By Martin Popoff
"It goes way back. The second demo the band ever did, the band was called Purgatory and the demo was called Horror Show. This is something I've written about, especially early on in my youth and in the mid '80s; I wrote about horror stuff all the time. And about the time we did the Enter The Realm demo, there was a pretty big change going on in me as a writer. I stopped writing about the horror thing, which was like 85% of what I had ever written about and started to write more about personal issues and my look at religion and dark fantasy. There was a big change going on. I was maturing as a songwriter. And since that point, I haven't written any songs about it until this point. Back in 1997, I had an idea to do an EP that I was going to call Monster and I was going to do five songs based on the classic monsters. We didn't do it for whatever reason. In hindsight, it was probably because we were meant to do this. So when I decided to put the Something Wicked concept record on hold, I was looking for a theme or a concept to go with for the next record and this seemed like the logical step."
And one would have to go along with Schaffer's disdain for the term power metal, a tired cliche' that really doesn't apply to this band, Iced Earth sounding darker, more organic, oddly timeless in comparison to the current definition of the term.
ICED EARTH - A Gathering Of Ghouls Page 5