Download Scorpions Wind Of Change Mp3

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Wind of Change" is a song by West German rock band Scorpions, recorded for their eleventh studio album Crazy World (1990). A power ballad,[4] it was composed and written by the band's lead singer, Klaus Meine, and produced by Keith Olsen and the band. The lyrics were composed by Meine following the band's visit to the Soviet Union at the height of perestroika, when the enmity between the communist and capitalist blocs subsided concurrently with the promulgation of large-scale socioeconomic reforms in the Soviet Union.

With estimated sales of 14 million copies sold worldwide, "Wind of Change" is one of the best-selling singles of all time.[6] It holds the record for the best-selling single by a German artist. The band presented a gold record and $70,000 of royalties from the single to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, with Soviet news sources claiming the money would be allocated to children's hospitals.[7]

Klaus Meine said in an interview that the time 1988/1989 in the Soviet Union was characterized by the mood that the Cold War was coming to an end, the music was the unifying factor for the people.[8] The memories of this time are also transported in the music video for the song.[9] Meine was inspired by his participation in the Moscow Music Peace Festival on 13 August 1989, at Lenin Stadium, where the Scorpions performed in front of about 300,000 fans:[4][10]

Die Idee dazu ist mir in der U.d.S.S.R. gekommen, als ich in einer Sommernacht im Gorki Park Center sa und auf die Moskwa geblickt habe. Das Lied ist meine persnliche Aufarbeitung dessen, was in den letzten Jahren in der Welt passiert ist.

The idea came to me in the U.S.S.R. when I was sitting in the Gorky Park Center one summer night, looking at the Moskva River. The song is my personal reappraisal of what has happened in the world in recent years.

Meine referred to the music center in Gorky Park, founded by Stas Namin from the eponymous rock band Gorky Park.[11] The lyrics celebrate glasnost in the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and speak of hope at a time when tense conditions had arisen due to the fall of Communist-run governments among Eastern Bloc nations beginning in 1989.[4] The opening lines refer to the city of Moscow's landmarks:

The Moskva is the name of the river that runs through Moscow (both the city and the river are named identically in Russian), and Gorky Park is an urban park in Moscow named after the writer Maxim Gorky. The song also contains a reference to the balalaika, which is a Russian triangular stringed instrument somewhat like a guitar. The balalaika is mentioned in the following lines:

"Wind of Change" opens with a clean guitar introduction played by Matthias Jabs, which is played alongside Klaus Meine's flat whistle.[13] The song's guitar solo is played by Rudolf Schenker.[citation needed]

The song is the subject of the Pineapple Street Studios podcast Wind of Change, released 11 May 2020, which raises questions regarding the song's origin.[14][15][16] Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at the New Yorker and host of the podcast investigates the allegation that the song was written by or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency, citing a rumor originating allegedly from inside the agency. In a Sirius XM interview with Eddie Trunk on 13 May 2020, Meine stated "It's a fascinating idea, and it's an entertaining idea, but it's not true at all".[17][18] In December 2020, it was reported that a further investigation of the song's origins based on the claims from the podcast will be adapted into a series for Hulu directed by Alex Karpovsky.[19]

As of 2022, the Scorpions still perform the song live but with lyrical changes in light of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The opening lines are changed to "Now listen to my heart / It says Ukrainia, waiting for the wind to change." Meine stated, "It's not the time with this terrible war in Ukraine raging on, it's not the time to romanticize Russia."[23]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, they collaborated with Japanese rock star Yoshiki to perform "Wind of Change" for the documentary film Yoshiki: Under the Sky.[25] This was the first time the band came together to perform the Ukraine version of the song.[26] The performance was later released as a music video on YouTube.[27]

As of 2024, the Scorpions have changed the opening lyrics again to adopt a more neutral tone, displaying these on the video screens at gigs: "Now listen to my heart, it still believes in love, waiting for the wind to change. A dark and lonely night, our dreams will never die, waiting for the wind to change."[28]

Did the CIA write "Wind of Change" for Scorpions? It's a question so simple, so tantalizing it's a wonder that it hasn't been explored prior to Wind Of Change, the eight-part podcast by Pineapple Street Studios and Crooked Media that debuted on Spotify this past month.

It's such an enticing scenario, I wondered why I had never heard of this rumor prior to the podcast. "Wind of Change" climbed to number four on the Billboard charts in the summer of 1991, a year when I was paying attention to every trend in modern rock and pop. While I could never call myself a Scorpions fan, I had been aware of the group for years, ever since "Rock You Like A Hurricane" rammed its way into the Top 40 in 1984, a placement assisted by heavy play on MTV. Like all metal bands, Scorpions experienced a nosedive in popularity in the early 1990s, falling prey to the shifting winds of fashion, but they never went away, maintaining enough of a presence to still be featured in metal, classic rock and metal magazines for years. All of this combined with my voracious music press reading habits make me think that gossip of Scorpions doubling as secret agents would've wound its way to my ears at some point in the last thirty years, but it just didn't.

I'm not the only one who didn't hear this CIA rumor. I asked my Facebook feed whether they'd heard it and the vast majority had not. Among this group included several music journalists and critics who shared my belief that the would've heard about the deep state writing the Scorpions' biggest hit. Several other posters had heard the story before. Among these ranks were residents of Washington DC and metalheads, which pretty much represents the Venn Diagram for this particular story.

Discovering that some friends and acquaintances were familiar with the "Wind of Change" rumor helped dispel my first reaction to the Wind Of Change podcast: that investigative Patrick Radden Keefe invented the story. Keefe is too respected a reporter to put his reputation at risk by simply making things up but the ingenious thing about Wind Of Change is, it's a story that can't be proven or refuted, only explored. That ambiguity makes it an ideal vehicle for a leisurely podcast, where each episode rambles down a detour designed to bolster the circumstantial evidence supporting Keefe's thesis. There's an episode dedicated to CIA's cultural operations during the cold war, an episode about "The KGB Rock Club," a stretch detailing the procedure for getting FOIA requests from the CIA, a segment spotlighting rock manager Doc McGhee and, finally, an interview with Klaus Meine, the Scorpions lead singer who wrote "Wind of Change." Combined, these highways and byways give the impression that Keefe launched the podcast as an opportunity to explore ideas tangentially related to his central theme and fair play to him. The cold war generated more intrigue and espionage than could've been properly documented at the time and "Wind of Change" provides an ideal hook to pull upon a few interesting threads.

Podcasts specialize in digressions and Wind Of Change contains nearly all the deviations endemic to the format: casual conversations, re-enacted exchanges, whispered confidences, archival footage, events staged for the microphone, wild theories best recounted in the hours after midnight. It's a structure pioneered on This American Life and Wind Of Change adheres to this formula so strongly it almost plays like a metacommentary on the format while also feeling reassuring. The twists and wry commentary are expected, the unhurried pace allowing a listener to get accustomed to its lulling rhythms while also suggesting this is a story of import, even if Keefe never comes to a definitive conclusion to his thesis.

Scorpions not only broke out of Germany, they were a staple on the Billboard charts throughout the 1980s. Blackout, Love At First Sting and Savage Amusement all reached the Top 10 between 1982 and 1988, and they had a genuine Top 40 hit in 1984 with "Rock You Like A Hurricane." This success laid the groundwork for "Wind of Change" reaching number four in 1990, a remarkable position that nevertheless may underplay just how big the single was during 1991 when it was a mainstay on MTV. Keefe frames this success in an odd way, suggesting that the song has been nearly forgotten in America whereas it's been no more forgotten than the average chart-topper from 1991. Its lack of recurring play says more about the strictness of classic rock and oldies radio than the song's popularity itself. Besides, the fact that Scorpions are still an active concern, recording and touring to this day, is a testament that the group hasn't been consigned to the dustbin; they may be a relic from another era but they have plenty of competition on that front.

All these years of activity are evident in Keefe's climactic interview with Klaus Meine. The singer gamely recounts the Moscow Music Peace Festival, the 1989 extravaganza that inspired him to write "Wind of Change," and when he's asked about the CIA's potential involvement he's audibly surprised and genuinely delighted to explore this theory. Meine is engaging, warm, and funny, hardly the rube that the previous episodes of the podcast suggested he might be. He seems like somebody thoughtful enough to have written "Wind of Change" while also being responsible for the line "The wind of change/blows straight into the face of time," a line that any ghostwriter would've ironed out of the song.

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