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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.”“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 has always lit the way. The beats 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.
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