Trouble Is… by Kenny Wayne Shepherd

Trouble Is..., Kenny Wayne Shepherd's second album, came out on Giant in 1997, the first billed to the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band and the first with Noah Hunt singing. Jerry Harrison produced it at the Record Plant, and the guitar slinger sounds fired up: thick, stinging blues-rock tone, solos that rip loose, and Hunt out front so Shepherd can do his talking on the fretboard.

"Blue on Black" is the heart of it, a dusky, slow-burning ballad that went all the way to number one on the rock radio chart and crossed over to number 78 on the Hot 100. "Slow Ride", "Somehow, Somewhere, Someway" and a crunching take on Bob Dylan's "Everything Is Broken" followed it onto rock radio, and there's a Jimi Hendrix cover, "I Don't Live Today", for good measure. It went gold in 1998 and platinum the year after, and the title track later turned up in the video game NASCAR 2001.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.