Speaking to Loudwire, Bruce Dickinson talked about his plans to release a new solo album, saying:
“I am obviously coming over to [America to] do the one-man [spoken-word] show [beginning in late January]. When I get to the end of the one-man show thing at the end of March, then the idea is I’ve got about three weeks cooling my heels somewhere. I’ll lie down in a darkened room for a couple of days and recover from the tour and then put my singing head-on and go and have a chat with [longtime collaborator] Roy [‘Z’ Ramirez]. ‘Cause we’ve already got a bunch of material, but we need to organize it a little bit.
”We have demos and everything, but we need to organize it a bit more properly and be a bit more serious about it — maybe write a few more tunes. And then basically leave it down to Roy. [Once] we’ve got what we wanna do, he can go off and start doing backing tracks and things like that. Obviously, I’m gonna be going out on tour with Maiden [later in the year], but we made ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ that way. ‘Tyranny Of Souls’ was done not exactly remotely — well, kind of remotely in that I wasn’t physically present when some of the backing tracks were done but he sent me the backtracks and I listened to them and went, ‘These are cool.’ And some of them I wrote the words to the backtracks, and the tunes and everything. And some of them we had already done. So mixing and matching like that sometimes gets great results.”