Tex 392

The title of Ronnie Baker Brooks' Times Have Changed may refer to the decade gap between this 2017 album and its 2006 predecessor, The Torch. A lot has happened during those ten years, including the deaths of Bobby "Blue" Bland and Lonnie Brooks, artists who make cameos on this 11-track album, but that's not the only way the past is present on Times Have Changed. With the assistance of producer Steve Jordan, Ronnie Baker Brooks has created a tribute to the Southern soul of the '60s and the smooth funk of the '70s. Guests abound – apart from the dearly departed, Steve Cropper, "Big Head" Todd Mohr, Angie Stone, Felix Cavaliere, Lee Roy Parnell, Eddie Willis, and Al Kapone all make appearances – and a few familiar old tunes, like Joe Tex's Texas soul classic "Show Me" and Eric Clapton's slow-burning "Old Love," sit alongside some fine new originals.

The life of a traveling blues musician isn't easy. The vocation is rife with loneliness, bad food, cheap hotels, and lack of sleep. Walter Trout is a survivor of that life (just barely). During the late 1960s and '70s, he worked the road with Big Mama Thorton, Joe Tex, and John Lee Hooker. In the 1980s, it was Canned Heat and John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. He's led his own bands since 1990 and experienced cycles of triumph, tragedy, alcohol and narcotic addiction, and recovery from a near-fatal liver transplant that required two surgeries. Trout's dues are paid and then some. Ordinary Madness was produced by longtime collaborator Eric Corne and cut in analog at guitarist Robby Krieger's studio. Its many surprises reveal it to be unlike any other record in his large catalog.