At 74, Robin Trower is a man whose creativity has not dried up the older he gets. In fact, he has been releasing an album every couple of years like clockwork since his first solo album, 1973’s Twice Removed From Yesterday. On Friday, March 22nd, he dropped his twenty-third solo studio album, Coming Closer To The Day, and it percolates with the kind of guitar fretwork and moody blues that only Robin Trower can conjure up from a piece of wood with strings.
Trower, whom Zakk Wylde once told me he loved listening to when he first gets up, again lends his vocals to the songs, something that took him years to actually do. “It does take quite a bit of work,” Trower told me about coordinating singing and playing. On tour, Richard Watts handles the vocals on the older songs while Trower sings the newer compositions. He has a US tour slated to begin on April 2nd in Virginia and ending in Seattle in mid-May.
Discovering music via his older brother, Trower was attracted then, as he still is now, to blues and R&B; although his first guitar hero was Elvis Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore. BB King influenced him with how he could bring “a human voice quality to his notes” and Albert King had “this wonderful, flowing vibrato.” And then came Jimi Hendrix and that changed his world.
In 2013, I interviewed the Stratocaster wizard for Glide. We talked about his time in Procol Harum, where he was a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old having “a great time” making Procol Harum, his first of six albums he’d record with them, in 1967; working with “first-class singer” James Dewar, Davey Pattison and his current trio’s vocalist Richard Watts, whom he first heard singing at church; his love of blues and seeing Hendrix for the first time. For this interview, we touched on things such as his learning to play guitar, producing, his first live album in 1976 and what he’s been thinking about lately that shows up in his current batch of new songs.
So what’s going on in your musical life right now?
Well, I’m halfway through recording a new album
Goodness, you never stop
(laughs) Hopefully I never stop! This week I start rehearsing for the US tour and then the rest of the time I’ll either be working at home on material or in the studio.
Do you have a home studio?
I have a workroom in my house where I do all the writing. I have a studio that I use all the time, which is about half an hour away from here and that’s where I record. It’s very convenient (laughs).
Throughout your career you’ve been very consistent putting out records, not letting a lot of years go by in-between. Is that a work ethic thing or does the music dictate the timeline?
The thing is, I just keep coming up with song ideas and writing songs and if you’re doing that you’ve got to record them. So I’ve realized that I do have quite a lot of creative energy. It just keeps going.
Have you always been that way?
I think it’s more now because I’m spending more time doing it. These last five years I’ve been spending a lot more time playing the guitar and coming up with ideas.
You have so many albums under your belt now, what was something new or different you wanted to try this time on the new record?
I’m not sure I had an overall idea of what it was about. The main thing is you’re always trying to be better at what you do. But the concept of an album is, I think, it just ties into the songs you come up with and hopefully you tap into something a bit fresh.
“Tide Of Confusion” is a very poignant song in today’s world. What more can you tell us about it?
Yeah, I think the lyric is just my sort of way of how people are using the internet. They’re making stuff up and sort of printing half-truths as the facts. That’s one side of it. But these are the sort of things I’m pondering and worrying about.
More so today than when you were younger?
Yeah, I think so. I think the internet influences everybody’s lives now and I think it’s being used to create confusion as well as benefit.
Which song on this record would you say changed the most from it’s original composition to it’s final recorded version?
I think it might be “Tide Of Confusion” because I actually cut that three different times. I think it did change quite a lot from how I’d originally written it. I tried three different arrangements for it and the one I ended up with, the third version of it, was really different to how I’d written it.
What wasn’t working right with the other ones?
Originally, I wasn’t happy with the groove. And it can be that I’d sort of written it in the wrong key for me to sing so you need to start from scratch when the key is off. You know, I was just messing about with it. There’re three or four songs on there that I recorded more than once on the album to get it right.
How did the title track begin?
All my songs always start off with a guitar part and then once I’ve got the complete structure I then start figuring out the vocal line and melody and then I go into the lyrics. That one actually started off with that guitar riff and then the lyric is very much about me and what I’m thinking about at the moment.
Is Richard involved with songwriting at all?
I do all the songwriting and all the singing. Richard is the guy that I use live. Richard’s been with me five or six years now and he sings the old stuff, “Bridge Of Sighs” and the other songs. I sing all the stuff I write now.
Is there a song on here where composing the guitar solo took the longest to feel right?
I think maybe “Coming Closer To The Day” was quite a hard one to get the lead right on. I ended up trying to make it more thematic in the end.
You played all the instruments except the drums. How common is that for you on your records?
I think this is the third album that I’ve done it on, played all the instruments.
So why don’t you play drums?
(laughs) I would if I could. But I’ve got a great drummer and he’s very amenable to try and give me what I want. So that works great.
Which guitar did you use predominately this time?
It’d be one of my signature model Stratocasters. I use only those now so it’d be one of two or three. I probably switched in-between three over the whole period of recording the album.
When you first started playing guitar, what was the hardest thing for you to get the hang of?
I’m not sure I really struggled (laughs). It seemed to come very natural to me when I first picked it up. My first guitar my father bought me for Christmas. It was a very cheap make but you have to start somewhere (laughs). It was an acoustic guitar. The next year I put a pickup on it and started to play through an amp. I was a big fan of Elvis’ guitar player, Scotty Moore, and I think he was the inspiration for me to have a guitar.
How early did you get turned onto the blues?
It had to be when I first started getting into BB King, getting hold of some of his early stuff. Around the same time, I would be hearing Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and other artists as well so I think it must have been the early 1960’s.
What do you think made those old blues guys so mesmerizing and magical to kids like you?
Talent, they had bags of talent (laughs). These guys are giants and I look up to them and still listen to them today.
And it took the British to turn us Americans back onto them
Yeah, I think in terms of a general sense, yeah. The British sort of made people more aware of the great stuff they were missing. I was only ever influenced by black music. Those were the big influences – early James Brown, James Brown Live At The Apollo, BB King Live; early Muddy Waters. Then Jimi Hendrix came along and he was a huge influence. These guys are my mentors.
When you made your first solo record after leaving Procol Harum, did you know exactly what you wanted to do?
Yeah, I think I did. I was looking to write more guitar music, obviously, and leaving Procol Harum, I could introduce more of my rhythm & blues, rock & roll, into what I was writing.
And Matthew Fisher produced your first couple of solo records. Why was he the right choice for you?
He was the only producer I knew (laughs). He produced A Salty Dog for Procol Harum and I got on very well with him and I wanted to work with someone I felt comfortable with.
You’ve done some producing yourself. What do you like and not like about doing that?
I worked with Bryan Ferry on the production side for a while and I really enjoyed that. He’s a great artist and a great guy to work with. But I think producing other artists is quite difficult because when you’re a creative artist yourself, you have really strong ideas how things should go. If you’re producing other artists, you’ve got to let them run their course and I found that quite difficult.
Out of all the songs in your catalog, which one was the most difficult to transfer to the live stage?
Oh, there’s a lot of songs I couldn’t really play live because they’ve got two or three guitar parts which are fundamental. So I only do stuff that can work with a three-piece. But there is one on the new album, the title track. I don’t think I could perform that live. The other guitar parts are fundamental to it. I would have to get another guitar player to do that live.
Your first live album did quite well on the charts. Are you still happy with how that live record came out?
Yeah, I think it was fantastic. We didn’t know that we were being recorded. We knew it was going out live on the radio in Sweden – we were playing in Stockholm – and after the tour had finished, somebody from the radio station sent us a recording and we thought, oh, this could be a live album. So we got hold of the 4-track, it was recorded on 4-track, and mixed it for the album.
“Too Rolling Stoned” from the Bridge Of Sighs album is the opening track. Anything you can tell us about that song?
Lyrically, it was about what I had been going through and was going through, and mostly quite a lot about my time in Procol. It was about the period, you know, from a personal point of view.
What are you still searching for in your guitar playing?
I think probably the most sort of elusive thing is tone. I’m always searching and trying different combinations – amps, pedals, guitars – and I think that is what I’m searching for: a perfect tone.
Top photo by Rob Blackham
