Just yesterday I put the finishing touches on the Iron Maiden singles series. It was a long one but it was fun to actually visit through each single and check out the songs, the B-sides and of course the covers. Maiden have a whole lot of singles and running through what I have was a task but certainly a worthwhile one.
The singles series will return again, once I fill in the gaps in my collection. That will be a ways off, at least late 2024 for sure, if not later. There are a few that are not easy to get, but a fair bit of what I still need is generally obtainable. I’m not going to rush the process and also re-doing a series list will be a whole lot of tedious fun, so it will be some time before I get back into that. I want to do my best to make the next update the last one so I don’t have to tinker with it all again, but we’ll see what I can or can’t get my hands on.
Up next on my list of Maiden stuff are the live albums. There are, at present, 13 official live albums. I will only be handling the officially released stuff in this next series, I’ll save bootlegs for another time. I want to get this one over with since it’ll be a year or so before the next triple-LP live set that’s inevitably coming after the Future Past tour. Though updating a live album series is not near the chore that the singles list will be.
My run through the live albums will only include the audio releases. Many of these have video releases as well, save for the last few, but the video content is something I’ll save for another series. There are a lot of documentaries and extra footage things on the videos, and there are other video releases not tied to album recordings so I’ll do that as a separate thing and that’s also a ways off.
I will also be handling the live albums in the order they were released, not the order the shows were originally played. There are some older live albums that were released several years on, though this really only applies to a couple. Just easier to do it this way. And, unlike the singles series, these will actually be in the proper release order since it’s kind of hard to screw up.
I intend to kick off the live album series in September, that’ll give me time to set up most everything. That leaves a bit of a gap for awhile, which I’ll fill with a few things. Up first will be a bit of a look at Iron Maiden’s four-song saga about Charlotte the Harlot. And I’ll also do what I intended to do when I was first setting up this site, which is offer up an actual Maiden studio album ranking. I was going to post that awhile back but I decided to wait to help fill space between the singles and live records.
An actual run through each studio album is a ways off, though it will happen someday. In fact, a new series where I go through and actually score songs and albums is coming soon, though it won’t involve Iron Maiden. Their studio records have and will continue to pop up as Albums of the Week, which is a separate thing from this new scoring deal.
I do also intend to actually go through and rank every Maiden song, something I talked about before. It’s a hell of a lot of tedious work and hard yet usually pointless decision making, but that series might be the one that pops up after the live album run is complete, maybe sometime early next year. That’s not something I’m going to do with any other band but I figured I’d take the plunge for Maiden.
I think that covers about everything – the singles series is laid down for now, the live album run is coming soon, and a review series for a different band is also just about out of the gate. There is plenty of other Maiden content I can milk, er, run but I’ll get to that as time rolls on. For more general updates about things upcoming, hang on for a few weeks until early August when I commemorate two years of running the site, there I’ll get into some other stuff. For now, everything else runs as usual and some other one-off content will show up to help occupy the void left by the end of the singles series.