Blues rock icon Walter Trout returns to the UK this October and fans can expect to hear highlights from Broken, his #1 Billboard Blues album, released earlier this year, alongside many a fan favourite from his back catalogue.
The tour begins on 16th October at the Opera House, Buxton, then call through Edinburgh (Queens Hall), Gateshead (The Glasshouse), Holmfirth (Picturedrome), Bury St Edmunds (Apex), Frome (Cheese & Grain), Birmingham (Town Hall) and finish on 25th October at the Islington Assembly Hall, London.
Support on the tour will come from Welsh songstress Laura Evans, and tickets are available from here.
Broken is available via Provogue/Mascot Label Group. Tracks featured on the album are: ‘Broken’ featuring Beth Hart, ‘Turn And Walk Away’, ‘Courage In The Dark’, ‘Bleed’ featuring Will Wilde on harmonica, ‘Talkin’ To Myself’, ‘No Magic (In The Street)’, ‘I’ve Had Enough’ featuring Dee Snider, ‘Love Of My Life’, ‘Breathe’ written by Richard Gerstein, ‘Heaven Or Hell’, ‘I Wanna Stay’ and ‘Falls Apart’.
Fans got their first taste of what to expect from Trout by way of the single, ‘Bleed’, featuring harmonica player Will Wilde, and he followed that with ‘Broken’, featuring powerhouse vocalist Beth Hart. ‘Talk To Myself’ saw the blues guitarist performing solo in more than one sense – Talking about that song, Trout said, “The inspiration for the song is based on my experience of feeling like our world of TV sensationalism and people on social media pandering for attention don’t really care about what any of us have to say. So we’re talking but nobody is listening.” Available digitally, you can check out the videos to those singles here at RAMzine.
Regarding ‘I’ve Had Enough’ featuring Dee Snider, Trout said, “Dee Snider from Twisted Sister put up a live cut of me on his Twitter and said: ‘Listen to this fucking guitar hero’. We started talking and became friends; he came into the studio, and I knew I had to write him a song. So I’m thinking, ‘well, he did ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’. So I wrote ‘I’ve Had Enough’. And it’s rockin’.”
The video features Trout and his band in a performance video with Snider, the guitarist commenting: “To go in the studio and recreate a visual representation of the mood of the song as we recorded it is always challenging. And in walks, Dee Snider, who sets the whole experience on fire with his amazing, positive, entirely infectious energy! True rock ‘n roll swagger. What a blast we had, and I was sorry when the shoot was done. Thanks, Dee!”
“I thought my friend Beth Hart could relate to the title track, ‘Broken’,” Trout said of the warrior princess whose fiery vocals coil with his own. “With that song, I was looking at the world – especially what’s going on in the United States – but also thinking about my recovery from the things that happened to me. I had the first verse – ‘Pieces of me seem to break away/I lose a little more every day’. But it was almost too much for me to go back into that shit. So my wife, Marie, was able to help me with the lyrics – and she nailed it. The guitar solo, that’s maybe my favourite on the record. I tracked it with the band, one take. I wanted to see if I could beat it – but they wouldn’t let me!”
All of us are broken. But no one is beyond repair. It’s a philosophy that Walter Trout has lived by during seven volatile decades at the heart of America’s society and blues rock scene. Even now, with the world more fractured than ever – by politics, economics, social media and culture wars – the fabled US blues man’s latest album, Broken, chronicles the bitter schisms of modern life but refuses to succumb to them.
However, as he noted: “I’ve always tried to write positive songs, and this album is not quite that,” the 72-year-old guitar slinger contemplated of an all-original album that rages and soothes. “But I always hold on to hope. I think that’s why I wrote this album.”
For the last half-century, however rocky his path, hope and resilience has lit the way for Trout. From a traumatic childhood in Ocean City, New Jersey to an audacious move to the West Coast in ’74; auspicious but chaotic sideman shifts with John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton; and raging addictions that somehow never stopped the boogie when he was with Canned Heat in the early-’80s.
Even now, some will point to Trout’s mid-’80s guitar pyrotechnics in the lineup of the late John Mayall’s legendary Bluesbreakers as his career high point. But for a far greater majority of fans, the blood, heart and soul of his solo career since 1989 is the main event, the blues man’s songcraft always reaching for some greater truth, forever surging forward, never shrinking back.
It’s a creative streak underlined by the guitarist’s regular triumphs at ceremonies, including the Blues Music Awards, SENA European Guitar Awards, British Blues Awards and Blues Blast Music Awards. The iconic British DJ Whispering Bob Harris spoke for millions when he declared Trout “the world’s greatest rock guitarist” in his 2001 autobiography, The Whispering Years.
If he were a less questing artist, Trout could mark time and dine out on those past glories, leaving the polemics and calls-to-arms to a younger generation. But that’s not enough, according to this still-hungry veteran. “I have to grow. I want to be a vital contributing artist. I feel young. I know I’m not. But in my head, I’m still 25, wanting to get better and do something I haven’t done before. I have more to say.”
The Broken album was recorded at Kingsize Soundlabs in LA with producer Eric Corne. “This is our 15th album together,” the bluesman calculated. “Eric and I just have a way of working, man. A friend who came into the studio and watched us said, ‘Man, you guys are like a machine’. It’s unspoken.”
“‘Bleed’ came about when we were pretty much done. My drummer Michael Leasure said to me, ‘Hey, Walter, you played with John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat, this is your 31st album and you’ve never played a boogie. What’s the deal?’ So, I said, ‘Ok, fuck it, let’s do a boogie’. I can kinda play harmonica, but I thought, ‘Let’s elevate this thing’. There’s a young harmonica player in England who’s the best I’ve ever heard, Will Wilde. He has the soul and the power of Paul Butterfield but couples that with blinding virtuoso technique.”
Elsewhere, for the wistful ‘Talkin’ To Myself’, Trout took inspiration from the hits that crackled from AM radio in his youth, and no words were required for the tender instrumental ‘Love Of My Life’ “Of course, it’s about Marie,” his wife, he commented.
With gallows humour, Trout noted that his new album opens with a track called ‘Broken’ and ends with one called ‘Falls Apart’. He can’t deny the link between the personal and the socio-political mood in the air, and as such, between those two bookends are said to lie some of the most raw and bruised songs of his career. Still hope leads the way with the notion that music can help us overcome brokenness – one note at a time.
You can order Broken by clicking here.
