With a little help from my friends

Trout still plays with other people, though. Last year's release, Full Circle, is a 'guest artist' album with John Mayall, Jeff Healey, Joe Bonamassa, Coco Montoya, Bernard Allison, Eric Sardinas, Richie Hayward, Junior Watson and Guitar Shorty just a few of the featured luminaries.
"That was a lot of fun. The way that came up was there's a young fella here in the UK named Danny Bryant and he'd asked me if I would play on his CD. We went to the studio right after playing a gig - it was like 2am - and I kinda wanted to be quick. And he had a Mesa Boogie set up for me and said, 'Ok, let's do a blues, key of C, I'll take it around, I'll sing one, you sing one, you play a solo, I'll play a solo, we'll end it.' We did it live. And I went back to my room and I thought, 'What a cool way to make a record. And if you get the right players together it should work.'
"So then it was calling up people to see if they were interested; I got a good response [from] everyone I asked. And probably 90% of that record was written right before it was recorded. Some of it wasn't even rehearsed. The Joe Bonamassa cut, we had no idea what we were going to do. I had a combo Boogie set up and he was checking the tones playing a couple of notes as he was changing the settings and I said 'That's a cool lick.' He said, 'That's not a lick, I'm checking my amp.' I said, 'Let's do that lick over E, then we'll go to the four chord then instead of the five chord we'll hit a D chord, then we'll hit the four chord and we'll walk back up to the E.' We discussed it and we sat down and wrote some words - and we played what you hear on the record. At the end of that Richie Haywood, the drummer out of Little Feat, said 'Ok, are we gonna record it now?' and I said, 'We just did.'
Trout's latest CD, Hardcore, is even more live. "That started when we played here last year at the Mean Fiddler and Sammy Avila's keyboard broke five minutes before showtime, so we had to play as a three piece. We just jammed - Cream songs and so on, 'cos a lot of my songs won't work as a three piece. We had a great time, the people went nuts, we came off stage and the promoter said, 'Man, I can book a tour for you as a three piece.' Yeah, go ahead. So I recorded every night and we decided to release some of it."

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