Scorpions’ Klaus Meine on Changing Lyrics to “Wind of Change”
Klaus Meine, the frontman of the West Germany’s Scorpions, just did an interview with Brazil’s 89 A Rádio Rock where he again discussed why the band decided to change the lyrics to their anti-war song “Wind of Change,” which they wrote as after participating in 1989’s Moscow Music Peace Festival. The original lyrics were team-Russia considering the events of the time, but were changed back in 2022 to show solidarity with Ukraine after Russia attacked them. At the time, Meine said he no longer wanted to sing words that in any way romanticized Russia and now, he’s opened up a little bit more about that.
The revised “Wind of Change” lyrics were debuted at the first night of their “Sin City Nights” residency at Zappos Theater at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino In Las Vegas, Nevada in March 2022, changing them to “Now listen to my heart / It says Ukrainia / Waiting for the wind to change.”
Meine told 89 A Rádio Rock:
“Well, basically we’re not a political band, but Scorpions, we’re always a band building bridges between cultures, between countries. And maybe it’s because the way we grew up in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, we grew up in times of the Cold War, and we always wanted to bring people together with music in a peaceful way. And so, yeah, I changed the lyrics a couple of years ago when Russia invaded the Ukraine and I turned it into a statement into a piece of solidarity with the Ukraine.”
It’s crazy to believe all of this started almost four years ago, but back then, Meine described the reasoning like this:
“Before we came [to Las Vegas to begin the residency], I was thinking about how it feels to play ‘Wind Of Change’ the way we used to play for so many years, and I thought, it’s not the time with this terrible war in Ukraine raging on, it’s not the time to romanticize Russia with lyrics like, ‘Follow the Moskva / Down to Gorky Park,’ you know? I wanted to make a statement in order to support Ukraine, and so the song starts now with, ‘Now listen to my heart / It says Ukraine, waiting for the wind to change.’”
What sucks is how positive the original intentions of “Wind of Change” were when they first released it. The band’s guitarist Rudolf Schenker said back in 2015 how they “wanted to show the people in Russia that here is a new generation of Germans growing up. They’re not coming with tanks and guns and making war — they’re coming with guitars and rock ‘n’ roll and bringing love!”‘
My my, how things change.
