Hello Friends,

I just wanted to make a quick and exciting announcement that I think many of you will be very happy about. Brent Smedley is coming back to Iced Earth for the recording and touring of the "Something Wicked" saga Parts 1& 2, and beyond. For those of you not familiar you can hear Brent's amazing drumming on the "Alive in Athens" CD, which in my opinion is the best thing about the recording. I can tell you that on a personal level this makes me very happy. Brent left the band about 7 years ago due to personal issues and I've missed him ever since. WELCOME BACK BROTHER!! The machine gun tight rhythm section is back!!!!

I wish Bobby Jarzombek the best of luck in his future endeavors, it was a pleasure jamming with him in the short time that we did.

Due to a personal situation Ernie Carletti will not be able to participate in band activities.

I will be making a significant announcement concerning the guitar and bass player positions very soon.

Also, the writing is going well and things are on track. I will post some details soon on www.icedearth.com. As challenging as this gigantic story is to tell in music, I have no doubt that it will be the pinnacle of Iced Earth's work thus far.

Take care all. More news is coming soon.

Jon Schaffer

Greetings,

The new Iced Earth guitar player is an absolutely fantastic player from the UK named Tim Mills. Tim is the owner/founder/visionary of Bare Knuckle Pickups, which is an incredible company providing state of the art handwound pickups from England, which is how I met him. I highly recommend any and all serious players to check out his website and try a few of his p/ups, they absolutely rule. The web address is at the end of this post.

As for his playing, it's awesome, very melodic, very tasty and he has great original ideas and songwriting abilities as well. He's here now and we're really inspiring each other and coming up with some great parts together. It's been a very long time since I've felt this kind of chemistry and I'm very psyched about it. It's an ingredient that's been missing for a very long time, so it should bring some very cool results.

It's a good thing I always call Tim Owens "T" that will help with the 2 guys in the band named Tim factor........ ;-)

There's more good news coming soon!

I'll keep you all posted,

Jon Schaffer

• www.bareknucklepickups.co.uk

i copied this from the iced earth website. im not jon sorry. lol