Walter Trout has lived the blues. A true survivor and one of the great blues guitar players ever, he is about to release a new solo record called Broken. The record features a few guests and Walter’s blistering guitar. Recently, he took some time to talk about the new record and much more.
Please press the PLAY icon below to listen to the Blues Fix with Walter Trout on MisplacedStraws.com –
On what drives him to keep writing and recording – It’s a hard question to answer other than to just say I’m going to be 73 here in a couple of weeks, but I’m still driven to create and it’s something I just love and it makes me feel young and I just want to keep creating and I just don’t want to stop. I want to keep doing this till I can’t do it anymore. I feel like I still, even at this point of life, I still have something to say Do you know what I mean by that?
On working with Beth Hart on “Broken” – Well, she’s a friend and we’ve done shows together and we’ve hung out, we know each other quite well. As a matter of fact, her husband, Scott, I’ve known him for going on 40 years. I used to have the house band at a bar in Huntington Beach and he was the bartender 40 years ago. So we go back a really long way, you know? I wrote the song with my wife. My wife is also an award-winning songwriter and we wrote that one together, and I immediately thought about Beth because she and I are both in recovery and we’ve both been through a lot in our lives, and I sent her the tune and she called me immediately and said, “Yeah, I really want to sing this with you”. So, she came in the studio and sang it, she elevated that song. She took it to a whole other level. Then we had a great day in the studio, hanging out with Robbie Krieger, who’s the guitarist from the Doors. He came in, spent the afternoon with us and we kind of sat around and we had food and we just socialized and took pictures and we had a really great day. But she came in and just sang it with all of her heart and soul.
On “Broken” being a fitting song for each of them to sing – Well, I thought that too when my wife and I wrote the tune. That was the first person I thought of. I said, “I need to do this as a duet. And I can only think of one person that this song is right for.” I was really glad that she responded the way she did. Beause as soon as she listened to the song, she called me right up and said, “Yeah, I’m in, let’s do it”. One of the things that blew my mind, I didn’t expect her to come in and sing harmony with me. You don’t hear her very often singing harmony with anybody. That really added something to that tune.
On having Dee Snider on the record – Well, about a year or two ago, he went on Twitter and he wrote this thing, “who is this guitar player?” and he put a cut of me on there. So, he put this thing up on Twitter where he put up a cut of me playing. It was a live recording and he wrote, “Who is this guy? How come I never heard of this guy?” So I just went on his page and I said, “Well, that’s me. And thank you very much”. He sent me a message, “Send me your cell phone number”, and I sent him the cell phone number, and he called it, and we’ve become great friends, and we’ve hung out, and he’s an amazing guy, he’s brilliant, incredibly intelligent, and well read, and well spoken. We just became buddies and then he happened to say, “When are you making your next record?” I said, “Well, like in a couple of weeks” and he said, “Well, let me sing something with you”. I thought to myself, I’ve got to write something for him. Then I thought about his major hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It”, and I thought about the theme of the album Broken, well, “I’ve Had Enough”. I wrote the tune in about five minutes and sent him the tune. He goes, “That’s awesome”. So he came in and sang it with me and we had a great day doing that tune together and I think it came out awesome.
On working with Richard T Bear (of KISS solo albums fame) – We have known each other for 30 years. 30 years ago, we used to do benefits for AA. We would play together. Richard now, for the last six months, has been the keyboard player in my band and he’ll be out touring with me. We just did a tour of Australia. I got back three days ago and Richard was there with me. We’re gonna be touring the West Coast in March. Then April and May we’re gonna tour Europe together. And then in the summer we’re gonna tour the States and Richard will be with me for all of that. When he played me that song (“Breathe”) he came to my house and we were hanging out and he played that song for me. I said, “I gotta do that tune”. I changed it around a little bit and I came up with this idea that I want to do the tune, but I want to make it sound like if it was the Faces doing it with with Ronnie Wood and Ronnie Lane and Kenny Jones and Ian McLaughlin, those records by the Faces. I even told the bass player, I want you to play like Ronnie Lane and he nailed it. So it’s a little different than Richard’s version. Richard has a new album coming out I think in a week or two and he does his own version of that song but it’s it’s very different than what I did with it, and he’s playing Hammond organ on there, by the way.
On Broken being a little less optimistic than his other records – That’s very fair to say. I’ve said in interviews that I’ve always tried to write kind of positive upbeat songs and, and kind of be an antidote to a lot of what the blues is. But on this one, the idea for the song “Broken” really was about my years as a junkie and an alcoholic and not wanting to be controlled by that stuff. I’ve been sober 37 years now, but it was about those days. But then when I started writing it with my wife the lyrics, she goes, “This can also be a metaphor right now for the world, with the wars and the polarization”. She had a point there. So, yeah, it is maybe a bit darker. That was just the kind of the mood I was in.
I’m a guy who, when it’s time to make a record, I will write the whole record in a week and I’m not a guy who’s out on the road writing songs. I have to focus. So normally when it’s time to do a record, I go into my house have my family go to our house in Denmark. We have a house there and I stay in the house here and for a week I just focus and I write and whatever kind of mood I’m in that. Seems to be the mood of the record.
On “I Want To Stay” being the bright spot of the record – I would say that is probably my favorite cut on the record. That’s another one I wrote with my wife. I said to her, “I want to write a tune. The theme of the tune is going to be that we’ve been together 33 years but think back to the first time we spent the night together and we fell in love that night And how did that feel in the morning? How did that feel? How did our lives change? It wasn’t just a one-night stand This was you’re finding your soulmate”. I said, “but I want it to be a tune that maybe Luther Vandross or Curtis Mayfield would be able to do this tune”. That’s what I was shooting for on there. So I think you actually grasped it there, what I was trying to do. I feel good that that’s how you hear it. Also, I sang it literally in a whisper, the entire song was whispered and my producer who I’ve done 15 albums with now, I’m singing it and he goes, “I’m not getting much signal. You’re not singing like you do”. And I say, “No, dude, turn the mic up. Because I’m going to whisper through this entire song”. So it’s got a very different kind of vocal sound also than normal for me.
On touring plans – It’s going to be probably my hardest working year and like I say, I’m going to be 73 here in a couple of weeks. So I hope I get through it. But it comes out March 1st. We do a couple of weeks on the West Coast. Then I’m home for 10 days. Then I go to Europe and do six weeks and get home from that in the middle of May. Then we spend the summer going back and forth between Europe and America. In July we do a couple of weeks out on the road in America. But then we go back and forth and do festivals in Europe and festivals in the States. Then at the end of August. I start another U. S. run and that’s actually when I’ll be back in New England because I’m going to start at the end of August and I’m going to play at the Marshfield Fair in Massachusetts on, I think it’s August 25th. Then we’re going to keep doing the Northeast through September. So I’ll be out there for another four weeks. Then in October, I go to the U. K. and I do two or three weeks in the UK, and then I come home the first week of November to vote, and then after that I go back to Europe through the middle of December. So I’m barely gonna be at home this year.
