Interview: Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson goes in depth on new album Senjutsu

Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson joined Audacy’s Remy Maxwell to fill us in on the next era of the band on Senjutsu release day.

[:10] — On new Record. “The new record [‘Senjutsu’] is unleashed…we’ve actually got a couple of tunes on there, like ‘Darkest Hour’ which comes in around seven minutes or something like that. There’s a lot of intro and outro — which is effectively seagulls and waves washing up on a beach. Even the same for ‘Writing on the Wall’, thats a lot shorter than the version on YouTube appears. There’s a varied bunch of songs on the record — a trip through all the kinds of styles that the band has embraced over the last 40 years.” 

[2:08] —  ‘Writing on the Wall’ that is a little bit left field for us…The concept of the video, once we decided that that was going to be the opening track, we thought it was a fairly catchy tune, a bit more conventional than we normally do. Steve [Harris] really loved it, and said that’s got to be the first track, and we were like okay, cool.” 

[3:00] — “Because of the pandemic we weren’t going to film it with other people because of the restrictions and everything, maybe we should do something with animation. We had some friends who used to work at Pixar. So I wrote a story, they storyboarded eight scenes from it, and I went well these are the right guys to produce it with, and we settled on this English company called Blink Ink to do the actual animation. The whole thing took eight months from inception to finishing up.” 

[6:22] — Recalls forgetting the invitation flyer at the end of the production of the video for the teaser campaign.

[9:57] — On concept of the album. “Other than the cover concept, the album is not a concept album, any connections that people make are purely things that we happened to be feeling at the time; where we might have been in some kind of weird zeitgeist that we didn’t even know we were in.”

Iron Maiden – Senjutsu is available now in numerous formats and via streaming platforms. https://ironmaiden.lnk.to/Senjutsu

Source: https://www.audacy.com/music/rock/watch-our-audacy-check-in-with-iron-maiden-bruce-dickinson