This is the news fans of Bruce “The Dyslexic Voice of Dog” Dickinson‘s solo work have been waiting, no joke, TWENTY YEARS to see. He will release his first solo album since Tyranny of Souls early next year, and will go on tour with his solo band as well.

The first video just dropped, and I have to say, “Bruce Bruce” sounds pretty damn good:

I do have a few quibbles – the audio mix almost drowns out Bruce’s vocals, for instance. But, overall, his voice is in remarkable shape. Keep in mind, Bruce is SIXTY FIVE YEARS OLD. He’s literally a pensioner. And yet he is still capable of performing at a level that would exhaust men a third his age.

Also, can we just take a moment to note – Bruce is FIT. I mean, seriously, how the hell does he stay in that kind of shape?!?!?! He looks like an athlete in his early forties, not a man who should be pleasantly going to pieces at home with a rotund wife and a fully paid off mortgage…

Longtime Readers know full well just how highly I think of Bruce Dickinson – and not just because IRON MAIDEN is THE GREATEST FREAKIN’ BAND OF ALL TIME!!! His life reads like a superhero origin story – his list of accomplishments is almost too absurdly long to belong to one man, yet he has done ALL of those things, and more.

I have been a fan of Bruce’s solo work throughout his long history, dating all the way back to his first solo album, Tattooed Millionaire. It wasn’t the best album, but it held the promise of great things to come – and they did. Skunkworks had some seriously great moments, but it was Accident of Birth and then the titanic The Chemical Wedding that truly sealed Bruce’s reputation as one of the greatest creative talents in metal history.

Since then, we have had to wait for increasingly sporadic IRON MAIDEN releases to hear his pipes in full flow, but he has been a very, very busy man in the meantime. He has made guest appearances for other musicians – most notably Arjen Lucassen‘s AYREON project. And with this new album, it looks like he will carry on with the storyline first hinted at in the first song from 2015’s The Book of Souls album, “If Eternity Should Fail”.

The link is very clear – Necropolis is the main character of that song, and we know that song was originally intended to serve as the basis for a new BRUCE DICKINSON solo album. That never came to pass, because ‘Arry heard it and decided (yet again) to co-opt it into an IRON MAIDEN song. Nothing wrong with that, but I do wonder what could have been, given Bruce’s writing talent and Roy Z‘s superb guitar shredding.

All in all, I think this is a good time to go into some of Bruce’s best ever solo tracks, in preparation for this momentous event: