Walter Trout: “I’m like a cat. I’m on my 4th or 5th chance here”
Walter Trout has lived through enough close calls to fill a biography: drug addiction in his twenties, liver failure in his sixties, and now the daily grind of making music at 74. Somehow, like the nine lives he jokes about, he keeps landing on his feet.
As the blues legend tells Classic Rock magazine, “I never expected to make it this far. I’m like a cat. I’m on my 4th or 5th chance here. And with each one I get more involved in wanting to be an artist, wanting to say something that means something to somebody.”
READ MORE: “If you have a kickass amplifier, why put it through a $100 pedal?”: Walter Trout sees “no need” for guitar pedals
For Trout, that drive is rooted in the stage. Touring remains his lifeblood, though it comes with discipline: “It’s incredibly important to rest, to eat well, to pace yourself,” he says.
“I drink a lot of water and do vocal exercises to warm up my voice. The weird thing is that I’m finding the older I get, the more power I have in my voice. I even have more of a range. I don’t understand it.”
That vitality carries straight into his performances: “I want people to come and see us and feel the energy. I want to give them everything I have, and at the end of that two hours be completely drained. I’ve had many people come and see my band and they go: ‘you guys play like you’re twenty.’ I don’t want them to say it’s a bunch of old men up there doddering around.”
When it comes to his guitar playing, Trout has little interest in mindless flashiness. “Great guitar players now, they’re dime a dozen,” he says. “I want to play less but have it mean more. Melody, feeling, expression – that’s what I’m going for.” It’s a philosophy that carries into his upcoming record, Sign Of The Times, which arrives on 5 September.
And in a world where technology is creeping further into music, Trout makes it clear he’s not about to hand any part of his craft over to a machine.
“It used to be if they had a video of somebody murdering somebody, they showed that in the courtroom and the guy was obviously guilty as hell. None of that works [any more] because of these deep fakes,” says the musician.
“I’m not gonna ask a computer to help me do what I do. If it’s not coming from me, I’m not putting it out there.”
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