Wind of Change

For more of my random posts on random topics (PSAs, Ads, music, miscellany), click HERE:

Wind of change

lyrics and music by Klaus Meine
performed by Scorpions
release date: January 21, 1991

[Intro]
(*Whistling*)

[Verse 1]
I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change
An August summer night
Soldiers passing by
Listening to the wind of change
(*Whistling*)

[Verse 2]
The world is closing in
And did you ever think
That we could be so close, like brothers?
The future’s in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change

[Chorus]
Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away (Dream away)
In the wind of change
Mmm

[Verse 3]
Walking down the street
And distant memories
Are buried in the past forever
I follow the Moskva
And down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change

[Chorus]
Take me (Take me) to the magic of the moment
On a glory night (A glory night)
Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams (Share their dreams)
With you and me (With you and me)
Take me (Take me) to the magic of the moment
On a glory night (A glory night)
Where the children of tomorrow dream away (Dream away)
In the wind of change (The wind of change)

[Bridge]
The wind of change
Blows straight into the face of time
Like a storm wind that will ring the freedom bell
For peace of mind
Let your balalaika sing
What my guitar wants to say (Say)

[Guitar Solo]

[Chorus]
Take me (Take me) to the magic of the moment
On a glory night (A glory night)
Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams (Share their dreams)
With you and me (With you and me)
Take me (Take me) to the magic of the moment
On a glory night (A glory night)
Where the children of tomorrow dream away (Dream away)
In the wind of change (The wind of change)

[Outro]
(*Whistling*)

__________________________

Not all that long ago there used to be a lot of music flowing into the U.S. mainstream from mainland Europe. ABBA, a-ha, Roxette, Ace of Base, Falco, Europe, and many others… including Scorpions from Germany (who we’ll get to below.) It feels like someone turned off that auditory spigot. My working theory is that there was an artificially created cultural divergence between the two continents in the early 1990s. Europe didn’t have its own version of grunge music. Then Europe didn’t have a version of hip hop that translated well. The Brits still sell their pop and rock music here, but eventually America lost touch with its other European cousins. It feels like the early 90s were a million years ago, sometimes, but they really weren’t. We could reopen those artistic pipelines if circumstances (i.e. record labels) allowed that to happen. The connection is not too far gone.

Sometimes things start changing so rapidly that the volume of change skews our sense of time. I’ve heard it said that some weeks feel like they had an entire year crammed into them, and then some years feel like they had a week’s worth of events. And those feelings won’t always work the same way for all people. It depends on the extent to which you consider the things that are happening to be important.

If you live in a highly politicized environment, wherein every single thing that happens feels VERY important in the moment, and you go through something new like that every day, then eventually the thing that happened six months and 1,000 events ago feels much farther gone in the past than it really was. Yet… it was only six months ago. Living that way can really impact your mind and mental health. Conversely, if something genuinely world-altering happens, that thing remains relevant despite tons of comparatively smaller subsequent events that happen around you over a much longer span of time. That’s why people still talk about Napoleon so much.

When I visited Germany in the early 2000s for an extended educational stay, one of the many things that struck me while there was how much more recent the fall of the Berlin wall seemed to Germans. For me, growing up on the other side of the planet, it was a news story followed by a lot of other newsworthy stories. Over time, it felt like something in the far distant past. It was thoughtless of me not to have realized that it would be a big historical cloud hanging over the whole country. Of course it was. More than a decade had passed for me, and in that decade, a lot of events happened that were more immediately important to me than something halfway across the world. However in Germany, the bar for “more important” was much, much higher. Few things eclipsed it. This sort of thing makes it difficult for people in far flung parts of the world to understand each other very well.

I thought of all of that when listening to this song. Is 35 years actually so very long ago? Not really. When I see the news, and it concerns Russia or Central and Eastern Europe, the “it wasn’t that long ago for them” context is important to remember. A particular Wind of Change blew a lot harder in Europe than in other places.

The song has a pretty interesting backstory, written by a German rock musician, while in Moscow, in the immediate aftermath of the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), but before the Fall of the Soviet Union (1991.) This song really captured the mood of its moment and became one of the best-selling singles of all time. There are conspiracies to this day, even, suggesting that the American CIA even helped to write it – which I suppose makes sense if you believe as I do that some supernatural non-human intelligence with a music background works there. If you don’t have a song on your discography with a CIA conspiracy theory attached to it, have you even made it in the music business? Scorpions doesn’t have to worry about that.

(more on the song, via wiki)

“Wind of Change” is a song by German rock band Scorpions, recorded for their 11th studio album, Crazy World (1990). A power ballad, 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 start of large-scale socioeconomic reforms in the Soviet Union.

“Wind of Change” was released as the album’s third single on 21 January 1991. The song became a worldwide hit, just after the failed coup that would eventually lead to the end of the Soviet Union. The song topped the charts in Germany and six other countries across Europe, and it also peaked at number four in the United States and at number two in the United Kingdom. It later appeared on the band’s 1995 live album Live Bites, their 2000 album with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Moment of Glory, and on their 2001 “unplugged” album Acoustica. The band also recorded a Russian-language version of the song, under the title “Ветер перемен” (“Veter Peremen”) and a Spanish version called “Viento de Cambio”.

With estimated sales of 14 million copies sold worldwide, “Wind of Change” is one of the best-selling singles of all time. 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 reporting the money would be allocated to children’s hospitals.

Background and writing

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. The memories of this time are also transported in the music video for the song. 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:

Die Idee dazu ist mir in der U.d.S.S.R. gekommen, als ich in einer Sommernacht im Gorki Park Center saß und auf die Moskwa geblickt habe. Das Lied ist meine persönliche 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.

— Klaus Meine, Friede, Freude, Hasch und Perestroika, in: Rocks. Das Magazin für Classic Rock, Heft 01.2014, S. 88

Meine referred to the ‘SNC’ cultural center, opened by Stas Namin inside Moscow’s Gorky Park without any official permission, where Russian and international musicians as well as progressive poets, artists and designers met in a free, innovative atmosphere. 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. The opening lines refer to the city of Moscow‘s landmarks:

I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change

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 further mentions the balalaika, the signature Russian stringed instrument, as a counterpart to the guitar, suggesting harmony of different cultures. The balalaika is mentioned in the following lines:

Let your balalaika sing
What my guitar wants to say

Klaus Meine and Rudolf Schenker are owners of the trade mark Wind of Change.

Composition

“Wind of Change” opens with a clean guitar introduction played by Matthias Jabs, which is played alongside Klaus Meine’s flat whistle. The song’s guitar solo is played by Rudolf Schenker.

Claim of CIA creative input

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. 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”.

In December 2020, it was reported that a further investigation of the song’s origins based on the claims from the podcast would be adapted into a series for Hulu directed by Alex Karpovsky.

Legacy

The song became associated with the Revolutions of 1989 and the Fall of the Berlin Wall also in 1989 and was performed by the Scorpions at the Brandenburg Gate on 9 November 1999, during the 10th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. In 2005, viewers of the German television network ZDF chose this song as the song of the century. “Wind of Change” is featured in the films In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2007), Gentlemen Broncos (2009), The Interview (2014), Love Island (2014) and I.S.S. (2024), and the video game SingStar Rocks! (2006). The song can be heard in the opening scene of the action comedy film The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018). The song is also featured in television shows Melrose Place, Brass Eye, Chuck, and Peter Kay’s Car Share and Nutri Ventures parody version.

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.”

In February 2023, the official music video hit one billion views on YouTube.

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. This was the first time the band came together to perform the Ukraine version of the song. The performance was later released as a music video on YouTube.

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.”

This song opens with a really great whistle intro. I’m thinking of making a Spotify playlist of songs with whistle intros and interludes for my enjoyment while I’m working. (Suggestions appreciated.) Anyway… I embedded the official music video below. It’s fantastic and it feels timely. My society at the least seems to be one wherein the Wind of Change seems to be blowing.