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.”
Born in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1951, Trout has been right there at the sharp end for all the most flammable chapters in post-war American history. Raised against the polarised backdrops of the hippie dream and the Vietnam War, his personal history was also one of jagged extremes, with his searing talent for guitar helping him escape an abused childhood that left its mark on some of his best songs. In ’74, he made the audacious coast-to-coast drive to Los Angeles and won transient gunslinger spots with titans like John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton. By the early-’80s, he was a high-functioning addict whose demons simmered as he stoked the engine for boogie legends Canned Heat. “It wasn’t the smoothest road, that’s for sure,” he reflects. “A lot of potholes…”
The recent death of British blues godfather John Mayall has naturally brought Trout’s mid-’80s tenure with the Bluesbreakers into sharp focus. “His influence on my life, I can’t overstate,” reflects the guitarist. “My career would have been vastly different if he hadn’t invited me into his band and stuck with me through my drug addiction and alcoholism, when I was such a clown. It wasn’t just a musical relationship – he was a surrogate father to me. The last time he and I were together, it was very fitting and beautiful. We were in the dressing room after I invited him to my show in LA, laughing and telling stories. Then we hugged, and that was the last time I saw him.”
By ’89, Mayall’s paternal influence had cleaned Trout up and propelled him into the solo career whose breadth and quality makes his peers look sluggish by comparison. Scan his back pages and you’ll find a thousand accolades – including Blues Music Awards, SENA European Guitar Awards, British Blues Awards and Blues Blast Music Awards – summed up by the quote from storied British DJ ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, who declared Trout “the world’s greatest rock guitarist” in his 2000 autobiography, The Whispering Years.
While Trout has excavated himself with agonisingly personal songs across his back catalogue, when times are at their toughest, he’s also proved himself a sharp-eyed protest singer. Like 2012’s classic Blues For The Modern Daze – but with new targets and a very different musical flavour – Sign Of The Times looks outward as well as within. The album explodes to life with Artificial: a scornful, satirical, harmonica-spiced rebuke of the fake world we risk creating with unchecked AI. “We got artificial photos, artificial music, you could go on and on,” considers the bluesman. “I’m freaked out by AI. I read articles about how it’s gonna do all these wonderful things in the medical world. Then I hear Bill Gates say that 80 per cent of jobs are gonna disappear. What happens then?”
Just as combustible is Sign Of The Times’ title track. One of the most experimental cuts in Trout’s half-century studio output, it finds a monstrous guitar tone paired with massed chants and an out- there solo that few blues gods would dare put down on tape. “I’ve played it for blues fans who were outraged,” he admits. “But I wanted to outrage people. I wanted it to be dissonant. Dissonance is a sign of the times. The chant is supposed to be the repressed people of the world crying. I actually wrote it on an acoustic, but the final track is massive and John Avila had this nasty, growling bass sound. Marie had been inspired by watching Bob Dylan documentaries with me and every line of that is hers.”
With its cross-burning lyrical references and a howling solo tracked with a BluGuitar Mercury Edition amp, Trout explains that No Strings Attached skewers the small-minded (“It’s obviously about bigots”). Yet Sign Of The Times is no one-note diatribe. For Trout – who survived an eleventh-hour liver transplant in 2014 – his second chance at life still holds joy, beauty and pain. “Mona Lisa Smile came to me in a dream,” he says of the gorgeous, bucolic acoustic strum decorated by accordion, mandolin and violin from famed string arranger Stevie Blacke (Ariana Grande, Beyoncé). “Y’know, Marie is strong and potent – but there’s another side to her which makes me love her even more. That song is about when I see her vulnerability, or her moments of self-doubt and sadness.”
With its dancing guitar lick and undeniable chorus, I Remember is also a moment of respite from the album’s stormier subject matter. “That song is a longing for when life was simpler,” he explains. “Like, when I was 20 and starting out. Or when Marie and I had just got together, and we had no money and were pawning guitars, but we were madly in love and the future was ahead of us. We didn’t have anything, but we felt like we had much more, because the world was alive with the promise of what would be revealed.”
Also soundtracking the good times are the fingerpicked porch blues of Too Bad (“That’s my little tribute to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee”) and the barroom bounce of High-Tech Woman (“The music came from a jam with Jimmy Vivino, who was the bandleader on Conan O’Brien, and the lyric is about when I’m trying to do something on my phone, I get pissed off, then Marie comes over and makes it happen”). But for a man who has always been open about his past agonies, pain is never far away. “Hurt No More is my recovery song, with cutting yourself representing killing yourself with drugs and booze,” he says of the dust-blown rocker. “With Blood On My Pillow, I told Marie, ‘I want to do a minor blues, why don’t you write something?’ And she came to me with that lyric, which is a metaphor for a broken heart. It’s her projecting about somebody’s unrequited love.”
Even by Trout’s standards, Sign Of The Times is a record that puts you through the emotional wringer. But if you thought the bluesman’s fire might burn out before the end, closing track Struggle To Believe sets you straight. “I wanted to write a song that almost sounds like The Who if they had Hendrix playing guitar,” he says of the thundering finale. “There’s a song on Live At Leeds called Young Man Blues. And in the middle, they just go off, all three instrumentalists soloing at the same time. It’s madness, but it’s beautiful. So I told the band, ‘We’re gonna freeform and we’re only gonna do it once’. I thought about ending this record with Too Bad. But then I was like, ‘No, I’m gonna be pissed at the beginning and pissed at the end’. Artificial and Struggle To Believe are actually the same theme. As that song says, ‘Humanity and dignity/I sit and watch as they slowly die away’.”
But as long as there’s music, we have a fighting chance. As a lifelong road warrior, Trout will be taking the Sign Of The Times material to global audiences throughout 2025. And for those glorious two hours, political divides and culture wars will crumble as a crowd with nothing in common melts into a communion of souls. “I could be on social media right now, writing very explicit posts about what’s going on,” he considers. “But I don’t want to contribute to the division. When I’m up onstage playing a minor-key blues, and I look down at the front row and there’s a burly biker – and he’s crying – at that moment, I’m hitting him in our common humanity and it doesn’t matter who he voted for. At that moment, we are a community…”
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