The award-winning British blues icon Robin Trower will release his breathtaking new album One Moment In Time: Live In The USA on 30 January via Artone/Provogue. Listen to the blistering first taste on Day of the Eagle.
For Robin Trower, stage and studio are two sides of the same coin. If you’ve followed his six-decade career, you’ll know every song on One Moment In Time: Live In The USA – starting with Day of the Eagle, the opening song to his 1974 masterpiece Bridge of Sighs.
In the summer of 2025 and riding high on the acclaim for his latest solo album, Come And Find Me (“Trower is to be treasured,” wrote Classic Rock), the guitarist crossed the Atlantic for a 25-date run in the nation that has welcomed him since the start. Almost 60 years have passed since Trower first performed in the Land Of The Free, but as a British gunslinger raised under slate-grey South London skies, he still remembers the culture shock. “I first came here with Procol Harum in the late-Sixties. Back then, it was a different world,” he says.
A lifetime later, with sound engineer James Kane rolling tape at multiple venues on the tour, it fell to Trower to decide which performances would be immortalised for One Moment In Time: Live In The USA. Every show was cooking, but after countless hours of intense study, Trower honed in on the material caught at the Music Box At The Borgata, Atlantic City, New Jersey (14 June) and the Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, New Hampshire (24 June). “The new album is the best take of each song from those two nights,” he explains. “It’s about the performance but also down to the sound quality. You have to choose carefully – I did a lot of listening.”
The 14-song setlist represents a whistlestop guide to Trower’s fabled career, the bluesman striking a keen balance of all-time classics and new songs that reflect where he stands as an artist in modern times. You’ll find no fewer than four songs from 1974’s gold-selling masterpiece, Bridge Of Sighs, still universally hailed amongst the greatest albums from the golden era of blues-rock. “Those songs have to be in there, because they’re the audience’s favourites,” he says of these roaring renditions of Too Rolling Stoned, Day Of The Eagle, Little Bit Of Sympathy and Bridge Of Sighs’ title track. “That album is still a compelling piece of music.”
Other old favourites include Daydream (from 1973’s solo debut, Twice Removed From Yesterday) and Somebody Calling (from 1977’s In City Dreams). Elsewhere, Trower plays the aces up his sleeve with surprise airings of Rise Up Like The Sun (from 1994’s 20th Century Blues) and Distant Places Of The Heart (from his 2007 collaboration with the late Cream bassist Jack Bruce, Seven Moons).
Trower is no heritage artist, and the cheers are just as loud for the four songs from 2022’s No More Worlds To Conquer, not to mention his stalking take on One Go Round (from Come And Find Me).
But as the veteran bandleader acknowledges, the flying sparks on One Moment In Time: Live In The USA are down to the chemistry between his trusty power-trio: a three-headed beast that moves as one through the set’s shifting dynamics and time signatures, with Richard Watts on bass and vocals and Chris Taggart on drums.
One Moment In Time: Live In The USA, then, is a document of Robin Trower in full flight, just as powerful when experienced through your home speakers as it was for the fans on the front row. “At the very least, you want the audience to be feeling entertained by the end of the show,” he considers. “But I’d really like them to walk out feeling elated. I want them to get something emotionally out of this as well…”
