Blues-rock icon Walter Trout is exploding into 2024 with a new album, heavy touring and today he reveals the new video for Broken featuring powerhouse singer Beth Hart. You can watch the video HERE. The song is taken from new album, Broken, which will be released on 1 March via Provogue / Mascot Label Group and features appearances from Hart, Twisted Sister's Dee Snider and Harmonica virtuoso Will Wilde.
Trout has also announced an eight-date UK tour, starting on 16 October at the Opera House in Buxton and calling through Edinburgh (Queens Hall), Gateshead (The Glasshouse), Holmfirth (The Picturedrome), Bury St. Edmunds (Apex), Frome (Cheese & Grain), Birmingham (Town Hall) and will finish at the Islington Assembly Hall, London on 25 October. Tickets are available from www.thegigcartel.com. Support will come from Laura Evans.
He has started the year in an incredible way by hitting the road, as harder than ever. Today he begins a seven date tour of Australia, before 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 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
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!”
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. He recently released the first taster from the album, Bleed, featuring Will Wilde.
"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 humour, 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.
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