Jon Schaffer: That is going to happen. The box set was planned from the beginning. The reason we were talking about doing the box set was to be able to have the entire saga in one package with a DVD, some extra artwork and a special deluxe packaging. What I wanted to do with Framing Armageddon and The Crucible Of Man was to have them come out in one edition worldwide, which is the digipak. The plan was, after both parts are out, we’ll do this extra special thing. There will be a hardback book, a lot more artwork that will help the story flow. There are a lot of elements of the story that I can’t put into the music. The story is very detailed. This will help people understand things a little more by doing this box set. Whether Matt had come back or not we would have done this box set. It now makes perfect sense to have the continuity and have Matt redo the vocals for part one. When the thing is done it’s going to have the flow and continuity that it should all the way through.
That does give me the opportunity to go back and address some of the production issues that I have with part one. I think we were a little too conservative in controlling the bottom end in the mix. That’s why we were able to make part two punchier and heavier sounding in terms of the low end. What I didn’t want to happen in part one was to have too much woof when people turned it up and played it loud. When you’re dealing with the very percussive way the music I write is, if you’re not careful you can cause your speakers to fart out even when you’re not cranking it super loud. We were too concerned with that, and were able to find a happy medium with part two, to still be able to get that low end and be able to crank it at high volume. Now that we’ve found the sweet spot we can go back and make those adjustments when we remix part one. There will be extra tracks on there, some segue pieces that I left off of part two. There’s actually one instrumental song that will be on part two of the box set. The DVD will have a few tracks from us this summer, us in the studio recording and some behind the scenes stuff. SPV is talking about making it a before Christmas release in 2009.
We also have a DVD that we’re going to be putting out in January or February of 2009. It’s going to be called the Summer Slaughter DVD. It’s going to be some of the festivals we played this summer. It’s going to be a step above Live In Athens in terms of film quality, but it’s not going to be the full Iced Earth production and big stage show. When you’re doing festivals you’re somewhat at the mercy of the festival site in terms of production. But they are cool shows and a celebration of Matt coming back. We’re deciding now which show to choose as the main show. It’s probably going to be a two DVD set. The bonus DVD will have a behind the scenes documentary of the tour and some tracks from Graspop and some of the other shows we’ve done. It’s going to be cool.
You did a lot of European festivals this summer. Was there anything that stood out?
Greece is always killer. That was a phenomenal crowd and a special show. Bloodstock was great. The U.K. is a market that hasn’t been worked nearly enough the past 20 years. Last fall we had a great opportunity to play with Heaven And Hell there, and that certainly raised our status in the country. Before that we had only done one show. At Bloodstock there was a lot of people that were aware of Iced Earth, and the fan base has grown rapidly. A big part of it is the fact that we’ve been with SPV for five years, and since The Glorious Burden they really started working the market. Before that it was never taken very seriously. It’s nice to have people working us there.
Obviously playing with Kiss and Iron Maiden and Judas Priest within the course of a week and a half was really great, to play with our idols. There was a lot of good points this summer.
Even after nearly 20 years of playing are there still places you still haven’t played live?
There are actually a lot of places we haven’t played around the world. We’ve never toured in South America, we still haven’t played Japan. There’s some talk about going back to the U.K. this fall, but we were planning on Australia, Japan and New Zealand. But apparently there’s a big festival in the month of November, which is the time period we were looking at, and the promoters think it might be better to push back our tour for that region until January. It will happen. We haven’t done Russia. We have a lot of places around the world we need to do. There are reasons why it hasn’t happened in the past, but we now have a worldwide booking agency. It’s a huge agency, and they have contacts everywhere. That’s a fairly new development. They are the reason we were able to tour with Heaven And Hell in the U.K. That was strictly due to the agency’s involvement and having a proper booking agent that’s got some power and pull with people. Those kinds of opportunities are going to start presenting themselves in a way that’s never happened before.
As you look back on Iced Earth’s catalog, is there a CD you think was underappreciated at the time of its release?
I actually think that with the whole catalog with Century Media. That entire part of my career could have been handled far better on the label side. We didn’t have proper management until about six months ago anyway, so a lot of things could have been better. I can’t pick out one specific album. I’d say the whole deal. We were a very secure insurance policy for that label. Iced Earth sold consistently with very little financial input. They always knew no matter what we were going to sell a couple hundred thousand albums within the first year. It was like hitting the lottery all the time for those guys. They didn’t have to spend a ton of money to build us up to a point. That allowed them the security to take risks on other bands. Meanwhile, it’s my career. But those are days that we will never have to repeat.
