Scorpions’ most iconic song is undoubtedly “Wind of Change,” but the song historically tied to the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union has received a bit of an update when performed live today.
Singer and “Wind of Change” songwriter Klaus Meine told Loudwire Nights that he’s altered the song’s lyrics during the band’s current residency in Las Vegas due to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Meine said, “Before we came here, 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.’”
Meine added, “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, 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.”
“Wind of Change” was the third single off of Scorpions’ 1990 album Crazy World. It still remains the biggest-selling single by a German artist ever moving 14 million copies worldwide.