Great artists take the pulse of their times. 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, where to stand politically, or what to scrawl on their
protest placards. 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 the primal scream and pressure valve we all desperately need.
“I wanted
to convey the anger and angst going on in the world,
” explains 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…
”
Right now, it feels like the amps have barely cooled from 2024’s Broken (“That record
debuted on Billboard at #1 – I was very, very pleased with that”). 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 Dr Marie Trout, Walter’s wife, manager and latterly co-writer, whose eloquent
lyrics struck each subject on the head.
“This album flowed pretty easily,
” he reflects 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 sessions at producer Thomas Ross Johansen’s Strawhorse Studios in Los Angeles.
Immediately, the tinderbox subject matter sparked one of the toughest-sounding records in his
catalogue.
“Let me put it this way,
” considers Trout,
“after we finished recording the title track,
my keys player Teddy said,
‘Well, you won’t be winning a blues award this year’
. But I really felt
like rocking on this album. We had heavy things to talk about, and we went for it musically too.
”