According to my last.fm charts, Dream Theater is my second most played artist with about three thousand scrobbles as of now. According to Normalisr though, DT is my most listened artist with about two weeks’ worth of time.

I always had some Dream Theater music around, though until Octavarium, this was limited to two albums, Six degrees of inner turbulence and Train of thought. To be honest, the song As i am from Train of Thought was the one that made Dream Theater stay, even when i wasn’t yet that fond of prog metal. But then Octavarium came, and that and my then-newfound Stratovarius pulled me in. But even though i was at two DT gigs before the release of Systematic Chaos, that was the album that i just couldn’t stop listening to, and i still consider that my favourite DT album, whatever the “hardcore fans” say about it.

Not so recent by the way, but it was very shocking news for me when not so long ago i found out that Mike Portnoy left Dream Theater. Which means that i was there on their last gig in Japan where Mike was drumming. I will be very interested, first to see who the new drummer will be (though probably i’ll have never heard of him/her before), second to hear what kind of musical direction Dream Theater will turn to from now on. It’s undeniable that Mike was a very defining character in the band. I don’t know if they have written the music for the album coming out this year before he left or they will write it with the new drummer, but either way i’ll be interested to hear it.

Yesterday i bought my ticket for the march Iron Maiden gig in Tokyo. I find it outraging that even though it’s a two-day event held in the biggest arena in Japan (Saitama), standing tickets were already sold out–please note that the tickets only went on sale yesterday! This is what i can’t stand about the japanese way of pre-sale, and pre-ordering the stuff on pre-sale, and reserving a place in the queue for pre-ordering the pre-sale. And that i have to feel lucky to have gotten a ticket at all with all the fanclubs enjoying absolute precedence. People like me, who like the band but wouldn’t want to get daily n+1 spam ad mail on their phones can gtfo.

I decided to write a series of posts about the bands i like, and what would be better to start with than Iron Maiden?

I don’t remember how i got to know Iron Maiden. It’s been ages, ages ago, during my first year in high school i think. That was the time when i got loads of cd’s from friends trying to enlighten my then non-existent musical world. That’s how it all started. (This story also applies to most of my top listened bands.)

Iron Maiden has always been the music, something i could listen to at any time, in any mood, and never get bored of it. It was like that when i was 13, it’s like that even now i’m 21. There are of course albums i listened more, and there are ones i listened to less, but it doesn’t make much of a difference.

Finally, after three years, here’s the big day (or to be precise, here was the big night), that i passed 100000 (a hundred thousand) scrobbles on last.fm. Because the last.fm milestone gadgets all mysteriously disappeared from the net (or was i wrong in my impression that there was plenty of them?) so i couldn’t check in a sure automated way what was my 100000th, but just a few plays over the five zero i counted back manually and so it seems to be either Iron Maiden’s Out of the Shadows or Moongate by Samael. I wish i could know for sure…

Well anyway, considering how long it took to get this many posts, it’ll take a while until i can write such an anniversary post again. Looking forward to it tho.