By Martin Popoff
"The Iced Earth album is going to be called The Glorious Burden," explains Jon. "That will be the title of it. It's not going to be a concept album. It's going to be a lot of songs not really related to each other. But it's going to be a lot of personal stuff, a lot of heavy stuff, emotion, with a lot of depth. I think it's going to be the kind of Iced Earth album that will have the staying power of Stormrider or Something Wicked did; one of the ones that ends up being a fan favorite. That's always my goal, but I can kind of tell that, by the time Horror Show was finished, that... it's a good record and I'm certainly not disappointed, but it doesn't have the personal attachment that a lot of stuff on Wicked or Stormrider does. Those are albums that stayed in the reader's charts for a couple years, dominating in the big magazines and stuff in Europe. That wasn't the case with Horror Show and I knew it; I knew it was going to be that way. And I think it has something to do with the theme, you know what I mean? That's one of the things that makes Iced Earth fans I think pretty rabid, is that there's usually something lyrically that they can personally connect with. And obviously, the lyrical and musical connection all become one thing. When the fans can actually feel personal emotion, it makes it different. And that's what I think is missing in Horror Show, and that's what we're going for on this album. And with a lot of the stuff that has happened in the world lately, that's affected us. So there's going to be more of our patriotism certainly showing through on these tunes. I would say it's going to be a roller coaster of emotion, in that sense like Something Wicked is, where you have a wide range of emotions from really heavy raging stuff to downright sad, depressing; you'll have all that. But I would say that the extremes are going to be even more. I mean, the stuff that's really heavy is really f**king heavy, really intense. And the stuff that is a little more ballad-oriented or personal, the touching stuff, is really going to hit home with a lot of people. I'm excited about it."
ICED EARTH - A Tale Of Two (Three?) Records Page 3