Sons Of Liberty (feat. Jon Schaffer)

How did Sons of Liberty come together?

I took a vacation I really needed desperately, and it was during that period I was able to get out of the rat race for a while. I saw a couple of news reports, though I hardly ever had the TV on because I was in Central America, but I saw this report…it caused me to start questioning things. When I got back to the states, I spent some time digging and stumbled upon some information about money creation and the Federal Reserve system and the fact that it’s a private banking cartel. It was sort of like being unplugged from the Matrix in a way. It hit me pretty hard that there had been a silent coup d'état in the United States in 1913. A lot of the things that I heard people talk about in the past that I just thought was nonsense, I was seeing the motive. It really opened my eyes to a lot of stuff and that’s how Sons of Liberty came to be.

Being a big fan of the American Revolution and the Civil War periods, I really hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to things that went on in the 20th century. I did a little studying about World War I and World War II, but my real area of passion was the beginnings of the country and what the Republic stood for. So it’s one of those things that bothered me and rocked me down to my core. I know what the founders were actually fighting against and to find out that the Federal Reserve system is not a legitimate part of government and is a private banking cartel that has the power to counterfeit our money. We can’t audit them; we have no control over it. There are a lot of people out there that don’t know about the Fed., but that’s changing every day. More and more people are waking up to it and what that institution means and how much damage it’s caused to our people.

How did you weave these ideas and research into the concept of the debut album Brush-Fires Of The Mind?

It happened in steps. At first, I wrote the song “Our Dying Republic.” That was after…I don’t really know how to say it, except it was the strongest epiphany, the heaviest thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. As soon as you see it for what it is, how fraudulent and criminal it is, and you realize that you’ve been lied to on a massive scale, you feel betrayed. That was the first song and I had to get my head out of the books and go to the studio and write something, try to put this emotion into some music and that was the song that came out. I did in one day, and I was never really motivated to sing before, but there was strange (crap) going on inside of me.

I sat on it a while and didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but the more that I read and studied and learned about these things, the more angry I got, the more motivated I got to speak out against it and try to raise awareness. There are a lot of good people out there who are doing it, but in so many ways, it’s not something that is in the mainstream media and not something they teach in school. They teach very little about the economy and real history in school, so it’s pretty easy to get people into a state where they can be manipulated. It’s very important that people are aware of what is going on and we can stand together and fight this.

The debut album Brush-fires Of The Mind is one of the best work Jon has ever created, so my anticipations were high for this EP and when listening to it for the very first time I felt like being hit by a truck. This is heavy metal at its best and Jon is singing with such passion that you can feel that he believe in his words and his cause.

Due to his obligations with Iced Earth, Jon only had time to record five songs, so four heavy metal tracks and a ballad is what we get, the ballad being the title track, Spirit Of The Times. All with cool and heavy riffs, great melodies and sung by a voice that can make a grown man cry. Jon is a great singer and also a magnificent guitar player and even if you can hear parts from his main band, he always finds a way to create new riffs to dazzle you. It's hard to pick the best song from this release, but after listening to it several times, I will go for Full Spectrum Dominance, even if all songs blows my mind.

Whether you agree or disagree with his political aspects, I encourage everyone to log on to iTunes and get a copy of this fantastic piece of work, because this is without a single ounce of doubt the best music of 2011.