Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” is one of those songs that doesn’t just belong to heavy metal history — it helped define it. Released in 1982 as the title track of Maiden’s third album, it was the first Iron Maiden album to feature Bruce Dickinson on vocals and became the record that launched the band onto the international stage.
For me, though, this song goes back to something more personal. “The Number of the Beast” was one of those guitar-riff songs that really turned my head when I was younger. It opened my ears to what a two-guitar band could do — the interplay, the harmonies, the sheer power of those riffs. Iron Maiden showed me that guitars could almost become characters in the song, answering and pushing each other along.
So when I decided to cover it, I didn't want to simply recreate the original. I slowed it down, stripped it back, brought out the acoustic guitar and bluesed it up a little. And honestly, something unexpected happened: underneath all that metal, there’s a surprisingly beautiful song.
It still has the DNA of Iron Maiden, but this version lets the melody and emotion breathe a little differently. Sometimes you have to take a song apart to discover what was hiding inside it all along.