Songfacts®:

• This close to ten minute song has a five-minute drum solo in the middle, and an orchestra at the end. Zombie explained why to MSN Music: "I was listening to a bunch of different music for other reasons, working on a different project, and I had been listening to Iron Butterfly in the car and the drum solo [from 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida'] came on while I was driving. Everyone always makes fun of that like it's a joke or something, but I was stuck in traffic listening to the whole thing and I was really digging it. So it was fresh in my mind when I went into the studio that day, and I said to Tommy (Clufetos, drums), 'Let's put a drum solo on this song.' And he thought I was kidding, I think, at first, but then he went in and did it and the only thing was, he kept – I could hear that he was starting to wind down the drum solo after a minute, two minutes, three minutes, like he was thinking, how much does he want? And I just kept screaming out there, 'Keep going! Keep going!' So he went for about five minutes or whatever it turns out to be, and then he came in and he thought for sure I was gonna chop it down or not even use it and I just left it as is. It's in the song."
  He added: "It's actually the longest record I've ever made as a solo artist. It's more than ten minutes longer than any record I've ever made. We were just in a groove, crankin' out songs. But I figured, how many kids these days have ever picked up a record and had a drum solo on it? Probably none. So what the hell. That one, in contrast to some of the other songs that are so stripped-down, that one has a 100-piece orchestra playing and a drum solo, we decided, let's just pile it all into the last track. Tyler Bates, the composer who had done music for some of my films and Watchmen and 300, he composed the string section and we went into a different studio with a full orchestra and recorded it. They sat there and played along with the song."