In a recent interview with Spain’s Stairway To Rock, former ICED EARTH frontman Matt Barlow was asked about a potential reunion with band founder Jon Schaffer.
Barlow, who had two previous tenures with the band (1993-2003 and 2007-2011), responded with the following, as transcribed by Blabbermouth: “Jon and I haven’t talked about that at all, man. Obviously, I can’t wait for Jon to do something else musically. I don’t know if it’s gonna be ICED EARTH or something else. But I look forward to him coming back and getting back into things. I really hope that he does. But right now, that’s all on hold for him, I believe. It’s been a little bit since I’ve spoken with him. He and my wife speak quite often, as that’s my wife’s brother. But as far as, whenever he does something, I’m gonna be fully supporting him coming back into music. So hopefully that will happen.”
In response to a question about Schaffer’s legal troubles, Barlow referenced Schaffer‘s sentence last October of three years’ probation and 120 hours of community service for his involvement in the U.S. Capitol riot. (Schaffer was among approximately 1,500 individuals accused of riot-related crimes who received a pardon from President Donald Trump.) Matt then stated: “I’ve said this before in other interviews, I understand people’s disappointment in how things went down with Jon, and I think Jon is disappointed as well and has apologized. Hopefully there is a redemption story in here and hopefully people can understand and understand that we all have our differences in our, whether you wanna call them flaws or just differences in opinion or what have you, or differences in things that they’ve done or anything. But, at the end of the day, I think the outcome, if Jon is able to come back into the musical realm, I think the outcome ultimately will be something — a very, very, very positive thing.”
In a last month’s interview with The Metal Voice, Barlow was asked about the possibility of rejoining ICED EARTH if Jon decides to relaunch the band, to which he responded: “That’s something that would be entirely up to, obviously, when Jon… That’s Jon‘s band — a hundred percent — so that’s something that Jon would have to decide, whether I would be a part of it or not, either way, but whether ICED EARTH goes out and does it. But I look forward to that, whether it would be me involved with it or somebody else, if that were to happen. And I can’t speak to it, ’cause I don’t think at this point that… It’s not even in the long distance at this point.”
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