The blues-rock icon Walter Trout released his brand new studio album Broken on March 1, 2024, via Provogue/Mascot Label Group. The album features performances from Beth Hart, Dee Snider of Twisted Sister, and harmonica virtuoso Will Wilde. To celebrate the album release day, he also released a video for the song Talking to Myself, which can be streamed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BmDtZA5t-Y Regarding the new song, he says: "The inspiration for the song is based on my experience that our world is full of TV sensations and people on social media vying for attention who don’t really care about what we have to say. So we talk, but no one listens."
Trout has already released the videos for "Broken" featuring Beth Hart and "Bleed" with Will Wilde. A few collaborators joined Trout for the first time. "I thought my friend Beth Hart could relate to the title track 'Broken'," he says about Hart, whose fiery voice blends with his own. "On this song, I looked at the world - especially at what’s going on in the United States - but I also thought about how I recovered 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 get back into that shit again. So my wife Marie was able to help me with the lyrics - and she nailed it. The guitar solo might be my favorite piece on the record. I played it with the band, in one take. I wanted to see if I could top it - but they held me back!"
"Dee Snider from Twisted Sister posted a live recording of me on his Twitter account and said: 'Listen to this damn guitar hero'. We started talking, became friends, he came to the studio, and I knew I had to write him a song. So I thought: 'Well, he did We’re Not Gonna Take It.' So I wrote I’ve Had Enough. And it rocks, massively.
Walter Trout has begun the year in an incredible way, touring more extensively than ever before. After already completing a tour in Australia this year, he will follow up in March with a series of ten dates in the USA. Then he flies to Europe to continue the tour, which will take him through Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands in April and May, and to the UK in October. About the tour, he says: "Music is my escape from everything that is broken in our world. Come by and rock your blues away with my band and me." Tickets are available at all known ticket outlets.
We are all broken. But no one is irreparable. Following this philosophy, Walter Trout has lived at the heart of American society and the blues-rock scene for seven decades. Even now, as the world is more torn apart by politics, economy, social media, and culture wars than ever before, the famous US bluesman describes the bitter fractures of modern life on his latest album Broken, yet refuses to succumb to them. "I have always tried to write positive songs, and this album isn’t quite that positive," says the 72-year-old about the tracklist, which is both angry and soothing. "But I always hold on to hope. I believe that’s the reason I wrote this album."
Credit: Leland Hayward
No matter how rocky his path has been over the last half-century, hope and resilience have always illuminated his way. The key facts of Trout's incredible story are well-known: the traumatic childhood in Ocean City, New Jersey; the daring move to the West Coast in '74; the promising but chaotic sideman shifts with John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton; the addictions that somehow couldn’t stop when he joined Canned Heat in the early '80s.
Even today, some will point to Trout's guitar fireworks in the mid-'80s with the lineup of John Mayall's legendary Bluesbreakers as the highlight of his career. But for the vast majority of fans, the blood, heart, and soul of his solo career since 1989 is the main event, the songwriting craft of the bluesman, always seeking a greater truth, always pushing forward, and never flinching.
This unparalleled creative vein is underscored by the regular triumphs of the guitarist at awards ceremonies like 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 in his autobiography The Whispering Years from 2001 to be "the greatest rock guitarist in the world."
The album was recorded in Kingsize Soundlabs in LA with producer Eric Corne. "This is our 15th album together," says the bluesman. "Eric and I just have a certain way of working. A friend who came to the studio and watched us said: 'Man, you guys are like a machine'. We understand each other blindly."
With gallows humor, Trout notes that his new album starts with a piece called Broken and ends with a piece called Falls Apart. He cannot deny the connection between the personal and the sociopolitical mood that’s in the air, and so there are some of the rawest songs of his career between these two bookends.
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Tickets may still be available at local ticket offices or at the box office.