WALTER TROUT live in Asbury Hall, Buffalo, NY | Sun MARCH 23, 2025!

Name: WALTER TROUT live in Asbury Hall, Buffalo, NY | Sun MARCH 23, 2025!
Start: 2025-03-23T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Asbury Hall

Schedule

Sun, 23 Mar, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Asbury Hall | Buffalo, NY

Soul of Buffalo presents Walter Trout live in Asbury Hall
6pm Doors, 7pm Show
Tickets: On sale Fri 1/17 @10am – General Admission Seated – $38 advance, $46 day of show, Limited Gold Circle reserved seats $52 available at TixR.com or in person at the Babeville Box Office (M-F 11a-5p – in person only, no fees for cash transactions, 3% credit/debit card fee).
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 American society and its 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.
“I’ve always tried to write positive songs, and this album is not quite that,” said the 72-year-old of an all-original tracklisting that rages and also soothes. “But I always hold on to hope. I think that’s why I wrote this one.”
For the last half-century, however rocky the path, hope has always lit the way. The beats of Trout’s unbelievable story are well-known: a traumatic childhood in Ocean City, NJ; an audacious move to the West Coast in ’74; the auspicious but chaotic sideman shifts with John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton; and raging addictions that somehow never stopped the boogie when he was with Canned Heat in the early ’80s.
Even now, some will point to Trout’s mid-80s guitar pyrotechnics in the lineup of John Mayall’s legendary Bluesbreakers as his career high point. But for a greater majority, the blood, heart and soul of his solo career since 1989 is the main event, the bluesman’s songcraft always reaching for some larger truth.
It’s a peerless creative streak underlined by the guitarist’s regular triumphs at ceremonies including the Blues Music Awards, SENA European Guitar Awards, British Blues Awards and Blues Blast Music Awards.
Trout could mark time and dine out on past glories, leaving the polemics and calls-to-arms to a younger generation, but that’s not enough. “I have to grow. I want to be a vital contributing artist. I don’t want to come out every night and play my first hit. I feel young though I know I’m not. In my head I’m still 25, still wanting to get better and do something I haven’t before. I have more to say.”
As the pandemic burnt out, Trout got back to business: the career-long cycle of writing, touring and resting still as natural as breathing. But scarcely had the world’s turntable needles dropped on his latest album, 2022’s Ride, when Trout felt the first tingles of incoming inspiration. Alternating between his homes in the remote Danish fishing village of Vorupør and Huntington Beach, CA – or sometimes even in the back of the van, still slick with sweat after that night’s gig – the twelve songs of Broken demanded to be born.
“A lot of times I put on headphones, listen to music that gets me emotional, and then start just writing lyrics,” explains Trout of a process that still fascinates him. “I think these songs are as honest as I can be. The band came down to my house for rehearsals so we could just go in the studio and blow through this stuff.”
Kingsize Soundlabs in LA was the scene of the crime – a familiar haunt that also hosted 2019’s Survivor Blues –and producer Eric Corne once again behind the glass. “This is our 15th album together,” Trout said. “Eric and I just have a way of working, man. A friend who came into the studio and watched us and said, ‘Man, you guys are like a machine’. It’s unspoken.”
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 socio-political mood in the air, and as such, between those two bookends lie some of the most personal, bruised songs of his career (albeit twinned to some of his most rocking and defiant guitar work). Yet as the man says, as long as there’s love and music, there is always a light to guide us. “That Sixties idealism still burns in me and I want to make music that means something or helps somebody. I may be naïve but I’m ok with that. In the face of what’s happening in the world, I will stubbornly hold on to my idealism and hope. I want to make music that matters…”