Composer Hans Zimmer just turned 69 years old, and he’s still getting used to life as a rock star. “I’m going, ‘What am I doing? Shouldn’t I be sitting at home, you know, knitting or something like that?'” he tells Consequence with a laugh via Zoom. “But this music thing, you don’t retire from it. It pushes you forward.”
And it’s with this energy that Zimmer and his collaborators are launching the North American leg of “Hans Zimmer Live – The Next Level.” The shows will take him to arenas in 30 cities between February and April next year, and you can find the full schedule below. American Express cardholders can get early access to tickets beginning Wednesday, September 23rd at 10:00 a.m. local time. There will also be an artist pre-sale at Zimmer’s official website beginning Thursday, September 24th at 10:00 a.m. local time. The general on-sale follows on Friday, September 25th at 10:00 a.m. local time via Ticketmaster.
As for what “The Next Level” really means, Zimmer says he didn’t come up with the title for tour: “It’s just ‘OK, we’ve got to find a name. Call it whatever you want.'” However, he adds, “We learned from the previous tour, so the next level is just that we’re a little bit better than we were last time.”
Zimmer actually began his career in the 1970s and 1980s as a member of bands including The Buggles, but, he confesses, “I always had stage fright. And I loved movies.” So he gradually moved more into composing, getting his big break with the score for Barry Levinson’s Rain Man. Over the decades since then, Zimmer created music for some of the world’s biggest movies, and has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards, winning twice.
Then came a fateful conversation with his friends Pharrell Williams and Johnny Marr, when they told him, “There comes a point where you can’t hide behind the screen for the rest of your life — where you have to get out there and actually look people in the eye and actually play for them live.” Zimmer initially resisted, pleading stage fright, but when Williams offered to bring him on stage at the 2015 Grammy Awards, he agreed to play guitar for the artist, thinking that “only an idiot would say no.”
Then came his 2017 Coachella performance, and now his latest tour, which will feature a 19-piece band playing a mix of tracks that could include the scores from the Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar, Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Lion King, and the Dune films.
As with the first tour, “The Next Level” will feature no footage from the movies whose music is being featured. “The music can stand on its own two feet. If you remember what scene it came from or what movie it came from, great, do that,” he says. However, he also encourages concertgoers to just let the music “give you new images in your head.”
Hans Zimmer Live — The Next Level, photo by Suzanne Teresa
The setlist, he says, is already “incredibly finalized”, though he admits that sometimes he will introduce one track and “somebody will whisper in my ear, ‘That’s not what we’re playing now. We’re playing Pirates now, you know?’ Even though there’s a finalized set list and even though it’s printed out on the floor and I can just look down and read it, I still get it wrong.”
Zimmer doesn’t mind accidents on stage, because “very often they result in really interesting things. You’re playing something that you wrote for this film, and suddenly you come up with a completely different line inside it, and you go, ‘Oh God, I wish I had thought of that for the film.’ Some of the pieces actually turn out to be better than they ever were, because playing it every night gives you an opportunity to invent.”
Creating the setlist was a discussion that originally began with the idea of “one for you, one for me — one hit and one obscure thing.” Eventually, though, the band realized that “some of the hits, we actually really liked. We actually liked playing Pirates or Interstellar.”
It’s a lesson Zimmer learned when preparing for Coachella 2017, and had to take his usual three-hour concert and trim it down. His first idea was to cut the The Lion King portion, writing it off as “a kid’s movie,” but “Niall Marr, Johnny’s son, turned around to me and said, ‘Zimmer, just get over yourself. That’s the music of my childhood. That’s got to be in there.'”
The night of the concert, when they launched into The Lion King, Zimmer looked out into the audience, “and there are 80,000 people crying. And I suddenly realize how right Niall was. They’re not crying because they’re sad. They’re crying because they’re moved. They’re crying because it’s not that they remember the movie. They remember their childhood. They remember who they are and what their life is all about.”
To Zimmer, though, there’s no limit to what might succeed on stage. “I think we can make anything work. We are ambitious, you know? It might not sound exactly the way it sounded. It will never sound exactly the way it sounded in the movie. But if the tune is solid enough, you can throw all sorts of things against the tune and it will move people, hopefully, or make them happy. Or make them dance.”
Touring, he says, is “an adventure. I still have the stage fright, but I realized that’s just who I am, and I can’t let that stop me. You can’t let fear stop you.”
Plus, he continues, “The people around you and the audience… It just gives you energy. It’s an amazing thing, when you play and you look out at 22,000 people or something — you see humanity at its best. It’s worth showing up for those people, for the people who bothered to fight through the traffic, bothered to park the car, bothered to come. And we will give our all. We will give our best every night. We’re not slackers.”
One word of warning, though: “If people in the first four rows turn up late, we can’t help it, but we have to start heckling them for the rest of the show. So try not to turn up late.”
Watch our interview with Hans Zimmer above, or via YouTube.
Hans Zimmer 2027 Tour Dates:
02/17 — Hartford, CT @ PeoplesBank Arena
02/19 — Belmont Park, NY @ UBS Arena
02/21 — Newark, NJ @ Prudential Center
02/23 — Philadelphia, PA @ Xfinity Mobile Arena
02/24 — Boston, MA @ TD Garden
02/26 — Ottawa, ON @ Canadian Tire Centre
02/28 — Quebec City, QC @ Videotron Centre
03/02 — Hamilton, ON @ TD Coliseum
03/03 — Detroit, MI @ Little Caesars Arena
03/05 — Chicago, IL @ United Center
03/07 — Cincinnati, OH @ Heritage Bank Center
03/09 — Charlotte, NC @ Spectrum Center
03/11 — Orlando, FL @ Kia Center
03/13 — Miami, FL @ Kaseya Center
03/14 — Tampa, FL @ Benchmark International Arena
03/16 — Atlanta, GA @ State Farm Arena
03/17 — Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena
03/19 — Kansas City, MO @ T-Mobile Center
03/21 — Oklahoma City, OK @ Paycom Center
03/22 — Fort Worth, TX @ Dickies Arena
03/25 — Denver, CO @ Ball Arena
03/27 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Delta Center
03/30 — Phoenix, AZ @ Mortgage Matchup Center
04/01 — Los Angeles, CA @ Crypto.com Arena
04/02 — Anaheim, CA @ Honda Center
04/04 — San Francisco, CA @ Chase Center
04/05 — Sacramento, CA @ Golden 1 Center
04/08 — Vancouver, BC @ Rogers Arena
04/09 — Seattle, WA @ Climate Pledge Arena
04/11 — Portland, OR @ Moda Center
