Tom Morello Rages On

Tom Morello, most widely known as the guitarist for rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, laughs when he realizes he’s been an AARP member for years. “It’s crazy,” he says. “I’m 57 now. I got my AARP card in the mail seven years ago. And it’s such a jarring moment.”  

Though he jokes that he likes to think he’s still 22, it recently dawned on him  that it’s been nearly 30 years since his talents were introduced to the world through Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut album in 1991. In fact, referring to Morello as simply “a guitar player” doesn’t do his work justice. Over the years, Morello has established himself as a barrier-breaking, genre-bending rock legend with a remarkable body of work. He is truly a musical pioneer.  

The son of a Kenyan diplomat and an Italian American schoolteacher, Morello was raised by his single mother, Mary, in the small town of Libertyville, Illinois. Mary, he says, “remains the most radical member of the Morello family.” At 98 years old, she continues to be an outspoken activist involved with a number of social justice organizations. It is no surprise, then, that she taught her son — the only Black kid in town — to fight for his rights from a young age.

“People will sometimes ask, ‘How were you politicized?,’ assuming it was reading a Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn text,” he says. “No, it happened at day care when I was 5 years old. There was this older kid who’d just pound me every day and N-word me. My mom told me about a fella by the name of Malcolm X. She said, ‘Whenever you’re confronted with racism, you’re the one that has to resist it and has to fight back.’ I was like, ‘I’m 5.’ She’s like, ‘Yeah, even when you’re 5.’ ” 

At 17, Morello, by then a political science major at Harvard University, picked up his first guitar. “I’ve only ever heard of one guitarist who started that late and made albums,” he says. “And that was Robert Johnson, the famed blues guitar player who had to sell his soul to the devil to get good. Given my Catholic upbringing, that wasn’t really on the table.”   

Instead, he practiced daily, sometimes logging up to eight hours a day. “I think it was a way of exerting some control,” Morello says. “I recognized early with the guitar that it was only my will that determined success or failure in that relationship, so I really leaned in.”  

Though his years of practice paid off, Morello wasn’t entirely pleased with his sound. “I became a very technically skilled musician,” he says. “But I didn’t really like the songs that I was writing. I could play a shredding guitar solo or make you weep with an emotional one. But I didn’t have my own voice on the instrument.”

Check out Tom Morello's Spotify playlist of songs of rebellion and liberation below.

After graduating from Harvard, he moved to Los Angeles and in 1991 formed the trailblazing rap-rock band Rage Against the Machine with vocalist Zack de la Rocha, drummer Brad Wilk and bass player Tim Commerford. It was during this time that Morello really began to manipulate the guitar’s sound and expand the boundaries of what the instrument could do.

“It was really at the beginning of Rage Against the Machine when I began self-identifying as the DJ in the band,” Morello says. “With my own bare hands and my Marshall half-stack [amplifier and speakers] and my electric guitar, I began practicing barnyard animal noises and sounds from the Star Wars trilogy and the police helicopter overhead and whatever else. All of a sudden, I started to find my voice on the instrument and started to cobble together a musical language and vernacular that felt like it was my own.”  

With this experimentation, Morello carved a sound that was so unheard of for a single instrument that the band had to include a disclaimer in the liner notes of its first album: “No samples, keyboards or synthesizers used in the making of this recording.”

Rage Against the Machine would go on to release four studio albums and receive two Grammy Awards before disbanding in 2000. In the years since, Morello — a lifelong fan of Kiss, Black Sabbath, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin — has continued to keep one foot in the world of hard rock while creating revolutionary music in a variety of genres. From his work in the supergroups Audioslave (featuring members of Rage Against the Machine with the late Chris Cornell on vocals) and Prophets of Rage (with members of Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Cypress Hill’s B-Real), to performing as the folk artist The Nightwatchman and joining Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, Morello has consistently fused his cutting-edge guitar sound with his unwavering pursuit of social justice to produce some of the most innovative, transformative music of the past 30 years.

Now, Morello has a new release, The Atlas Underground Fire, which was born of the pandemic. As he explains, “From the time I was 17 until March of 2020, I had been nonstop writing, recording and performing. All that came to a screeching halt with the lockdown. And while I have a nice studio at my house, I don’t know how to work it. Normally, there’s an engineer that does that. So it was the first musical drought of my entire adult life. It was a time of great anxiety, frustration and depression.” 

After reading that Kanye West would sometimes record vocals into his phone’s voice memo app, Morello began using his iPhone to record new music. He would then email the riffs to artists around the world. Some of the artists, such as Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder, were friends. Others he hadn’t yet met.

“[I’d] kind of go, ‘Who do I want to send this to? Who might I want to make a song with today?’ Some were ones that were already in my phone and in my Rolodex, and others I would just kinda scroll around on Spotify or call younger, hipper, cooler friends of mine and go, ‘What’s the last song you listened to that was awesome?’ And reach out to them and say, ‘Hey, I’m Tom Morello, would you like to make a song today?’”

The result is an impressive slate of collaborations with artists from around the world. With Morello’s guitar leading the way, the tunes on the album vary from shredding heavy metal and pounding electronic dance music to Southern rock and reggae. He says its creation was not only creatively fulfilling, but beneficial to his mental health during a time when “every day was in some ways exactly the same.”

“This record was not so much a creative endeavor as it was an antidepressant,” Morello says. “It was a life raft. But part of that life raft was forging this global community of collaborators. From Springsteen in New Jersey to Eddie Vedder in the Pacific Northwest, from Damian Marley in Jamaica to Mike Posner, who recorded vocals at 25,000 feet in Nepal on his way to summiting Mount Everest, to Sama’ Abdulhadi, a great young Palestinian DJ who mixed the song during the Israeli bombing of Palestine, to [hardcore punk band] Refused, in Sweden. It was like this rock ’n’ roll pen pal community that I could plug into on a daily basis to be like, ‘I am still a guitar player!’ ”

When asked to recommend a few of his favorite contemporary artists, Morello says, “Grandson [and] K.Flay are very young, great, thoughtful artists.” He also shares that Sama’ Abdulhadi is “a tremendous EDM [electronic dance music] DJ. Vic Mensa is a great young rapper out of Chicago who I’ve had the honor of working with before. Off the top of my head those are some that people should check out.”

In the coming months, Morello plans to rejoin his former Rage Against the Machine bandmates for a tour that is scheduled to kick off in March 2022. It will be the band’s first time playing together in over a decade. In the meantime, he hosts a weekly podcast, Tom Morello’s Maximum Firepower, on SiriusXM Lithium, and is even becoming comfortable with the fact that he’s no longer 22.

“The one that I’ve learned is stop trying to be people you’re not,” he says. “I tried on so many hats before I finally just gave up and went, You know what? I like Lady Gaga. Yes, I play Dungeons & Dragons. Yes. I’m fifty f---ing seven years old! I can still shred my ass off on guitar. Come at me!”  

See instructions below on how to add the playlist to your phone or tablet.

GET THE PLAYLIST 

Every playlist on Spotify has its own unique code, similar to a QR code. Called Spotify Codes, these bars make it easy to add a playlist to your Spotify app on your device. Here's how:

1. Download and open the free Spotify app on your phone or tablet.
2. In the app, tap Search.
3. Click the camera icon.
4.  Scan the barcode above, then tap the arrow to listen.

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