Blues rock icon Walter Trout is going on a major European tour with his new studio album SIGN OF THE TIMES.

Trout is regarded as one of the best guitarists ever, often mentioned in the same breath as Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. His music represents a successful synthesis between blues and rock.

Walter Trout has played with various bands and musicians since 1968, for example with the legendary blues musician John Lee Hooker from 1979 to 1980. From 1980 to 1984, Trout was a member of the band Canned Heat, before joining John Mayall in 1984-1989. In 1989 he founded the Walter Trout Band, which changed its name to Walter Trout & the Radicals in 1999.

Trout is rightly celebrated by the international press and is without doubt one of the greats of the blues. In a BBC radio poll, he was voted number 6 of the top 20 guitarists of all time (a few more votes would have put him in the top 5 along with Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page).

SIGN OF THE TIMES

Great artists feel the pulse of their times. In his half century as a social observer on the road and honest songwriter, the resilient blues rock icon Walter Trout has never told his fans what to think, how to feel, where they stand politically or what to scribble on their protest posters. But at a time when his homeland - and the whole world - is tearing itself apart on the fronts of modern life, the new album 'Sign Of The Times' is a primal scream and a pressure valve we all desperately need. "I wanted to convey the anger and fear that's 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, they're about how it affects you inside your head. And 'Sign Of The Times' was just the obvious title..."

At the moment, it feels like his last album 'Broken', which debuted at number 1 in the Billboard charts, hasn't even faded yet. But the epochal songs of 'Sign Of The Times' wouldn't wait, these riffs flew out of the guitarist's fingers. He was once again supported by Dr. Marie Trout, his wife, manager and co-writer, who gets to the heart of every topic with her eloquent lyrics. "This album came together pretty easily," he says of the writing process. "I had so many song ideas and pages of lyrics from Marie. We would have had material for a triple album."

After writing and arranging ten new songs, Trout was ready to call together his studio band - longtime drummer Michael Leasure, bassist John Avila and keyboardist Teddy 'Zig Zag' Andreadis - to record at producer Thomas Ross Johansen's Strawhorse Studios in Los Angeles. The explosive subject matter immediately sparked one of the hardest sounding records in his catalog. "Let me put it this way," Trout reflects, "after we recorded the title track, my keyboard player Teddy said, 'Well, you're not going to win any blues awards this year.' But I really wanted to rock out on this album. The songs are about serious things, and that's what we did musically."

Born in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1951, Trout experienced the most explosive chapters of American post-war history at first hand. He grew up against the backdrop of the hippie dream and the Vietnam War, and his personal history was also characterized by extreme contrasts. His guitar talent helped him to escape an abusive childhood, which left its mark on some of his best songs. In '74, he made the daring journey from coast to coast to Los Angeles, where he performed as a guitarist with the likes of John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton. In the early '80s, he was a highly addicted man whose demons seethed as he fueled the engine of boogie legends Canned Heat. "It wasn't the smoothest road, that's for sure," he reflects. "There were a lot of potholes..."

The recent death of British blues godfather John Mayall has brought Trout's time with the Bluesbreakers in the mid-80s into focus. "I can't overestimate his influence on my life," says the guitarist. "My career would have been very different if he hadn't invited me into his band and guided me through my drug addiction and alcoholism. It wasn't just a musical relationship - he was like a surrogate father to me. The last time he and I were together was very fitting and beautiful. We were in the dressing room after I invited him to my show in LA, laughing and telling each other stories. Then we hugged, and that was the last time I saw him."

By '89, Mayall's paternal influence had set Trout on the right path and paved a solo career for him, the scope and quality of which makes his peers look sluggish by comparison. Trout has won a thousand awards in his career - including Blues Music Awards, SENA European Guitar Awards, British Blues Awards and Blues Blast Music Awards. British radio DJ Bob Harris declared Trout "the greatest rock guitarist in the world" in his biography.

While Trout's back catalog is a trove of excruciatingly personal songs, he has also proven to be a sharp-eyed protest singer during difficult times. Like 2012's classic Blues For The Modern Daze - but with new aims and a very different musical flavor - Sign Of The Times looks both outward and inward. The album comes to life with Artificial: a snarky, satirical, harmonically flavored rebuke to the illusory world we threaten to create with uncontrolled AI. "We have artificial photos, artificial music, you could go on and on," says the bluesman. "I'm scared of AI. I read articles about how it's going to do all these wonderful things in the medical world. Then I hear Bill Gates say that 80 percent of jobs will disappear. What happens then?"

Also standing out is the title track, Sign Of The Times. It's one of the most experimental tracks of Trout's career and features a monstrous guitar tone coupled with great vocals and an exceptional solo that few bluesmen would dare record. "I 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 song is meant to make the oppressed people of the world cry. I actually wrote the piece on an acoustic instrument, but the last 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 it is hers.

With its lyrical references and a howling solo recorded with a BluGuitar Mercury Edition amp, Trout explains that No Strings Attached takes aim at the small-minded ("It's obviously about bigots"). But Sign Of The Times is not a one-sided diatribe. For Trout - who survived a last-minute 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, acoustic track, embellished with accordion, mandolin and violin by famed string arranger Stevie Blacke (Ariana Grande, Beyoncé). "You know, Marie is strong and powerful - but there's another side to her that makes me love her even more. The song is about when I see her vulnerability, or her moments of self-doubt and sadness."

With its dancey guitar riff and unmistakable chorus, "I Remember" also offers a little break from the album's serious themes. "This song is a longing for a time when life was simpler," he explains. "For example, when I was 20 and just starting out. Or when Marie and I had just got together, had no money and were pawning guitars, but were madly in love and the future lay ahead of us. We had nothing, but we felt like we had so much more, because the world was full of the promise of what was about to be revealed."

The soundtrack to the good times is the finger-picked 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 comes from a jam with Jimmy Vivino, who was bandleader for Conan O'Brien. "Hurt No More is my recovery song about killing myself with drugs and alcohol," he says of the dry-as-dust rocker. "With Blood On My Pillow, I said to Marie, 'I want to do a minor blues, why don't you write something?' And she came to me with this lyric that's a metaphor for a broken heart. It's her projection about someone's unrequited love."

Even by Trout's standards, Sign Of The Times is an album that put you through the emotional wringer. But if you thought the bluesman's fire might burn out before the end, the closing track Struggle To Believe will prove you wrong. "I wanted to write a song that almost sounds like The Who if they had Hendrix on guitar," he says of the thunderous finale. "On Live At Leeds there's a song called Young Man Blues. And in the middle they just go off, all three instrumentalists playing a solo at the same time. It's insane, but beautiful. So I told the band, 'We're going to let loose, and we're only going to do it once'. I thought about ending the record with Too Bad. But then I thought, 'No, I'll be pissed off at the beginning and pissed off at the end'. Artificial and Struggle To Believe actually have the same theme. As the song says: 'Humanity and dignity/I sit and watch as they slowly die away'."

But as long as there is music, we have a chance. A lifelong road warrior, Trout will bring the Sign Of The Times material to a worldwide audience in 2025. And in those glorious two hours, political divides and culture wars will crumble as a crowd with nothing in common melds into a community of soul. "I could be on social media right now writing very explicit posts about What's happening," he reflects. "But I don't want to contribute to division. When I'm on stage playing a minor blues and I look in the front row and there's a burly biker sitting there - and he's crying - I meet him in our common humanity and it doesn't matter who he voted for. In that moment, we are a community..."