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''Humanity: Hour I'' is the sixteenth studio album by the German hard rock band Scorpions, which was released in Europe on May 14, 2007 and in the United States and Canada on August 28, 2007. ''Humanity: Hour 1'' is a concept album based on a loose storyline by Desmond Child and futurist Liam Carl, which predicts a world torn apart by a civil war between humans and robots. This apocalyptic nightmare serves as a warning shot to all humanity, whose only hope of survival is to reclaim our humanity. The album was produced by James Michael and Desmond Child, who also provide backing vocals. The song "Humanity" was performed for the first time by Scorpions on March 24, 2007 in Brussels, Belgium and released as the first single from the album. Also of note is the band's logo on the album's cover: the text font is similar to their first two albums, as opposed to the band's more famous logo. This marks only the third time in the band's career (and the first time in 33 years) the less familiar font has been used. However, if one looks closely, their more familiar logo can be seen on the back of the neck of the gynoid. The opening track "Hour I" has been used as the intro of the NHL's Minnesota Wild since the 2007-08 season. ==Background and recording== After the Scorpions had finished the U.K. tour as a special guest for Judas Priest, Rudolf Schenker revealed that band started to work on a live video album which will later become Unbreakable World Tour 2004: One Night in Vienna and also revealed that the band is planning to start working on a new album in late 2005. In an interview for The Malay Mail in May, 2006, Schenker confirmed that band is working on a new album which will be hopefully released in late 2006. or early 2007. Describing the upcoming album, Schenker said: "For now, I can only tell you that it's going to pick up where Unbreakable left off. It will have superb power ballads and hard-rocking songs playable on commercial radio. I guess you can say that the new SCORPIONS album is going to sound fresh and rocking. Also one more thing, it's going to be a great album and not an album with one or two great songs". Scorpions had been working intensively on the songs during the concerts in 2006 and invited several producers to come over to Germany for an interview (one of them was Roy Thomas Baker), but band members weren't really pleased with what producers had to offer, so in the end band decided to choose Desmond Child and James Michael as the producers of the new album. James Michael worked on the production of the guitars, drums and bass guitars. In October, 2006, Scorpions band members went to Los Angeles to start recording the new material and during the next month and a half they worked on recording the basic tracks for the album. Band came there with 30 songs already written and soon after they have started second songwriting process. In the end of the second songwriting process, band had around 20 songs and many of those songs were little bit "too dark" from the lyrical standpoint, so band choose to throw out many of the "darker" songs and put in more optimistic songs on the album. Among those songs are "The Game of Life" and "You're Lovin' Me to Death". In order to make those songs fit the concept of the album, songwriting teams had to rewrite the lyrics and the choruses on those songs.First couple of weeks, band was working together in a rehearsal space, every day for eight hours. After the rehearsals, they started to arrange and record in different studios in the Los Angeles area. Guitars were done in one studio with James Michael, while Klaus'es vocals were done with Desmond in another studio. Desmond Child also hired a vocal coach for Klaus, so he and the coach did about an hour of vocals warm-up session before vocals recording sessions. Matthias Jabs explained: "Vocal cords are like muscles and you need to warm them up. Desmond was a visionary guy and knew if the vocalist is in good form, then he'll get what he wants from them". In the period between October 2006 and February 2007, band managed to record thirteen songs, of which twelve managed to make the album. From the remaining 37 songs, several songs were managed to be recorded only as a demos. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Humanity: Hour I」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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