SCORPIONS Guitarist Wants To Keep '80s 'Spirit' When Resurrecting Unfinished Songs

German hard rock veterans SCORPIONS spent the first three months of this year in the studio with producers Mikael "Nord" Andersson and Martin Hansen resurrecting a dozen unfinished songs from what some people believe was the band's best and most creative period — leftovers from the albums "Blackout" (1982),"Love At First Sting" (1984),"Savage Amusement" (1988) and "Crazy World" (1990) — for an album that is tentatively scheduled for release in 2013.

"We will dig in again and maybe have a selection of 16 to 18 songs and pick the best 12 from those," Jabs tells Billboard.com. "It's actually very good material." He adds, "We're doing it the way we are recording albums today, but the basic ideas, the riffs, the feel, the way they were written and arranged, we try to keep as much from the old recordings as possible. Thirty years later no one would come up with these ideas we came up with when we were younger, so we want to keep that spirit in there."

According to Jabs, the idea for the project "came from the fans. They were the ones saying, 'There must be some extra material from those days,' and they were right," he says.

The guitarist recently told ArizonaRepublic.com about the project, "There's so much strong material, but it hasn't ever been finished, especially the lyrics. They're like 'Blah blah blah blah blah.' It was recorded like you would record a demo, no click track, anything. But the vibe is great because it's from the time when we were starting out. Everything I played back then, I remember when I found a new riff, I would get excited. It's slightly different today because I know it all. I've heard it all. So it's much harder to get excited about the simplest or sometimes half-genius riff. But there was a definite spark in those old recordings and the idea is to redo them with today's technology and take it further as a tribute to the fans."