Bruce Dickinson has opened up on the mini-existential crisis he experienced that led to his exit from Iron Maiden in 1993 - and the solo career that followed.
The singer, who departed Maiden following the band's tour for 1992 album Fear Of The Dark, had already released one solo album, Tattooed Millionaire, in 1990 - a fun, semi-spontaneous project that Dickinson wrote with longtime friend and soon-to-be-Maiden guitarist Janick Gers in just two weeks.
Before leaving Iron Maiden, however, Dickinson started to feel creatively stagnant and began to question his abilities as an artist.
Speaking to Metal Hammer about the track Tears Of The Dragon, a fan-favourite power ballad from his second solo LP, Balls To Picasso, Dickinson dismisses the long-held theory that the song's dramatic, soul-searching lyrics were conceived as a farewell to Iron Maiden.
"It's a bit deeper than that," he explains. "You know, 'farewell to Maiden' sounds like you're sort of thumbing your nose at them, but it's more introspective than that. It really is about self doubt, and I had a lot of that because I realised, when I embarked upon the solo album thing, that I really didn't have a clear idea of what I was doing, and creatively, I just felt lost.
"I found that really disturbing," he adds, "to have that 'lost' feeling. You know, you don't get that in Maiden, because it's got a shape, a direction. You go with the flow, and you're part of that flow. And it worried me that I'd almost felt that being in Maiden had disabled several of my critical faculties. I thought, 'That's terrible. How old am I? Not that old to be just a one-trick pony!' And so I started experimenting, and then I just had this moment when I went, 'You know what? Maybe I should leave.'"
Released in 1994, Balls To Picasso officially established Dickinson as a solo artist; he has released five more studio albums under his own name since, including two since his dramatic return to Iron Maiden in 1999.
Last month, Dickinson released a lushly remastered edition of Balls To Picasso. Titled More Balls To Picasso, it includes bombastically revamped versions of each song from the original.
"The songs are the same, but you will just not recognise the vibe," Dickinson explained. "Because not only does everything sound more vibrant and electric because of modern technology, but we've effectively reimagined the album. We've put stuff on there which was not there in the original. We haven't taken anything away, so nobody has changed any guitar solos [but] we've added loads of really heavy, moderrn-sounding rhythm guitars to it, so everything is just more beefy, as it should have been in 1994."
