Blues-rock icon Walter Trout, today releases his brand new studio album, Broken, via Provogue/Mascot Label Group. The album features performances from Beth Hart, Twisted Sisters’ Dee Snider and harmonica virtuoso, Will Wide.To celebrate, he has also revealed a video for the song, Talking to Myself, which you can watch HERE.
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Talking about the new song, he says, “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.”
Trout has previously revealed the videos for “Broken” featuring Beth Hart and "Bleed" featuring 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 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!”
“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, 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’, big time.
He has started the year in an incredible way by hitting the road, harder than ever. With a tour of Australia already under his belt this year, he hits a run of ten dates in the USA in March. He then flies to Europe to continue the tour as it runs through Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Czechia, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, and The Netherlands through April and May before heading back to the US in July and August and then to the UK in October. Talking about the tour he says, "Music is my escape from everything that's broken in our world. Come out and rock away your blues with my band and me." Tickets are available from www.waltertrout.com
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 bluesman's latest album, Broken, chronicles the bitter schisms of modern life but refuses to succumb to them. "I've always tried to write positive songs, and this album is not quite that," considers the 72-year-old of an all-original tracklisting 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 always lit the way. The beat of Trout's unbelievable story are well-known: the traumatic childhood in Ocean City, New Jersey; the audacious move to the West Coast in '74; the auspicious but chaotic sideman shifts with John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton; the 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 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 bluesman's songcraft always reaching for some greater truth, forever surging forward, never shrinking back.
It's a peerless 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.
The album was recorded at Kingsize Soundlabs in LA with producer Eric Corne. "This is our 15th album together," says the bluesman. "Eric and I just have a way of working, man. A friend who came into the studio and watched us and said, 'Man, you guys are like a machine'. It's unspoken."
With gallows humor, Trout notes 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 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.
US Tour Dates
Jul 9 - The Dakota, Minneapolis, MN
Jul 10 - The Englert Theatre, Iowa City, IA
Jul 11 - Playing With Fire, Gene Leahy Mall/Riverfront, Omaha, NE
Jul 14 - SPACE, Chicago, IL
Aug 21 - The Kate, Old Saybrook, CT
Aug 23 - Jimmy's Jazz and Blues Club,Portsmouth, NH
Aug 25 - North River Blues Festival, Boston MA
Aug 26 - Payomet Performing Arts Center, Cape Cod, MA
Track Listing
1. Broken (feat. Beth Hart)
2. Turn And Walk Away
3. Courage In The Dark
4. Bleed (feat. Will Wilde on Harmonica)
5. Talkin' To Myself
6. No Magic ( in the street )
7. I've Had Enough (feat. Dee Snider)
8. Love Of My Life
9. Breathe
10. Heaven Or Hell
11. I Wanna Stay
12. Falls Apart
