BEAST IN THE MAZE

    We are finally ready to debut our first full length episode of the podcast! Starting around midnight tonight, you'll be able to download or stream Beast in the Maze  here and on your favorite podcast apps. We flipped a coin to determine whether we would be digging into a Phish album or an Iron Maiden album first. Matt, representing Iron Maiden, won the toss and has selected their self-titled 1980 studio debut album Iron Maiden .       If you've never heard it, now is a great time to give it a listen! The album is fairly short (around 40 minutes or so), but it's a classic of the genre, and we go over it track by track, from the point of view both of a die hard fan and of a person hearing the album for the first time. If that sounds like something you'd be into, come check us out! Also, if Phish is more your speed than Iron Maiden, we will be alternating bands each episode, and we currently plan to post episodes on an every-other-week basis, so stay tuned for our firs

          Iron Maiden has been around for almost half a century, and has undergone some changes both in personnel and in their overall sound (though they have always sounded distinctly "Maiden"). While many critics divide these cleanly into four eras based on lead singer, there's more going on with Maiden than just who is singing the lyrics. To that end, I've attempted to construct a rough timeline of the different ways to view Iron Maiden's evolution through the years.     I've focused just on studio albums and disregarded other material for simplicity's sake. I'm sure that I'm leaving some things out, and there are many more ways to view / divide up the Maiden catalog. Do you have a different take? Let us know!  (Note:We do not own the rights to the album artwork that appears on the timeline, which is presumably the copyright of either the artist or the label)

     Beast in the Maze will be going live in a few days! We should have our first episode, a discussion of the 1980 album Iron Maiden,  up soon. We've added an embedded player to our website which is currently playing our short (and very lo-fi) intro episode if you want to check that out. It's on the left hand side of the page, above the comment box.      There will be another post on the day of episode one's actual release. In the meantime feel free to comment below, or send your email to Mail@BeastintheMaze.com or tweet at us at @beast_maze

    Both Iron Maiden and Phish have multiple artists contributing to the lyrical and musical composition of their songs. While both bands have a primary songwriter (Steve Harris in the case of Maiden, and Trey Anastasio in the case of Phish), it's interesting to see to what extent others have contributed. To that end, I've put together a couple of pie charts representing the songwriting credits on both bands' studio catalogues. Here's Iron Maiden: ...and now Phish:           Interestingly, both bands have a primary writer working in collaboration with four other main artists, one lesser contributor, and a handful of artists with only one or two credits. While it could be simply that this isn't that unusual for bands that have been working long enough to put out fifteen or so albums, it's nonetheless another thing which these two very different bands share.

I had a little extra time this week so I thought I'd dig up some information on how long Iron Maiden and Phish's studio albums were for comparison. I made a couple of simple charts for visual purposes. Ranked longest to shortest, here's Iron Maiden: And Here's Phish:      (It should be noted that these lengths reflect the  original  track list on the original releases and do not take into account any bonus material. So, for instance, many editions of  The Number of the Beast  since the remastering contain the added track "Total Eclipse." These sorts of changes in album length are not reflected here.)     So, a couple of key takeaways here, is that both bands' longest album isn't exactly a photo finish, with  The Book of Souls  a full fifteen minutes longer than the runner-up,  The Final Frontier , and Phish's  Junta  coming in at over two hours, well ahead of their next longest record  Round Room , which comes in at 77:51.     Before collecting thi