Alan Dixon of The Metal Voice conducted an interview with vocalist Hansi Kürsch of German power metallers BLIND GUARDIAN at this year’s Heavy Montreal festival, which was held August 6-7 at Parc Jean-Drapeau in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Here are a couple of excerpts:
On the upcoming orchestral album:
Hansi: “It’s all new songs. We started with these songs when we did ‘Nightfall In Middle-Earth’. We got the first two songs back then, and I was really pushing to have them on ‘Nightfall’, and [the other guys were] just, ‘They don’t fit. They are too special. So why not work on a whole album like that?’ And I said, ‘Yeah! Great idea! And we are going to release that five years from now.’ ‘Yeah, five years from now.’ [Laughs] So twenty years later, we’re still working on it. But composing-wise, we are almost working on the second album already.”
On when he thinks the orchestral album will be released:
Hansi: “The orchestral album — I was wrong with that ever since 1998 — is going to be released in 2019. Because we recorded a lot of shows last year, and we are going to release a live album in 2018. [The live album] will be a double. We are still working on the songs in terms of choosing which songs to take from which city. I believe once we are back from North America in November, we are going to mix it.”
