Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson has plans to reconvene with songwriting partner Roy Z. later this year in an effort to continue work on the long-awaited follow-up to his 2005 solo album, Tyranny of Souls.
That’s what he revealed in a recent interview with Loudwire, which was conducted in advance of the upcoming “An Evening With Bruce Dickinson” spoken word tour where the multi-disciplined legend will share stories and anecdotes from throughout his life before fielding questions from a live audience.
Tyranny of Souls is the only solo Dickinson album to be released after he and guitarist Adrian Smith rejoined Iron Maiden in 1999 and served as the singer’s sixth overall full length under his own name. Work on a successor, however, dates back to at least 2015 — “If Eternity Should Fail,” the opening track on The Book of Souls, was originally written for the next solo record, but was evidently too strong for Maiden to pass up.
Since everyone has had some downtime to work with amid the two years of the still ongoing pandemic, we prodded Dickinson about whether or not any of that time had been utilized to get some solo writing underway.
“When I get to the end of the one-man show in the end of March, I’ve got about three weeks pulling my feels somewhere — I might lie down in a darkened room for a couple of days and recover from the tour and then put my singing head on and go and have a chat with Roy,” Dickinson told us.
“We’ve already got a bunch of material — demos and everything — but we need to organize it a bit more properly and be a bit more serious about it,” he continued, “[We have to] maybe write a few more tunes and then basically leave it down to Roy. He can go off and start doing backing tracks and things like that.”
Having to work remotely is also a bit of a familiar element, Dickinson revealed when he added, “Obviously, I’m going to be going out on tour with Maiden [next year], but we made Tyranny of Souls that way. Tyranny of Souls was done kind of remotely — I wasn’t physically present when some of the backing tracks were done, but he sent me the backtracks and I listened to them and, some of them, I wrote the words to the backtracks. Mixing and matching like that sometimes gets great results.”
Read (or watch) our full interview with Dickinson here. View the singer’s upcoming spoken word tour dates and gets tickets here and to see Iron Maiden’s 2022 tour plans and to purchase tickets, head to their website.
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