Seventh Son of a Seventh Son

 

Side one

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
1.	"Moonchild"	Adrian Smith Bruce Dickinson	5:38
2.	"Infinite Dreams"	Steve Harris	6:08
3.	"Can I Play with Madness"	Smith Dickinson Harris	3:30
4.	"The Evil That Men Do"	Smith Dickinson Harris	4:33

Side two

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
5.	"Seventh Son of a Seventh Son"	Harris	9:52
6.	"The Prophecy"	Dave Murray Harris	5:04
7.	"The Clairvoyant"	Harris	4:26
8.	"Only the Good Die Young"	Harris Dickinson	4:40
Total length:			43:51

A concept album inspired by the novel Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card, the record incorporates elements of progressive rock,

The idea to base the album around the folklore concept of the seventh son of a seventh son came to bassist Steve Harris after he read Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son. Harris stated, "It was our seventh studio album and I didn't have a title for it or any ideas at all. Then I read the story of the seventh son, this mystical figure that was supposed to have all these paranormal gifts, like second sight and what have you, and it was more, at first, that it was just a good title for the seventh album

"Moonchild" is loosely based on the Aleister Crowley novel of the same name,

"Infinite Dreams" is about a character who "implores a spiritualist to unlock the meaning behind his tortured dreams"

The final track, "Only the Good Die Young", closes the storyline and was later featured in an episode of the 1980s' TV series Miami Vice. The record opens and closes with an identical brief acoustic piece accompanied by two verses of lyrics, written by Dickinson, which,  "foreshadows doom and failure for the protagonist" and "wraps up the album".

, the brief given to Derek Riggs (the group's then regular artist) was, unlike with previous albums, to create "simply something surreal and bloody weird".

 Riggs confirms that "they said they wanted one of my surreal things. 'It's about prophecy and seeing into the future, and we want one of your surreal things.' That was the brief ... I had a limited time to do the picture, and I thought it was pretty weird their concept, so I just went with that."

According to Dickinson,  "I was probably responsible in a large part for the cover, with Derek."^[

Dickinson states that the idea to set the painting in a polar landscape may have originated from when he showed Riggs a Gustave Doré piece, depicting traitors frozen in a lake of ice in the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno.^[

In contradiction of this, Riggs states that the setting was because he "might have just seen a documentary about the North Pole or something ... I wanted something that was a departure from all the cityscapes and things. It was about prophecy and seeing the future, and so I just wanted something distant. And then they said, on the back, 'Could you stick all the other Eddies in the ice?' So I did."

 "I thought, you know, I don't feel like painting all of Eddie, so I'll get rid of him. I'll chop him off, and make it look kind of non-pleasant."

In addition to the lobotomy and cyborg enhancements, left over from the Piece of Mind and Somewhere in Time album covers respectively, this incarnation also comes with an in utero baby in his left hand and an apple, inspired by the Garden of Eden and featuring a red and green yin and yang.

On top of this, Eddie's head is on fire, which Riggs states is "a symbol for inspiration", an idea which he "stole" from Arthur Brown.