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‘A Guy Walks Into a Churchyard and Meets the Devil’: Bruce Dickinson Explains ‘Rain on the Graves’

Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson meets the Devil in the video for "Rain on the Graves," the new single off his solo album, 'The Mandrake Project.'

The idea for “Rain on the Graves” — the latest single from Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson ‘s upcoming solo album, The Mandrake Project, out March 1 — came to him while visiting the resting place of poet William Wordsworth. He’d been invited to a wedding in England’s Lake District in 2012, and, knowing that Wordsworth wrote a lot of his verses in Grasmere, he decided to visit his stone cottage and the church where his body was interred. Good and evil cross paths in rainy cemetery scenes, filmed in black & white, until the screen fills with stark, giallo colors and Dickinson belts the chorus, “Well, there is rain on the graves,” and his backing group nicknamed the House Band of Hell, provide the soundtrack.

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