The fact that it's co-penned by Smith doesn't mean much. In the end, it's Harris who takes all the parts and combines them. As we can clearly see on Making Of A Matter Of Life And Death, Adrian says that he wrote the riff in 7/4 as a part of "bigger" song. If we dissect parts, we only have few - the main riff, the simple chords behind the verses/chorus and the pre-solo harmony. Therefore and IMHO, Harris is responsible for the typical opener form of this track. And it's very fucking good. Not breathtaking, not revolutionary, just damn good. Better than Wickerman, miles ahead of Wildest Dreams, and way better than Final Frontier. 8
Re: Daily Song: Different World I agree with this entirely. I think there are two propositions here, one verifiable and one just opinion: - People on this list like the longer songs better (can be verified) - Maiden just write better long songs (opinion) My feeling is that their short songs can be fantastic, but that they have a higher miss rate with the short ones than the long ones. Statistically speaking, that's probably due to Fear of the Dark and NPFTD skewing it, but there you have it. That being said, I think that they may have been following a formula of a short rocker to get you hooked at the beginning (hell, we know they like to have balance on their albums, one of the reasons Alchemist is on TFF was because they felt they didn't have a straight-ahead rocker), but there is nothing wrong with that... would Powerslave have been better if Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the first song? I argue it would have much tougher to get through the whole album! This might be perhaps off topic, so to bring it back, if Maiden followed a short-rocker-to-start formula, they continued it with this album. And Different world is a better song than Wildest Dreams. But I would argue that it's better than some of the long ones on AMOLAD (including the Legacy, that one grates on me to no end). Again, I think the brilliance of Maiden is getting an epic quality in songs that are shorter. That I think is a sign of genius... not every song needs to be Rime, and not every album needs tohave Tales from Topographic Ocean length.
Really catchy song, gives a great energy, far better than Wildest Dreams but not in the same class (not even close) with The Wicker Man. 7/10.
A very respectable opening track, sounds larger than life as does the whole of AMOLAD album, Excellent vocals and I really like the lyrics, nice rocker, 8/10.