The Glorious Burden is Iced Earth's 8th studio album, and a concept album about world military history. Song topics include Valley Forge, Waterloo, Red Baron and Attila the Hun. The album culminated with a 32 minute epic about the Battle of Gettysburg that features the 55 piece Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.
Chad Bowar: How did you hook up with Iced Earth?
Tim "Ripper" Owens: Jon and I met back in '98 at a Priest show. This past year he called and asked if I might want to do a side project. He was sending me some songs and I was listening to them and the next thing you know he said "I was in the studio mixing the new CD and it just didn't work out. Matt's vocals just weren't what I wanted. His heart wasn't there." He asked me if I would be interested in doing the vocals. I said sure, I'd definitely be interested. It seemed like a no-brainer.
Were you into Iced Earth's music before?
I was into it. I didn't listen to it all that much, I was familiar with it and had the records. I noticed they seemed to get better all the time. You get so busy it's hard to listen. The problem was having the time.
Iced Earth's music is more power/progressive metal. Was there much of an adjustment for you vocally?
It's definitely heavier, but the singing is more melodic. It's a lot more singing, a lot better vocals. It's more of an attraction vocally.
It also seems a lot more diverse vocally than Judas Priest was.
The Priest stuff had a lot of different voices, but they were really quick. With this one I use a voice a lot more. It seems like there's a lot more different singing where there might have been more characters in the Priest stuff. It was just shorter or background stuff or a small part in the song. You didn't get to hear it as much.
Are you more comfortable singing the lower register or higher register vocals?
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