Blues-Rock’s Resilient Icon Walter Trout is riding a creatively formidable wave and heading into 2024 with an album raucous, wild and poignant in Broken. The album features guest appearances from powerhouse singer Beth Hart, Twisted Sister's Dee Snider and Harmonica virtuoso Will Wilde. It will be released on March 1 via Provogue / Mascot Label Group.
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.
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.
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.
