Great artists take the pulse of their times and Walter Trout holds a mirror up to society’s anger and angst on Sign Of The Times, which will be released on 5th September via Provogue. He has also revealed his blistering new single ‘Artificial’ that you can check out the video to here at RAmzine.
In his half-century as a street-level social observer and scaldingly honest songwriter, blues rock’s resilient icon Walter Trout has never told his fans what to think, how to feel, or where to stand politically. But in an era when his home nation – and the wider world – is ripping at the seams over the battlelines of modern life, the iconic US bluesman’s hard-rocking new album, Sign Of The Times, is a primal scream and pressure valve for all of us. “I wanted to reflect upon what’s going on in the world,” explained the 74-year-old. “For me, writing these songs is therapy. They’re not just about what’s happening out there, but how it affects you in your head. Sign Of The Times just became the obvious title.”
The album explodes to life with the first single and opening song, ‘Artificial’: a scornful, satirical, harmonica-spiced rebuke of the fake world we risk creating. “We got artificial photos, artificial music, you could go on and on,” considered the bluesman. “I’m freaked out by AI. I read articles about how it’s gonna do all these wonderful things in the medical world. Then I hear Bill Gates say that eighty percent of jobs are gonna disappear. What happens then?”
It feels like the amps have barely cooled from 2024’s Broken, which debuted on Billboard at #1. But the era-chronicling songs from Sign Of The Times wouldn’t wait, these urgent riffs flying off the guitarist’s fingers, assisted once again by Marie, Walter’s wife, manager and co-writer, who penned the lyrics for some of the tracks. “This album flowed pretty easily,” he reflected of the writing process. “I had so many song ideas and pages of lyrics from Marie. We could have kept going and made a triple album.”
With ten new songs written and arranged, Trout was ready to call up his studio band – longtime drummer Michael Leasure, bassist John Avila and keys man Teddy ‘Zig Zag’ Andreadis – for the recording sessions at Strawhorse Studios in Los Angeles. Immediately, the tinderbox subject matter sparked one of the toughest-sounding records in his catalogue. Self-producing, and having the material mixed by sonic genius, J.J. Blair, added yet another bit of edge to the sound. “Let me put it this way, I really felt like rocking on this album. We had heavy things to talk about, and we went for it musically too.”
The recent death of British blues godfather John Mayall has naturally brought Trout’s mid-’80s tenure with the Bluesbreakers into sharp focus. “His influence on my life, I can’t overstate,” reflected the guitarist. As a man who has always been open about his past agonies, pain is never far away. “‘Hurt No More’ is my recovery song, with cutting yourself representing killing yourself with drugs and booze,” he said of the dust-blown rocker.
With its dancing guitar lick and undeniable chorus, ‘I Remember’ is also a moment of respite from the album’s stormier subject matter. “That song is a longing for when life was simpler,” he explained. “Like, when I was 20 and starting out. Or when Marie and I had just got together, and we had no money and were pawning guitars, but we were madly in love and the future was ahead of us.”
The combustible title track is one of the most experimental cuts in Trout’s half-century studio output, “I wanted it to be dissonant. Dissonance is a sign of the times. Marie came to me with a set of lyrics, and I realized it fit the song perfectly,” he said. Whilst ‘No Strings Attached’ skewers hypocrisy, bigotry, and hatred, the album is no one-note diatribe.
For Trout – who survived an eleventh-hour liver transplant in 2014 – his second chance at life still holds joy, beauty and pain. “’Mona Lisa Smile’ came to me in a dream,” he said of the gorgeous, bucolic acoustic strum decorated by accordion, mandolin and violin from famed string arranger Stevie Blacke (Snoop Dog, Joe Cocker, Alice in Chains). “Y’know, Marie is strong and potent – but there’s another side to her which makes me love her even more. That song is about when I see her vulnerability, or her moments of self-doubt and sadness.”
Even by Trout’s standards, Sign Of The Times is a record that puts you through the emotional wringer. But as long as there’s poignant and relevant music, we have a fighting chance.
As a lifelong road warrior, Trout will be taking the Sign Of The Times material to global audiences throughout 2025. And for those two hours of playing to audiences, political divides and culture wars will crumble as a crowd with little else common melts into a communion of souls. “I could be on social media, writing very explicit posts,” he considered. “But I don’t want to contribute to the division. When I’m up onstage playing a minor-key blues, and I look down at the front row and there’s a burly biker – and he’s crying – at that moment, I’m hitting him in our common humanity, and it doesn’t matter who he voted for. At that moment, we are all in this together.”
