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, with the title track out now as his latest single.
One of the most experimental cuts in Trout’s half-century studio output, it finds a monstrous guitar tone paired with massed chants and an out- there solo that few blues gods would dare put down on tape. “I’ve played it for blues fans who were outraged,” he admitted. “But I wanted to outrage people. I wanted it to be dissonant. Dissonance is a sign of the times. The chant is supposed to be the repressed people of the world crying. I actually wrote it on an acoustic, but the final track is massive and John Avila had this nasty, growling bass sound. Marie had been inspired by watching Bob Dylan documentaries with me and every line of that is hers.”
“I had this song idea for a while. A part of it was a repeating melodic chant or moaning of people who are suffering. Almost like the crying of many people all at once. But even though I really wanted to do the song, I couldn’t quite get the words for it. One night Marie handed me a sheet of paper with lyrics that just fit the song perfectly. She didn’t even know about my song idea, but for some reason our minds collaborated on the song subconsciously. I put her lyrics to music, and ‘Sign of the Times’ was born. I feel that music and words make quite a statement about the world we live in, and therefore chose it as the title track.”
You can stream the single here and check out the video below.
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 death of British blues godfather John Mayall had 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.”
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.”
