Metal-Rules.com has issued a new interview with ICED EARTH leader/guitarist Jon Schaffer. The following is an excerpt:

Q: After this tour is done, what is the next thing that you'll be focusing on?

A: "My immediate plans are to take a well deserved vacation because it's been six years since I've taken even a week off, I'm really needing it badly so I'm doing that with my family in April when I get back. I've also got to wrap up the production on the [live] DVD that's going to come out, it's going to be a kind of collection of a few festivals that we've done. It's going to have Metal Camp on there being kind of the main show, then we have the Rock Hard Festival and we also have Wacken from 2007 and there's going to be videos and extras and behind the scenes and all that kind of shit. It's a really live and very raw kind of a video; it's going to be cool."

Q: When do you think the DVD will be ready for release?

A: "No, I don't know a release date yet. I would imagine probably fall this year, but I don't really know what the record company's plans are. I have to get it finished and that's the main goal when I get back in early March, I'm going to focus on wrapping up all facets of that like video editing, authoring of the DVD and all that. Once we get that set I'd imagine they'll probably wanna release it three of four months afterwards. But I don't know about the DVD market because that's new ground for us, Iced Earth hasn't done a DVD yet. Alive In Athens [DVD] is sort of an official bootleg, I did not put my stamp on that, I would not have put that out personally, it's horribly edited and really fucking lame because you've only got three cameras. It's a cool document historically, but it's not a proper DVD, it was never planned to be and it was just another way for Century Media to cash in on the continued success of Iced Earth. They're always going to do that, but unfortunately there's not much I can do about it. The cool thing about this [new DVD] is that, where as Alive In Athens was pretty polished [in the studio], these are live shows and haven't been doctored, this is the real thing. The best thing for me about Alive In Athens was the artwork; I've said that for years."

Q: When do you think the work for the next Iced Earth studio album will commence?

A: "Don't know yet? Like I said my priority right now is to get my head clear because I'm the only one that deals with all of this stuff on a daily basis. The guys in the band come, they do the tour, they go home, do their everyday life and Iced Earth happens here [in my head] 24/7 where as that is not the case with anybody else in the band. Before I would make any decisions about any themes or concepts or even what the album direction is going to be, I have to take a break. The last three and a half years have been really intense since I started writing this Something Wicked two-part thing, that was a really intense period because I wrote for a year straight and then immediately went into the studio and then on tour, went back in to finish part two and back on tour. It's been a constant process with no breaks.

Read the full interview and check out more live photos at Metal-Rules.com.