Their collaboration hit the metal scene like a bomb at the beginning of the millennium. And in hardly any other side project were the trademarks of the main bands so clearly visible from the very first second as in Demons & Wizards, the playground of Blind Guardian singer Hansi Kürsch and Iced Earth guitarist Jon Schaffer, which is entering the third round with the current album "III". "Yes, you simply cannot deny this fact", laughs Kürsch in the interview. "Jon has a very concise guitar style, and the same goes for my vocals. It's just our musical character and also our craft, and you can't simply subtract that. However, I find the symbiosis that arises from it very special. Demons & Wizards, for example, offers me much more room for singing, so that my approach is also changing
While four or five years can easily pass during the production of a Blind Guardian epic (in the case of last year's orchestral album, one must speak in principle of decades), the recordings for "III" now took place in a much more manageable time frame. But even here the pitfalls were in the details. "We've been talking about a third album every now and then since 2010, but never got together, for which there were thousands of reasons. In fact we didn't really get together seriously until early 2018. The release was supposed to be in 2019, that was the overall goal. We then cleverly made this fact public in one or two interviews, and suddenly we received a series of offers for concerts, which led us to Wacken, among other places. Of course we wanted to take this with us, which had the consequence that we couldn't proceed quite as a general rule anymore
