Bruce Dickinson plans to finish up his new solo album after his North American spoken-word tour wraps.
The Iron Maiden frontman already has several demos to tinker with for his follow-up to 2006’s ‘Tyranny Of Souls’, and he might need to “write a few more tunes” for his seventh studio effort once he’s done with his ‘An Evening With Bruce Dickinson’ shows in March.
Bruce explained how once his part is done, he leaves the rest to his long-time collaborator, Roy ‘Z’ Ramirez.
He said: “I am obviously coming over to [America to] do the one-man [spoken-word] show [beginning in late January].
“When I get to the end of the one-man show thing at the end of March, then the idea is I’ve got about three weeks cooling my heels somewhere.
“I’ll 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 [longtime collaborator] Roy [‘Z’ Ramirez]. ‘Cause we’ve already got a bunch of material, but we need to organise it a little bit.
“We have demos and everything, but we need to organise it a bit more properly and be a bit more serious about it — maybe write a few more tunes. And then basically leave it down to Roy. [Once] we’ve got what we wanna do, he can go off and start doing backing tracks and things like that.”
He added to Loudwire: “Obviously, I’m gonna be going out on tour with Maiden [later in the year], but we made ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ that way. ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ was done not exactly remotely — well, kind of remotely in that 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 went, ‘These are cool.’ And some of them I wrote the words to the backtracks, and the tunes and everything.
“And some of them we had already done. So mixing and matching like that sometimes gets great results.”
There was talk of the 63-year-old rocker doing a reworked cut of ‘If Eternity Should Fail’ from the heavy metal titans’ 2015 ‘The Book Of Souls’ LP, which was intended to be a solo cut.
The ‘Run to the Hills’ hitmaker previously explained how he had “a whole concept album, which was gonna be called ‘If Eternity Should Fail’. And ‘If Eternity Should Fail’ was the title track to my new solo album.
“And a bit like [Dickinson’s 1989 solo song] ‘Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter’ [laughs], it got commandeered for Iron Maiden. So if I did do another solo album, which I think I will, I might just stick to my original plan and have that as the title track.
“I mean, I did write it — it was the first track that I wrote for it.
“So, yeah, I’d probably still include that song. But it would be … the feel would be slightly different — not very much, though — from the Maiden version.”