If this is the potential end of Iced Earth, it's gonna be sad.
Some thinking aloud (well, typing what I'm thinking
)... I wonder how much bigger the band could have become, and in retrospect which were the elements that damaged the band.
Up until Horror Show, Iced Earth were on the rise. Finally found the perfect singer with a godlike voice, a series of critically acclaimed albums, a more "lighter" and power metal oriented sound that took away a bit of the thrash of the earlier records and made them more accessible, nothing could stop them in becoming one of the very top bands of the genre.
Then 9/11 happened.... and Matt Barlow felt the need to change his life, dunno what happened with Jon and if that was the first big event that sent him on his path. Of course there's no recovering from losing Matt Barlow, and yet Ripper was the best replacement he could possibly find back then. Would Matt Barlow's presence make a difference for The Glorious Burden?
And then of course, came his magnus opus, or what he wanted it to be. The album to end all albums, his masterpiece, the Something Wicked album, which eventually became two. He set out to write his Scenes from a Memory..... but in the end he wrote The Astonishing (just an example - I personally love the album, but again, it's not SFAM), and the clusterfuck of changing singers midway through the project didn't help either.
By then, the musical landscape had changed, the situation had become what we all know (no more money made from records, all incomes basically come from touring), and Matt left AGAIN and for good, and Jon finally settled with Stu opening a new and more stable phase of Iced Earth (I love Dystopia, mildly enjoy Babylon and quite like Incorruptible), that however has to face the reality of the current musical landscape, with them being just another mid-to-big band.
I believe Jon had the intention of making Iced Earth the next Iron Maiden. Or at least, as big as Iron Maiden and even that is an hyperbole - more realistically, I expect that for the longest time, his ultimate goal and vision was of making Iced Earth so big that - to give a pratical example - they could have headlined festivals that Maiden themselves headlined. Big as Avenged Sevenfold ad their peak, big as Ghost who were playing big venues in their last tour.
Could this have ever happened under different circumstances? what went wrong? I think the most important defining moments in Iced Earth's path to world domination were:
- Matt Barlow leaving
- The Something Wicked album(s) not being the absolute masterpiece Jon desperately wanted it to be
Horror Show was released in 2001, Matt Barlow left in early 2003. By the time Jon came out of the turmoil with all the Ripper / Matt comes back / whops nevermind, he's gone again, it was 2011 (the year of Dystopia). 10 years "wasted", kinda like Maiden's popularity waned in the '90s, but there was no reunion with Bruce dickinson to pull out of the hat. And of course, by 2011 it was cleary that nobody was buying records anymore and that income would have had to come from touring and merchandise.
So... do you think that with just some more fortunate circumstances Iced Earth could have been, in relative terms, "as big as Iron Maiden" (or at the very least, a band that would fill sports stadium all over Europe, kinda like Nightwish is doing now), or the creative plateau would have been reached anyway and Jon had no longer utter masterpieces left in him, regardless of who was the singer?