May 022025
 

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

iron maiden covers

Up the irons! Iron Maiden turns 50 this year. They’re still going strong too, releasing music, playing shows, engaging in mock sword battles with a towering Eddie. So we felt it was time to honor them with a Best Covers Ever. Personally, I feel the list should rightfully be 666 covers long, but that seems like a lot of blurbs to write.

We haven’t done that many heavy metal bands in these lists. The reason is simple: Metal bands often only get covered by other metal bands. This is particularly true for bands that are either a) niche or b) extremely technical. Iron Maiden is neither. Like Metallica, who we tackled a few years ago, their songs are versatile enough to be easily covered in any number of genres. You don’t need to know insane time signatures or ridiculously complicated riffs to find a way in. Many are essentially pop songs in metal garb—well, pop songs about the number of the beast, that is.

A few of the covers below come from metal acts, but most don’t. Nevertheless, we recommend headbanging to them all. Even the klezmer one.

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Aug 072011
 

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s big day with cover tributes to his or her songs. Let others do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

Bruce Dickinson may be the most metal individual of all time. Not only does he front Iron Maiden, one of the pioneering groups of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and a genre-defining titan of rock, but he’s also a licensed commercial airline pilot. That means that he can charter a Boeing 757 to fly fans of his band to gigs they might not otherwise reach, something he’s actually done before. He’s even got a special plane named after his band’s mascot, “Ed Force One.” Continue reading »