Ride Walter Trout

• 1 Ghosts 05:09
• 2 Ride 04:56
• 3 Follow You Back Home 05:34
• 4 So Many Sad Goodbyes 05:40
• 5 High Is Low 04:19
• 6 Waiting For The Dawn 05:50
• 7 Better Days Ahead 05:35
• 8 The Fertile Soil 03:29
• 9 I Worry Too Much 03:33
• 10 Leave It All Behind 03:56
• 11 Hey Mama 04:30
• 12 Destiny 05:17
• Total Runtime 57:48

Info for Ride

Der Bluesgitarren-Veteran Walter Trout hat ein neues Studioalbum angekündigt: Ride. Es ist ist Trouts 30. Soloalbum und wurde in Los Angeles geschrieben und aufgenommen und von Eric Corne produziert.

Wie schnell oder weit ein Mann auch reist, er kann seiner Vergangenheit nie wirklich entkommen. Walter Trout weiß das besser als jeder andere. Selbst im Alter von 70 Jahren schreibt der kultige US-Blues-Rock-Gitarrist noch neue Kapitel seiner Lebensgeschichte. In den letzen zwei Jahren verlängerte Trout seinen Vertrag mit seinem Label Provogue Records und zog mit seiner Familie von Kalifornieren nach Dänemark. Mit "Ride", seinem mittlerweile 30. Soloalbum, kann Walter Trout auf eine triumphale Karriere blicken.

Und tatsächlich, Album Nummer 30 läßt da keinen Zweifel offen. "Ride" hat eine aufladende Dynamik und eine Energie die den Puls einer Ära trifft, die von dem gesamten Weltgeschehnissen erschüttert wird. Und dennoch, als der Songwriter-Veteran zu Gitarre und Notizblock griff, fand er sich wieder inmitten der guten, schlechten und hässlichen Szenen seiner außergewöhnlichen Geschichte. "Dieses Album ist ein Schnappschuss davon, wie ich mich während dieser Pandemie gefühlt habe", sagt er. "Ich denke, ich habe immer noch etwas Neues über die Welt zu sagen, und das ist mir wichtig. Aber mein Leben war ein Höllenritt, und als ich mir das Album noch einmal anhörte, stellte ich fest, dass viele der Songs von meiner eigene Vergangenheitsbewältigung handeln."

Das letzte Mal, als wir Trout auf der Bühne sahen, war er als Support für das 2020 erschienene Album "Ordinary Madness" unterwegs: ein von allen Seiten gelobtes Album, das auf Platz 2 der Billboard Blues Chart einstieg. "Und es wäre auf Platz 1 gelandet", so der Blueser, "wenn Peter Green nicht eine Woche vor Erscheinen des Albums beschlossen hätte zu sterben und die alten Fleetwood Mac wieder an die Spitze der Charts gekommen wären." Auch in Deutschland konnte er Anfang Septemer 2020 mit Platz 24, seine bisher beste Chartplatzierung in den offiziellen Albumcharts feiern.

"Fast besinnlich lässt er schließlich das Album, das zu den besten seiner langen Karriere zählt, mit ›Destiny‹ ausklingen, einer fast flehend gesungene Liebeserklärung, bei dem auch seine Gitarre anbetend schwebt.​" (Good Times)

"Auf dem 30.​ Album kann der US-Gitarrist der angestauten Energie endlich freie Bahn lassen, und wie entfesselt lässt er trotz gebrochenen kleinen Fingers die Saiten knarzen und aufheulen und schreit sich dazu in Songs über die Tiefpunkte seines Lebens die Seele aus dem Leib.​"(Stereo)

"Die Intros zu den meisten Songs auf Soloalbum Nummer 30 (!) schmeicheln den Ohren.​ Doch jedes Mal nach wenigen Takten schlagen der inzwischen 70-jährige Walter Trout und vor allem sein Drummer Michael Leasure mit dem Hardrock-Hammer zu.​ (.​.​.​) So packend kann Bluesrock sein.​" (Audio)

Walter Trout, Gesang, Gitarre

Walter Trout
Walter Trout’s backstory is a page-turner you won’t want to put down. Five decades in the making; it is equal parts thriller, romance, suspense and horror. There are musical fireworks, critical acclaim and fists-aloft triumph, offset by wilderness years and brushes with the jaws of narcotic oblivion. There are feted early stints as gunslinger in bands from John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to Canned Heat, and the solo career that’s still blazing a quarter-century later. The veteran bluesman has seen and done it all, with just one omission: he’s never made a covers album, until now. “Luther Allison’s Blues is my first,” Trout notes. “I’ve thought about doing this album for years. It was just time.”

Of all the peaks in Trout’s trajectory, his abiding memory of the late Chicago bluesman is perhaps the most literal. It’s 1986, and high above Lake Geneva, at the palatial Alpine chalet of late Montreux Jazz Festival Svengali Claude Nobs, lunch is being served. “So we’re up at the top of the Alps,” Trout recalls, “in this big room with John Mayall, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Robert Cray, Otis Rush, and as we’re eating, Dr. John is serenading us on acoustic piano. I was sat there with Luther Allison, and we had a great talk.

“Luther was one of the all-time greats,” Trout continues, “and it was just an unbelievably potent thing to watch him perform. Just the energy and commitment that guy had, he was one of a kind. We played together once, at the Jazz Fest that year, and just as we walked offstage, somebody pointed a camera and we hugged and smiled. And that photo is on the cover of the CD.”When he died [in 1997], the idea of this album was planted in my brain.

Released June 10, 2013 on Provogue Records, this latest collection was bottled at Hollywood’s Entourage Studios alongside producer Eric Corne: the same combination that birthed 2012’s acclaimed solo release, Blues For The Modern Daze. The atmosphere, remembers Trout, was one of spit, grit and seat-of-the-pants energy: “Spontaneity is so important with this sort of music. Everybody was saying, ‘Well, aren’t you gonna get together and rehearse?’, but you don’t want to over-analyse or get too sterile. This album was all pretty much first or second takes. It’s gotta have warts on it. It’s gotta have a bit of grease in it.”

None of which should imply Luther Allison’s Blues was a throwaway project. “At times, it was, like, have I taken on too much here?” admits Trout. “Like, am I actually capable of doing justice to this? To me, Cherry Red Wine is one of the all-time greatest blues songs ever written, and Luther’s original version is so unbelievably passionate and emotional that even to sing it was a daunting task. If I had my way with this album, it would reignite interest in the man and his work, make people go back and check out the originals.”

Trout knows all about the life-shaping power of a great record. Rewind to the mid-Sixties, and he was put on his path by an older brother with a habit of blasting the family home in New Jersey with seminal blues-rock platters from Paul Butterfield’s 1965 debut to John Mayall’s seismic Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton. “He brought home John Mayall, and told me, ‘You gotta hear this guy!’” reflects the 62-year-old guitarist, who was soon inspired to buy his first Gibson Les Paul while on a day trip to Philadelphia. “I have fond memories of all those records. I still listen to them.”

Local bands never got the breaks, and in 1973, Trout made the death-or-glory move to LA, where he slept on couches and scrabbled for work. “I came out here and it was a overwhelming thing,” he says, “because I didn’t know anybody. I just started going around to clubs where there were bands playing and asked if I could sit in. My first gig, I was stand-up lead singer in a country band, singing Merle Haggard tunes. And with my third paycheque, I went and bought that Strat that’s still on the cover of all my CDs.”

In a city of Hicksville hopefuls, Trout’s ferocious talent on lead guitar and gift-of-the-gab soon marked him out. “I went to a party and that’s where I met Jesse Ed Davis, who was the first really famous guy I played with,” he remembers, of the sideman era that also saw him work alongside Big Mama Thornton, Lowell Fulson and Joe Tex. “I just weasled my way into his band, and I was with Jessie for two years.

By 1981, Trout had switched to West Coast boogie-blues titans Canned Heat for a period he diplomatically recalls as “turbulent”, but even this gig was topped three years later by a fantastical phone call from John Mayall, dangling the revered guitar slot in his iconic Bluesbreakers outfit. “As far as being a blues-guitar sideman, that gig is the pinnacle,” states Trout. “That’s Mount Everest. You could play with B.B. King or Buddy Guy, but you’re just gonna play chords all night. This guy features you. You get to play solos. He yells your name after every song, brings you to the front of the stage, and lets you sing. He creates a place for you in the world. Where do you go from there…?”

Trout would answer that question in emphatic style on March 6, 1989. As guitarist, his tenure had brought thrilling flammability to the Breakers’ sound and produced stone-cold classics including One Life To Live, but as the newly sober guitarist played a lavish show at a Gothenburg symphony hall on his 38th birthday, he sensed the hand of destiny. “To walk away from the Bluesbreakers,” he admits, “a lot of people thought was completely crazy, because I could have stayed with John as long as I wanted. I mean, John to this day is like a dad to me. He was behind me when I was all screwed up, kept me in the band, believed in me, and gave me the opportunity to progress and grow up in a certain way. So that was a huge decision, and it was scary, but I had to do it, because I knew I had more, y’know?”

Quarter of a century later, what seemed like career suicide has been vindicated by a thrilling catalogue of 22 solo albums, a still-growing army of fans and accolades including a nod as “the world’s greatest rock guitarist” in legendary DJ Bob Harris’s autobiography The Whispering Years, and a #6 placing on BBC Radio One’s countdown of the Top 20 Guitarists of All Time. Meanwhile, Trout’s most recent original album, Blues For The Modern Daze, was heralded by titles like Classic Rock Blues as perhaps his finest to date. “I feel like with Modern Daze,” he nods, “I found the style I’ve been searching for over 20 albums. It’s working, it comes out good, and I can play it well.”

A lesser artist might rest on such laurels. As Walter Trout powers into his 25th year as a solo star, there’s no whiff of the ennui or creative autopilot that hobbles the later output of most veterans. On the contrary, there’s a sense of growing momentum, perhaps even of a little surprise. “It’s hard to believe I’m still alive, to be honest,” he smiles. “I should have been dead by 30, with the life I was leading. But I still have a career, and at 62, I’m still climbing the ladder, which keeps it exciting, instead of trying to rekindle past glories. I feel like I play with more fire than when I was 25. I’m still reaching, y’know…?”

This album contains no booklet.