Common Ground

Provogue, 2010

With an election-season America bitterly split along Democrat and Republican battle lines, Common Ground saw Trout appeal for unity using the only tools at his disposal: a whip-smart lyric sheet and the beat-to-hell Fender Strat that positively strafes the tracklisting. “These songs were written amidst all the yelling and the screaming from the left and right,” he said of standouts like Loaded Gun. “It just felt like there was this inability amongst our politicians to be civilised and meet in the middle. That album was really a call for people to be more forgiving to each other.”