Iced Earth’s Jon Schaffer will reunite with the band’s former singer, Matt Barlow, under the name Schaffer/Barlow Project to record Christmas classics on a new record called Winter Nights. The project has a Kickstarter that you can contribute to and has surpassed the $15k goal in a brief run with $19k funded so far in less than a day. Watch the trailer and see the tracklisting now. Barlow played his last official show with Iced Earth in 2011 Wacken Open Air festival in Wacken, Germany. He joined Demons & Wizards on stage in New York City for a cover of Iced Earth’s “I Died for You”, which is on this Winter Nights album.
.
Schaffer and Barlow’s first collaborative recording since 2008 will feature the following songs:
- We Three Kings
- Silent Night
- Do You Hear What I Hear?
- Little Drummer Boy
- I Died For You (Winter 2020)
- Watching Over Me (Winter 2020)
- Silent Night (Traditional)
In a video message announcing the project, Barlow said: “This is something that Jon and I had been talking about for many years. It just so happens that it’s the right time. These are some Christmas classics that we’ve decided to do, and also add some reimaginings of some Iced Earth songs in there with it. So it’s really gonna be pretty damn cool, man.”
Schaffer added: “The idea, for whatever reason, popped in my head, and I called Matt. And I was in the middle of another production, so we had this short window of time; we couldn’t bring you, really, a full-length album at this moment. But if you guys are into the idea, we definitely would like to do more of this in the future. There’s other classic songs that we can rework from our past and from holiday songs and new originals and whatever. So, basically, everything’s on the table; we just wanna see if you guys are into where we’re going with this. And as weird as this year has been, hopefully it will give you guys some hope. So it’s gonna be really awesome.
“We’re taking some classic big holiday songs and doing our thing with it — making it very theatrical and epic sounding, and heavy in some parts and spooky in others, beautiful,” he continued. “We have two versions of ‘Silent Night’ — one more traditional and one very much something we would do, kind of what you would expect from us.”
A Kickstarter page for the project has been launched at this location. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/icedearth/schaffer-barlow-project?ref=video