Bruce Dickinson shared some sage advice for younger artists

Before Bruce Dickinson, the singer of Iron Maiden, performed in Hollywood, California on April 21 as part of the Musicians Institute’s MI Conversation Series, the Musicians Institute YouTube channel had the opportunity to interview him in the green room and ask him some questions about his advice for artists.

One of the most important things is self-belief. And you can’t teach that. That’s character. And self-belief is so important. I’ve played with people who have been astonishing musicians but were forever doomed to be playing in their bedroom because they had no self-belief because they did not go out there and put themselves out there and perform so the people notice them. I mean, it’s like if you’re the greatest guitar player in the world and you sit in the middle of a tent in the Sahara Desert, you are never gonna make it. Sorry. The universe is not fair like that, because you’ll need it, because you’ll get knocked over, knocked down, and other musicians will try and put you down as well because they’re all trying to step on top of you to do X, Y, Z. And try not to just go down the rabbit hole of a particular type of music, even if you love that particular type of music. There’s an irony. Yes, you need the self-belief, but if you make the performance all about yourself, people will walk away, because nobody’s that interesting. Nobody’s that interesting. What you need to do is have the self-belief to use whatever talent it is you have to tell a story, to say something, to have some feeling inside that you can express that’s real and authentic, and then people will listen because it resonates with them. So yes, you need the self-belief, but we don’t need to hear all about you. It’s like a game of tennis. I mean, when you’re performing live, it is like a game of emotional tennis, ’cause you knock it out there and they knock it back and you go, ‘Hey, let’s recirculate that’ — boom. And then you chuck it out again and you gradually warm up the pot. That’s why concerts are always better at the end than they are at the beginning. [Laughs]

He also spoke about what inspires him.

Whatever the last thing I did, that’s what keeps me going — not the thing I did 40 years ago or anything else like that. Oh, that’s great, but I did that 40 years ago. I don’t listen to a lot of stuff that I did, and when I do, I hope I’m sometimes pleasantly surprised, and sometimes I’m mildly appalled, , so I go, ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe I did that. Oh, wow. What were we thinking?’ Or I hear some technical thing like, ‘Oh my God. That note’s just a little bit dodgy. How did we let that go?’ So stuff like that. You become hypercritical. And I try and avoid it, because what you want is… It is an instant reaction people get to music, and if you then try and pick it apart, then you kind of destroy the moment. There are moments of technical excellence that coincide with emotional impact. And when you do that, you’re, like, ‘Hey, we were a 10 today.’ But sometimes you don’t — sometimes you get an emotional, nine and a half and a technical five. But what’s more important? For the audience, I argue it’s always the emotional nine and a half, except for, obviously, the geeks on YouTube that go, ‘I don’t like him because he can’t sing a high D above C…’ ‘Fuck off. You know what I mean? [Laughs]

Dickinson talked about the music distribution, too.

Obviously when the whole file-sharing thing kicked off in the very early days, the major labels didn’t understand what was about to hit them, so they all went bust. People who loved listening to music, they were, like, ‘Hey, cool. All of our favorite music is suddenly free,’ which was very nice for them. It was not a great disaster for established bands with a live following because they could still sell enough product, physical product, to make it worthwhile doing a record, but they could still go out and tour and make their money and make a living and merchandising, and so on and so forth. So yeah, great. But for everybody else on the planet that was up and coming, struggling to work, Spotify [was a] catastrophe… So you have to use your creative imagination in trying to present what you are doing in a way that people are excited about it. That’s always been the case, but it’s just the media in which you have to do it is now different. Now it’s online, it’s Instagram. And I know there are people who sit in their den with their podcast mic on and do basically kind of like a live broadcast every week with subscribers. And that’s the way they make music and do it. But it’s not the same as going out there with a live concert and building a physical community in one place that does that space. But it may be a way to alleviate some of the problems associated with kind of digital distribution. The good thing is that record labels, all the record labels that have evolved from the ashes of the old system are all very tech savvy and realize that you can stop people giving your music away, you can still sell records and things like that and that there are other avenues. There is endless appetite for consumption of music, so somebody somewhere must be making some money out of it.