Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Location: Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
Interview date: 24.01.2014
American veterans Iced Earth are no strangers to our stages. Their 2008 Metalcamp show even made it onto the DVD Festivals of the Wicked, and we’re always happy when they come back. After headlining Metaldays last year, Iced Earth returned to Ljubljana with their new record Plagues of Babylon and played Kino Šiška for the first time. Before they hit the stage, we grabbed a few words with the band’s eternal leader, Jon Schaffer, and the talk was mostly about the new album, which proves Iced Earth are far from done. And Jon is more than obviously thrilled with it.
RockLine: Jon, welcome back to Slovenia. You and the band couldn’t have picked a better moment, because we just got the first snow of this winter today.
Jon: Thanks, it’s great to be back, and cool, I had no idea (laughs).
RockLine: You’ve just released your new album, which was pretty eagerly awaited, partly thanks to the great reception of Dystopia. Did that put you under even more pressure while you were making Plagues of Babylon?
Jon: Yeah, definitely, but we’re really under pressure while making every album. This time it might have been even worse, because we built our whole schedule around the big European tour with Volbeat and aimed to have the new album ready for that. So there was really little time to put the Plagues of Babylon material together, and on top of that the album still had to be recorded and we had festival commitments to keep. It was hard, but I think people work well under pressure, if they can handle it, of course. Some can’t, but if you don’t crack under pressure, I think you can squeeze the best out of yourself and the people around you.
RockLine: This time it was probably even more stressful for you, since it’s not the first time in the band’s history that you’ve handled the production yourself.
Jon: True, although I’ve been heavily involved in the production of every Iced Earth record. But this is the first one I produced completely on my own. I worked with four different engineers in three studios and different environments, so I had to be really attentive and careful, because it was a totally new experience for me too. Which is great, because it makes you push even harder.
RockLine: If I’m not mistaken, Jim Morris, the producer you’ve worked with for many years, wasn’t available this time?
Jon: Not really, it’s just that our schedules never managed to line up. This time I didn’t want to work at Morrisound studio, even though I love it, because I would have had to fly from Europe to the US several times over the summer, which is exactly when the new album was coming together. That happened during the making of Dystopia and it was exhausting time-wise, especially for me personally, since I’m present the whole time while an album is being made. It would’ve been easier for the rest of the guys, since they only come into the studio to record their parts, but with me producing the album myself, recording with Jim Morris was out of the question. Given our schedule, I would have had to stay in Europe longer than we could afford financially, and at his age and with his experience, he’s not up for flying back and forth either. It simply made more sense to do things the way we did, and in the end both Jim and I know what’s best for Iced Earth.
RockLine: Was writing the material for the new album any different from writing Dystopia?
Jon: No, not really, it was pretty much exactly the same. I’d say the biggest difference is just that Luke and Troy contributed a lot more than before, although Troy had already brought some great stuff to Dystopia. Basically, the guys would send me riffs, and I’d rearrange them so that a bigger story could be built around them, meaning a whole song. I started working a few weeks before Stu joined me, and then we did a lot together, especially the lyrics and vocal melodies. So the whole process was exactly the same, we just had more time to rehearse and write before we started recording in Germany. We rehearsed Dystopia for only five days, but the new songs for several weeks, and during that time we were also breaking in Raphael (Raphael Saini recorded the drums for Plagues of Babylon, but by the time the album came out Jon Detter had taken his place, note by the interviewer), who had to learn the old material for the festival shows and the new stuff for the album recording.
RockLine: This album is kind of half-conceptual, since the first half deals with a story from the Something Wicked saga and your character Set Abominae. The approach is different, though, since this time you set the story in a post-apocalyptic zombie world.
Jon: Yeah, that’s right. But really, every chapter of the Something Wicked saga is set in a different environment, it’s always a different approach. Dystopia was a completely different era of that story too. This time it’s basically a zombie horror story, but it contains a ton of real-world elements.
RockLine: I don’t know if you’ll agree, but I see the zombies as a kind of symbol for the financial elite that’s currently draining the world dry.
Jon: Yeah, there’s definitely some of that in the story, but the main idea is that humanity has become zombie-like.
RockLine: And Set is the one holding the reins, or rather the chains?
Jon: Yeah, depends on which perspective you look at it from. In this story, yes, and as the cover shows, he’s ready to unleash plagues on humanity. There are two very distinct sides, as there’s always been in the Something Wicked saga. Set can be a savior or the antichrist, depending on which pole you’re standing on. That’s always been the point, the »mindfuck« of the story, and that’s why it’s so much fun to see it in different settings. You can transplant the framework of this story onto any era of human history.
RockLine: There are some really interesting moments on the album, including a cover of the American classic Highwayman, but what I’m more curious about is why you decided to cover your own solo, or rather Sons of Liberty, track Spirit of Times?
Jon: The album is very dark, especially the first half, and we wanted a few songs with some hope and optimism in them, the end of the album is nicer for it. On top of that, Sons of Liberty is a pretty obscure thing that spreads only by word of mouth. Stu and I wanted to record one song from that project to get it wider recognition. There’s no label behind Sons of Liberty, just people spreading the music, and I love that song. That’s why it’s placed at the end of the record too, since it has a similar message to Highwayman. That is, you can kill me, but you’ll never kill my spirit. I think that’s an incredibly powerful lyric, and Highwayman is like the exclamation mark of the album. It’s mostly about the idea of brotherhood and a strong bond, since Michael, Hansi, Stu, Russell and I are extremely close, tight friends.
RockLine: Personally, I think the best moment of the album is Cthulhu, partly because I’m a huge Lovecraft fan. In the past you already touched on classic horror literature and classic monsters on Horror Show, so I’m wondering whether you see Cthulhu as a kind of continuation of that?
Jon: No, I see it as a moment of extreme drunkenness in Uruguay at four in the morning on the beach, in the middle of a fierce, raging storm, when we were screaming »Fuck you!« at the sky (laughs). The next morning I played Stu a song that reminded him of the raging sea, and he wanted to write a song about the ocean. I suggested Cthulhu, he read the book online and wrote the lyrics. So no, it’s not a connection to Horror Show, it’s two friends getting absolutely hammered on a beach (laughs).
RockLine: Do you have any new Sons of Liberty material ready, by any chance?
Jon: No, that one happens totally spontaneously, and besides, I’m 100 percent committed to Iced Earth right now and I simply don’t have the time.
RockLine: You’re even busier with Iced Earth now than in the past, right?
Jon: True, the last three years have been crazy. During Dystopia I was also writing and recording Sons of Liberty, and it was too much. Believe me, there’s a flood of demand for new Demons & Wizards, for Sons of Liberty too, and Michael (Poulsen, Volbeat frontman, note by the interviewer) has his own thing planned, and there just aren’t enough hours in the day for all of it. But I can tell you that everything will happen, we just don’t want to put out the big fire that’s burning for Iced Earth right now.
RockLine: With only a few hours left until your show, I’m also curious how hard it is to put together a setlist, especially considering Iced Earth have such a rich discography?
Jon: Simple. Really, really hard. That’s exactly what I was complaining about backstage on the Volbeat tour, and Michael actually jumped in to help on his own initiative, since he’s been a big fan of the band since our debut. The next day he showed up in front of me with a four-page setlist, with enough songs for a four-hour set (laughs)! The set on the current tour is tailored mostly to the new record and to Jon, who’s learning as he goes, even at soundcheck. There are a few songs we haven’t played since the promo cycle for that particular album. We’re playing Blessed Are You and Disciples of the Lie, for example, which we haven’t played since somewhere around Alive in Athens. But picking songs keeps getting harder, and people will always complain that they don’t like this or that song and that they want to hear this or that track. We played for three hours at Kourion and people were still asking why we didn’t play this and that (laughs).
RockLine: With the new album, the future looks bright for Iced Earth, right?
Jon: Yeah, and full of hard work, it seems (laughs). Right now the band has great chemistry, the brotherhood among us keeps us going, and that makes the tour life, which is a hard life, a lot easier.
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