Accident Of Birth - 2001 Remastered Version

This was Bruce Dickinson's fourth solo album, the previous three being Tattooed Millionaire (1990), Balls to Picasso (1994) and Skunkworks (1996). Dickinson was the lead singer of the British metal band Iron Maiden from 1981-1993. He replaced Paul Di'Anno, who had a distinctive raspy singing style. Dickinson, on the other hand, had loud, distinct, and powerful vocals which earned him the nickname "the air-raid siren" (his interest in flight helped this). After six critically acclaimed albums, he adapted a similar singing style for the less popular albums No Prayer For the Dying and Fear of the Dark. When he left the band to pursue his interests, he was replaced by Blaze Bayley, who recorded two albums (both with X in the title) until Bruce returned in 1999.

Dickinson: "'Accident of Birth' is about a family from Hell. Except they're in hell and one of them has accidentally been born, and they want him back and he doesn't want to go. For all the same reasons that you wouldn't want to go back to your family if they're a pain in the ass, he doesn't want to go back to his family. Ok, so they're in Hell, that makes a little difference too."

The songs Dickinson wrote for the album had a general "alchemy" theme (alchemy is the psuedo-science in which the practicers of alchemia attempted to make gold from other metals) "and specifically the poetry of William Blake, which is very much based on the philosophy of alchemy." Dickinson also said: "Each song has a sort of frame in which it operates. The first song is about fear, the second song is about tragedy, the third song is about union. You could pick a theme or a topic for each song so that's what the song is about and then you put it in a frame. For example, one of the songs is about failure and the song is called "The Trumpets of Jericho." In the story of the trumpets of Jericho in the Bible, the walls fall down when the tribes of Israel walk around the city and blow they trumpets. Except in this song they don't, it doesn't work. You're done everything right, everything's cool but the wall's still standing. And what do you do? How do you face up to that fact? And it's all part of the whole alchemy thing. What were the alchemists trying to do? They were trying to achieve something that was virtually impossible, they spent their whole lives trying to do it, and all of them failed, or pretty damn near all of them failed. So, what does that feel like, and how does that work, and why keep carrying on. So that's the way the songs kind of work. And you don't have to go into them in all this detail, you could just sit back there and let it hit you over the head like a sledgehammer cause the album works it's just a really heavy album. But it's all there if you want to dig through the words."