The Good Die Young (Scorpions song)
| Sting in the Tail | ||||
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| Studio album by Scorpions | ||||
| Released | 19 March 2010 | |||
| Recorded | May–December 2009 | |||
| Studio | Scorpio Sound Studio and Vocal Land Studio, Germany The Garage Studio and Atlantisstudion, , Sweden |
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| Genre | Hard rock, heavy metal | |||
| Length | 47:20 | |||
| Label |
Sony/Columbia Seven One (Europe) New Door/UME (North America) RCA (Japan) |
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| Producer | Mikael Nord Andersson, Martin Hansen | |||
| Scorpions chronology | ||||
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| Singles from Sting in the Tail | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| About.com |   |
| AllMusic | |
| Blabbermouth.net | 8/10 |
| Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles | 6.0/10 |
| Rock Hard | 9.0/10 |
Sting in the Tail is the seventeenth studio album by German hard rock band Scorpions. It was released on 19 March 2010 in Europe (14 March in Greece) and on 23 March in North America. At the time it was a farewell album, released prior to their farewell tour.
Band members explained that the sound of the album would have been similar to that of the classic releases of the 80s, but with a modern twist.
The album features a duet on the song "The Good Die Young" with the Finnish symphonic metal singer Tarja Turunen, best known as the former lead vocalist of Nightwish.
A tentative title for the album was Humanity: Hour II, however this was eventually scrapped.
First week sales in the United States were 18,500 copies sold placing the album at No. 23 on the Billboard 200 chart. In Germany the album debuted at No. 2, but fell in its second week to No. 3, in France at No. 16 and in Greece at No. 1. The album also peaked at Number 2 on the Billboard Rock Charts.
The Get Your Sting and Blackout World Tour promoting the album was initially reported to be the band's last tour, though this proved not to be the case. In later interviews given after the tour had started, at least two band members (Klaus Meine and Matthias Jabs) stated that the band was not going to stop touring and was in fact, working on new material.
In the early April 2009, Scorpions fan club ScorpNews.com announced that Scorpions would have entered the studio in the fall of the same year to record a new album. A couple of weeks later, Klaus Meine officially confirmed that the band was working on new material in an interview for Deutsche Welle. He explained that "after a very turbulent 2008 with 60 shows in 22 countries, we're now trying to breathe a bit and charge our batteries — but also to be creative". Two months later, the band had extended their record deal with Ariola Records.
The band prepared about 18 songs for the album and teamed up with Swedish producers Mikael Nord Andersson an Martin Hansen. All the songs from the album are new written material, except four songs: "Slave Me", "No Limit", "Turn You On" and "The Best Is Yet to Come" which were written during the recording sessions for Unbreakable. During those sessions "Turn You On" had a different title; "The Best Is Yet to Come" was planned to be recorded for the album following Unbreakable, but when the band received an offer from Desmond Child to record Humanity: Hour I they kept the song and recorded it for this album.James Kottak in the interview for Sleaze Roxx explained: "The first four songs that we wrote for this record were actually dark. I call them dark songs because they were probably too heavy compared to the stuff we've done in the past. They were in the vein of "The Good Die Young", but you can't have too many songs like that. I love "The Good Die Young" but I'm glad the way things evolved took us away from where we were headed initially in the songwriting process. We also co-wrote with our producers, Martin Hansen and Mikael Andersson, who took the whole thing to an entirely different level".
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