BLIND GUARDIAN To Tour North America With GRAVE DIGGER

German power metallers BLIND GUARDIAN are returning to North America this fall for the second leg of the "Beyond The Red Mirror" tour. After making a stop at the ProgPower USA festival on Thursday, September 9, the band will kick off the 19-date trek at The Orpheum in Tampa, Florida, with support from fellow German metallers GRAVE DIGGER. Their tour will include one Canadian date as well as stops in Worcester, Milwaukee, and conclude on October 5 at The Fillmore in San Francisco, California.

Confirmed tour dates:

Sep. 09 - The Orpheum - Tampa, FL
Sep. 10 - Revolution - Fort Lauderdale, FL
Sep. 12 - Ziggy's By The Sea - Wilmington, NC
Sep. 13 - Cats Cradle - Chapel Hill, NC
Sep. 15 - Webster Hall - New York, NY
Sep. 16 - The Palladium - Worcester, MA
Sep. 19 - London Music Hall - London, ON CANADA
Sep. 20 - The Crofoot - Pontiac, MI
Sep. 22 - Sokol Auditorium - Omaha, NE
Sep. 23 - The Rave II - Milwaukee, WI
Sep. 24 - Pierre’s Entertainment Center - Fort Wayne, IN
Sep. 26 - Warehouse Live - Houston, TX
Sep. 27 - Gas Monkey Live - Dallas, TX
Sep. 29 - The Summit Music Hall - Denver, CO
Sep. 30 - The Complex - Salt Lake City, UT
Oct. 01 - House Of Blues - Las Vegas, NV
Oct. 02 - Observatory North Park - San Diego, CA
Oct. 04 - The Fonda Theatre - Los Angeles
Oct. 05 - The Fillmore - San Francisco, CA

Tickets go on sale on this Friday, May 6 at 10 a.m. local time.

BLIND GUARDIAN's tenth studio album, "Beyond The Red Mirror", was released in North America in February 2015 via Nuclear Blast.

BLIND GUARDIAN vocalist Hansi Kürsch told Spark TV about the orchestral album the band has been working on for the last few years: "We definitely are going to release a live album somewhere in the middle of [2016]. And we're going to continue with the orchestral album. I hope to be finished with everything, including mixing, at the end of 2016, but I doubt that there is a chance that this is going to be released [in 2016], but it will be released in 2017."

He continued: "We started writing these songs, I would say, almost twenty years ago. When we did [1998's] 'Nightfall In Middle-Earth', we figured that there were some songs which would not fit in because they were too orchestral, and at that point, we just thought, 'Well, it would be a waste to have a band involved, so just the orchestra and the singing would do the trick.' And ever since, we've built up these songs and came up with new ideas, and they changed a little bit with each album we were working on. Because the progression the people [in the band] were going through had an effect on the songs we were composing. Even though they were different than the regular stuff, they contain a little bit of each era. And this is the interesting thing. But they fit together really well. And just by listening to the music and the vocals, you have the feeling of a great, gigantic, 'Lord Of The Rings'-ish story, and this is what we are intending to make even more obvious to the people by releasing it as we originally intended to have it. Later on, we may even involve the band, because it is possible."

Hansi added: "There are, I think, eleven or twelve songs we have composed so far, and we are working on interludes and some reprises and stuff like that at the moment. But at the very end, I'm going to sing all the stuff. And there are a lot of different characters and they will be all performed by. You know, it's a lot of storytelling, so it's going to be nice to see how people will react on it. And we have worked with an orchestra from Prague. We are intending to have two more sessions for the reprises and all the stuff, and then we are basically done. And I hope that [longtime BLIND GUARDIAN producer] Charlie [Bauerfeind] is going to be finished with the mixing, let's say, in November [or] December [of 2016]."

Regarding the upcoming live album, Hansi said: "We [recorded] everything. We're doing a sort of best-of collection of all the shows we have done, and we are going for the best songs and the best performances, which means on one hand, it depends on the audience, and on the other hand, it also depends on our performance. They're quite different from city to city and from the status the band has been in. So it's quite entertaining for us to listen to all these shows."

"Our last [live] album is twelve years old already, so it's about the right time, because we have released three other albums, so there's plenty of new stuff, but also plenty of old stuff, which the people always wanna listen to. It's interesting for us to see the development of the band during the years because, from what I can say is that we have become a far, far better live band than we have been twelve years ago, so the attraction on the songs, even if it's the same songs, at least for some of the songs, will be the difference in the performance — it's tighter, it's more professional. On the other hand, live always depends on the different feeling of the music and everything. So it will be nice to see how everything turned into a different direction."