The worst thing about inheritance and not being a person of importance is that everyone asks you for money and everyone works at their own convenience, not giving a damn about your needs. It’s so sad. So far, I’ve already spent almost 14,000 euros, and I’ll still have to spend more on absurdities! Paying to accept an inheritance! What the hell does that even mean??? Why do I have to pay to accept an inheritance??? I don’t get it. Whoever invented this tax is an evil genius; I would resurrect him 100 times just to kill him again, you piece of shit! Let’s just leave it.

I’ll talk about a band that had a particular influence on my musical growth. My brother used to listen to them, and I considered them too heavy, like most other bands such as Metallica, Suicidal Tendencies, Anthrax, and Death. At the time, I just threw everything into one cauldron—heavy music that didn’t do anything for me.

One morning, during my university years, I was around 20, and I got the idea to clean the windows at home. I grabbed a glass cleaner and a cloth, but more importantly, I decided to listen to some music on my brother’s CD player. I chose the Iron Maiden album Somewhere in Time! I picked that album because it had “Wasted Years” and “Alexander the Great,” but mostly for the first one. I started listening and was “electrified” by all those songs. Everything flowed wonderfully up to the seventh song, “Deja Vu.” I almost got to the point where I thought cleaning windows was quite pleasant, all things considered!

From there, I started listening to their other albums and liked all of them except No Prayer for the Dying, an album I just don’t understand. There’s little that stuck with me. It’s perhaps the opposite of Brave New World—they took all the worst stuff and put it into one album. Fear of the Dark isn’t spectacular either, but the title track alone was enough to save it, especially since people now associate Iron Maiden with “Fear of the Dark.” It feels bad to speak ill of other artists’ work because there’s always effort behind it—a body of work driven by one’s convictions and a desire to express certain emotions. So maybe for Steve Harris and the rest of the band, that album makes sense if you look at it in context.

If I’m being cynical, it makes me think they created and released it just to justify the subsequent tour, or maybe it was an excess of confidence, like they believed they had reached a level where they could afford to release works they had previously discarded—a kind of arrogance that the public, of course, makes you lose when they tear you down. I also haven’t been able to connect with the album Senjutsu; I developed a predisposition to reject it, and that hasn’t changed. This is unlike The Book of Souls, which I partially appreciated on a second listen, as well as Death on the Road, A Matter of Life and Death, and The Final Frontier. These are all albums with some gems inside, surrounded by songs that are still catchy, energetic, and memorable.

As you may have gathered, I think Brave New World is a great album, also because it was the album that birthed the supergroup with Gers, Murray, and Smith on guitars, the return of Bruce Dickinson on vocals, and a more modern and aggressive sound. In fact, the introductory song is “The Wicker Man”—pure, fluid power! It’s one of the best Iron Maiden albums. For a while, I thought I started following the band because of Adrian Smith’s musical approach and Bruce Dickinson’s voice, but I also appreciated albums where they weren’t present or had left, like Iron Maiden, Virtual XI, and The X Factor. So, it makes me think that maybe what I like is Steve Harris’s approach and the ever-faithful Dave Murray. Of course, in the albums I like the most, Smith and Dickinson also play, but with them, it’s like they’re the GT Turbo version of a car you already like at its core.

To conclude, it’s thanks to them that I started taking guitar lessons more seriously and professionally. And do you want to know a fun fact? In all the years I attended music schools, the only song I ever studied was “Fear of the Dark,” and it was only for a rhythmic analysis! I had to learn all the other songs on my own, with everyone telling me things like, “Come on, they’re easy!” and “They’re a piece of cake to play!”… Yeah, sure, they definitely are. Fucking idiots.

Let’s just drop it… See you.