Songfacts®:

• Bruce Dickinson calls this song "a very twisted version of Sleeping Beauty." It's set in a dark forest, where a king finds the body of his frozen queen. He kisses her, but doesn't get the result he's looking for.
  
  Dickinson often draws on classic tales for lyrical inspiration, both in his solo work and with his band Iron Maiden.
• Running 9:51, the epic "Sonata (Immortal Beloved)" is the last track on Bruce Dickinson's album The Mandrake Project, which was packaged with a comic series of the same title. He wrote the song with his longtime producer, Roy Z, who came up with the title after seeing the 1994 movie Immortal Beloved, starring Gary Oldman as Beethoven.
  
  "He basically stayed up all night, suitably inspired, put down this drum machine for 10 minutes, layered guitars and these mellotrons and keyboards. And underneath it all was going this little loop of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata' that he had sampled," Dickinson explained to Songfacts.
  
  "He did that, and then he showed it to me one evening and said, 'I don't know what to do with this. What do you think? Got any ideas?' And I was basically like, 'No.'
  
  But after a while, I was feeling courageous, so I said, 'You know what? I'm just going to go into the studio, switch the mic on, let the track roll, and I'll see what rolls out.' And what fell out was the first verse.
  
  Without any words, without anything, I just closed my eyes and thought, Where am I? So, 80% of that song - the first verse, the choruses, the spoken word, all the bits at the end - is all the first take, and it's all improv. That's pretty weird. It's unusual."
• Dickinson and Roy Z recorded this song about 25 years before they finally released it on The Mandrake Project. When they went to work on the album, Roy Z asked Dickinson to revisit the song. Dickinson's wife heard it and declared it "amazing." That convinced him to revisit the song, so he and Roy touched it up and were thrilled with the results.