In fact, there’s a song called “Roots in My Boots,” which shoots right back to “Blackout,” plus a raging metal monster called “Hot and Cold.” Quick of attack are “When I Lay My Bones to Rest” and first single “Peacemaker,” while “Shining of Your Soul” might be the best song the band have ever done in their very occasional reggae idiom. This is all tied in with yet another complicated worldwide pandemic story, in the Scorpions’ case involving the usual canceled tour dates but also a Las Vegas residency, scotched plans to record the album in Los Angeles and ultimately a tight recording schedule back home in Hanover, Germany, due to travel restrictions that affected Dee (coming from Sweden) and Maciwoda (coming from Poland).īut an album that will go down as a late-period classic indeed got finished - and self-produced, another happenstance that Schenker says contributed to the record’s heavy metal roots. Everybody was excited when they heard the stuff.” Let’s put it down for the other guys,’ so that they had a picture of what I was doing. I got to around seven, eight, nine songs and called the engineer and said, ‘Hey, man, come over here. But I got these lyrics and I said, great, yeah, and I was driving around the neighborhood thinking about the lyrics, thinking about riffs, with the first riffs flying around in my car (laughs) and I drove home, went into my studio and started writing. You know, if you always go down the same road, after some time you get bored and then no creativity comes out. This was a fantastic way and not the normal way. We have a studio there, and I got the lyrics, and the first lyric was ‘Gas in the Tank,’ which I thought, yeah, right, good stuff - do we have some gas in the tank? But now I was able to write songs that support the lyrics, rather than doing the music first, which was our usual way. And he was sending them to me in Thailand, where I was at that time avoiding the wintertime in Europe. He wrote very inspiring lyrics, looking at the history of the Scorpions and also what you experience along the way by playing around the world. And then Klaus somehow got the inspiration to write lyrics. RELATED ARTICLE: 10 greatest Scorpions songs of the '70sĬonfirming the same story about the label request for an album like Blackout, Schenker says his answer was, “Yeah, that’s a good idea, but let’s see. And you know, it’s easier to say than to do, but we thought about it - somehow he planted that thought in our minds.”Īs a sort of parallel to having the drums in early, Schenker explains that a similar thing happened with the lyrics, with both procedural differences resulting in extra life across these Rock Believer songs. But I would say that the earliest point when we considered making another album was some time in 2018 when a good friend and fan, and also somebody who works for the record company, addressed us with, ‘Oh, guys, it would be fantastic if you could do an album again like Blackout, from the early ’80s.’ This is his favorite album. We decided if we do another album at all, which wasn’t clear, like for a long time, we have to go into a harder direction and make it more rock, make it more rough.
“ Return to Forever was, I think, a pretty good album,” reflects Jabs, “but we were coming to a point with our friends from Sweden, our producers - they are really our friends as well - where things were a bit too clean, too polished. Now here’s that Blackout thing, which, when you hear the album, the connection will ring through loud and clear. You know, it saves time, it saves money: It’s one of those, fly the drummer in, he knows the complete arrangement because he could rehearse it and get ready, and the album is done in two days and that’s it. That was the way the Swedes (producers Mikael Nord Andersson and Martin Hansen) were working. “He played last, because we had done all the arrangements and recordings to programmed drums, a programmed drum track. “With James, we usually recorded the modern way,” explains Jabs, referring to previous drummer James Kottak, who played with the band on five studio albums (depending on how you count) stretching back to 1999’s Eye II Eye. This gives an extremely good drive to the music.”īut the DEE factor - the Swedish dynamo is best known for his work with Motörhead and King Diamond - reveals itself in another key way as well. I noticed this already the very first time we played together. And when we play together, Mikkey does the same thing. You know, when I play, I’m a little bit before the point, because of the energy. “Especially by finding out that he plays so much ahead of the beat, pushing the beat. “First of all, a new drummer, Mikkey Dee, brought some fresh wind into the machine,” begins Schenker, asked about the personality of this slamming new collection versus the band’s last album, Return to Forever, from 2015.