Scorpions have changed the lyrics to their 1991 hit song “Wind of Change” in light of current events.
When the band kicked off their Las Vegas residency on March 26, they dedicated the classic track to the people of Ukraine. “This song is calling for peace,” frontman Klaus Meine declared that evening, “and tonight, I think, we shall sing it even louder.” The band then debuted a slightly modified version of the song, with Russian references omitted.
In August 1989, Scorpions played at the Moscow Music Peace Festival, a two-day concert in front of 100,000 people in Lenin Stadium. It was that experience, coupled with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that originally inspired “Wind of Change.”
During a recent interview with Loudwire Nights, Meine admitted the song hits differently given the state of the world today.
“Before we came [to Vegas] I was thinking about how it feels to play ‘Wind of Change’ the way we used to play for so many years,” the singer explained. “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.'”
Watch Scorpions Perform the Updated Version of ‘Wind of Change’
The band has continued using the new lyrics throughout their residency, which runs until April 16.
“This song is just so special in the history of the band because of the meaning, because of the background,” Meine further noted. “When I wrote that song, I was so very much inspired by what we saw back then in the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, the coming down of the Berlin Wall — it was a moment where all of us, and the whole world, we were looking into a peaceful future where it was about joining together instead of being separated by wars and those differences.”
“We had so many amazing moments, so many emotional moments we shared with our fans in Russia,” he continued, “but this is about the regime and there’s a lot of people in Russia that just don’t know the truth. That’s just a fact, and it’s so sad to see what’s going on and so many people are dying every other day. It breaks your heart, it’s really sad.”
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