Trivia / Iced Earth

• Creator Backlash: Jon Schaffer has gone on to say that Burnt Offerings was his least favorite record he did, which aside from the Creator Breakdown issues, apparently sold horribly.
  • It’s somewhat ironic since a very large proportion of fans consider it Iced Earth’s best record.
• Creator Breakdown: By far the darkest album put out by the band, Burnt Offerings was recorded when Schaffer was going through an ugly divorce and a lot of in-fighting within the band, all while suffering from a bad back injury.
  • Whilst Schaffer had always had strong political views, he kept these separate from his music which generally took influence from fantasy, horror and religion. However, 9/11 affected Schaffer to the degree that the following album The Glorious Burden was influenced by real life politics and American history, something that generally characterised his interviews as well. His arrest in the Capitol Riots was so widely publicised that he will always be associated with politics now.
• He Also Did: Jon Schaffer collaborated with Sabaton to create the "sounds of battle" drumkit for that band's song "The Lost Battalion".
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Several examples from the period prior to the first album. The only recording to have appeared on CD was their Enter The Realm Demo of 1989. Various examples of circulating stuff that doesn't seem to be getting an official release any time soon include:
  • The three Purgatory demo tapes, and some rare live bootlegs.
  • The second Iced Earth demo (the one with Haunted House on it)
  • The track "Dracula" which was the first track recorded under the Iced Earth name, which appeared on the "Tampa Bay's Metal Mercenaries" cassette. It was a rerecording of the Purgatory demo, but not the same track as the Iced Earth one later.
  • The original mixes of the first three albums which were released on CD, but were later replaced by the remix/remasters done for Dark Genesis. The most significant of these is the fact that "Before The Vision" on Night Of The Stormrider had some of the vocals edited out, and the mixing in general is clearer (the original releases were mixed quite roughly).
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Jon Schaffer's arrest and indictment on felony charges for participating in the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol caused the band to get dropped by their record label Century Media, as well as the entire band save for drummer Brent Smedley to resign. In April, he struck a plea deal which resulted in a tentative reduced sentence for him and was granted pretrial release at the end of 2022 (during which he was caught evading attorneys and possibly illegally crossing state lines, but he has apparently returned to being cooperative as of January 2023), but it's anyone's guess as to whether Iced Earth will continue, as its only output since Schaffer's arrest has been re-releases and it doesn't look like Schaffer will be able to put another band together anytime soon.

---