METALLICA's 'Orion Music + More' Festival To Take Place In Detroit Next Year

METALLICA's Orion Music + More festival, a two-day event featuring more than 20 bands which took place in June in Atlantic City, New Jersey, will be back in 2013 and it will be moving to a new location: Detroit, Michigan. More details regarding tickets and lineup for the event — which is scheduled to take place on June 8-9, 2013 — will be revealed in February.

The two Atlantic City shows on June 22 and June 23 sold a total of 24,000 tickets, according to The Press Of Atlantic City.

When asked why METALLICA would want to do their own festival, guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield said in an interview, "First of all, because we can. Why wouldn't you? We're just trying to bring a little more of a mix to what is going on. . . . I think the Europeans are able to look at a festival more as an event than 'my favorite band is playing.' We're not necessarily trying to reproduce that in the States, but we'd like to bring a little taste of that here."

Speaking about the future of the Orion Music + More festival, Hetfield said, "I would love it to be an annual thing and become an established festival that people can come to and know it's going to be good, no matter what. It'll be a fun place to be and hang and see some of the other things that are going to be happening, whether it's a car show or the movie tent that Lars [Ulrich, drums] is doing or Kirk's [Hammett, guitar] haunted mansion. . . . If it ends up staying in Atlantic City, who knows, it could move. It could end up being three days, it could just be one. It really depends on how it goes this time."

During an interview aired immediately after this year's festival announcement, METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich stated about how the bands were selected to perform at Orion Music + More, "Music, to us, is really diverse; it covers all grounds. If you took the four of ours;' iPods and scanned through those, you would find the biggest variety and diversity of music, so we're trying to bring that spirit to this festival."

He added, "A lot of the European festivals, and certainly also Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo and so on, in outside lands in America, these festivals are really about diversity and about different experiences. You go there, you go check out bands you don't know a lot about, you go check out bands where it will be the first time you'll experience them. So there's a whole big pile of stuff — from punk to thrash to country to, sort, of alternative, straight-ahead rock, blues. But it's really about diversity."

"We'd love to have people open up their focus. Maybe they come to see us but wind up discovering some blues or country act," METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett told USA Today.

Added Ulrich: "It's all about balance, keeping things fresh."

The METALLICA members explained that Orion was named in honor of the band's late bassist Cliff Burton. "Orion" is also the name of the instrumental song from METALLICA's 1986 album "Master Of Puppets", which is widely considered to be one of the greatest metal LPs of all time.

Orion Music + More 2012 Day 1 Recap:

Orion Music + More 2012 Day 2 Recap: