Iron Maiden: The missing albums

And then something odd happened: I lost interest. I don't know why, but I did.

I didn't lose interest in Iron Maiden itself (I still listened to all the albums I had bought previously), I just wasn't motivated to buy any new Maiden albums. When Fear of the Dark was first released, I always thought I would buy it, but it was always "later." And I ended up never buying it.

And then The X Factor came out. I had heard that Bruce Dickinson was no longer in the band at this point, and I saw no reason to get this album. Some bands can change their lead vocalists and still have a decent career, and Dickinson himself was a replacement singer, but he had become such an integral part of the Maiden sound that I couldn't imagine the album would be any good without him. So I didn't buy it.

Then Virtual XI was released, and it completely flew under my radar. Ditto for Brave New World. In fact, by this time, I was totally unaware of Iron Maiden except for all of my older albums. It wasn't until one day when I went poking around online for some Maiden b-sides (there aren't any on iTunes, by the way) that I rediscovered the band. I saw that their most recent release was Dance of Death, and I looked the album up and saw that Dickinson was back. And some of the songs looked interesting.

So I bought a few songs. I will tell you about them in a future post.