BN: How has the writing process been on this new record, seeing that you were out of Maiden for a few years. Was it primarily you and Steve handling most the writing?

BRUCE: No. Everyone is involved. There are ten songs on the record, I was involved in four of them, Adrian was involved in two of them, and Steve was involved in pretty much all of them in one extent or the other. But it's really a collaboration.

BN: The lyrics, particularly on the song, "Ghost of the Navigator," are really interesting...

BRUCE: Everybody is intrigued with that song. Broadly speaking, the song is about a journey, but the title is really a metaphor.... (The navigator) is navigating his way through the stormy seas of life. The song is saying, everyone is on a journey and we try to smash our way through all the crap everybody throws at us...all the internal fears. We try and stay on course to, even if we don't know where we wanna go, which most of us don't. Are we heading toward death? Death is inevitable, so why do we bother to keep plowing on to certain death? Why don't we just all kill ourselves right now? It's because we are driven by something inside of us. In the song, all the other 'navigators' don't make it, and he sees all the ghosts of the dead coming towards him and he's determined to survive and steers away from the rocks, and the sirens on the rocks who are telling him to 'come over here with us.'

BN: Sounds like a video to me...

BRUCE: It's all in my head. We couldn't afford a video like that! (Laughs)

BN: Let's talk about the Maiden tour. Lot's of talk about Maiden doing a huge summer tour here in the states...

BRUCE: We kick off, I think, at Madison Square Garden the first week of August, and it goes very rapidly all the way through the west coast.

BN: What about Los Angeles...Irvine Meadows?

BRUCE: We're hopefully gonna play the Long Beach Arena.

BN: You're kidding?! They're doing shows again at the Long Beach Arena? I must have seen Maiden at least 4 times there; LBA was always the best place to see a metal show!

BRUCE: We are trying for Long Beach Arena. We're trying to reactivate that place, which would be awesome. We plan to do two months in Europe in June & July (2000). The smallest venue will be 20,000, and the tour is already sold out. Then we're headlining festivals in front of 100, 000 people with Korn and Nine Inch Nails supporting.

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