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Tom Morello talks solo album, Voice of Baceprot, and Afghanistan
Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello talks collaborating on The Atlas Underground Fire, his latest solo album due out in October as a sequel to 2018's The Atlas Underground, how the pandemic affected his music and his personal connection to Afghanistan.
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Futurist: Tom Morello says that collaborating with other artists allows him to see the future direction of his guitar playing. (Tom Morello management/Courtesy of Travis Shinn)
Thomas Baptist Morello, or simply Tom Morello, is possibly one of the most prolific guitarists of the last three decades.
When he’s not busy trying to change the world with his seminal rap-rock group Rage Against The Machine, he’s rocking with Audioslave, Street Sweeper Social Club and supergroup Prophets of Rage, and was once part of the touring lineup for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The two-time Grammy winner also sings and plays acoustic guitar in his political solo act The Nightwatchman.
Safe to say, music is part of Morello’s daily diet.
But then the COVID-19 pandemic rolled around in 2020 and brought the music industry to a grinding halt almost overnight. In an exclusive interview with The Jakarta Post via Zoom on Aug. 20, Morello said the past year had been tough for him.
“It was really the first time I hadn't played music since I was 17, it was depressing,” Morello said. “It was a scary time with no prospect of touring or recording.”
Now 57, Morello has his own recording studio but admits not knowing how to run it on his own.
Fortunately, Morello was inspired by a new discovery a few months into the pandemic that would lead him to a new way of recording music, although this came indirectly from a rather “unusual” source: Kanye West.
“I read an article on Kanye West where he was talking about how he recorded the vocals of his big hit albums on the voice memo of his phone,” Morello said.
“So I tried recording guitar into my phone and it sounded great,” he said. “All of a sudden, I was sending all these guitar tracks to producers around the world and we started making a record.”
This was a big moment for Morello that paved his way back to his life of making music.
“It made me realize I’m still a musician, that I can do what I do even though I’m doing it alone,” he said. “It provided a connection beyond the isolation.”
His new solo album The Atlas Underground Fire, which will be released on 15 October 2021, features guitar parts recorded on his phone. The album features a wide array of collaborators of different genres, nationalities and generations, including country singer-songwriter Chris Stapleton, reggae artist Damian Marley and even heavy metal act Bring Me The Horizon.
Global collab & future of electric guitar
While Morello loves the idea of doing a solo album because it allows a “purity of vision”, he also enjoys the chemistry that comes with being in a band, and The Atlas Underground Fire is his way of getting the best of both worlds.
“My guitar leads the way, but on each individual song there’s a musical chemistry that takes my vision and twists it around, mixes it in like [a] Picasso or something like that, you know?” he said.
Morello cited some of the international collaborations that truly made The Atlas Underground Fire a global album.
“The song ‘Naraka’ featuring Mike Posner, between the beginning and the end of the recording of that song, he summited Mount Everest, so some of those vocals were recorded 15 to 20 thousand meters above the sea,” he said, clearly excited.
As for album closer “On The Shore Of Eternity”, Morello recounted: “Sama’ Abdulhadi is a great young Palestinian DJ, and she was mixing that song during the Israeli bombing of Palestine. She would have to take a break and find a shelter, and I wouldn’t hear from her for two days.”
But not all his attempts at collaboration were gold, and some simply didn’t work out. “Those songs didn’t make the record,” he said, laughing.
Morello is well known for his inventive playing style, especially the turntable scratches and helicopter overhead sound and effect pedals he made on his guitar with Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave, essentially acting as the bands’ DJ. He says he enjoys collaborating with other artists for the process of discovery that allows him to see which direction his electric guitar could go in the future.
“I believe very firmly that the electric guitar is the greatest instrument invented by mankind and it has a future and not just the past, you know? That’s what I’ve always tried in my art and my music, to keep pushing the boundaries of what the electric guitar can be,” he said.
“I think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities and I know electric guitar songs are not on top of the charts like they have been at other times in history, but that doesn’t mean the instrument can’t continue to show the way.”
The influence of Morello’s guitar playing and music reaches far and wide, and this was never more evident than when Indonesia’s young hijab-wearing metal trio Voice of Baceprot covered some of Rage Against The Machine’s hits like “Guerilla Radio” and “Testify”.
Morello deems it “one of the greatest moments in rock and roll history”.
“Seeing them play, and seeing the authenticity in which they tackled Rage Against The Machine’s songs were really impressive to me. It really is a testament to the unifying power of rock and roll, that gender, religion, national boundaries can’t stand in the way of it,” he said.
Next year, Voice of Baceprot is scheduled to play Wacken, one of the world’s biggest metal music festivals, and Morello is excited for them.
“I wouldn’t wanna play after them. You better be careful, whoever is playing after them better be on their A game that day,” he said.
Historical R&R moment
The first single from Morello’s new album is a cover of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell”, featuring Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam fame. While it may be slightly unusual to release a cover as the first single, Morello stresses that the song has a history with all the musicians who were involved in the recording.
Back in 2014, when Morello was playing with Springsteen’s backing E Street Band in Perth, Australia, he visited the grave of Bon Scott to pay his respects to the late AC/DC lead singer. He then tossed the idea of doing an AC/DC cover with Springsteen. The band started rehearsing “Highway To Hell” for the sound check at the next few cities on the tour. In Melbourne, they were playing to 80,000 people in a football stadium and Vedder happened to be at their show amid his own solo tour.
So they decided to open the set with “Highway To Hell”, and the rest is history.
“If you think you’ve seen people go crazy at a concert, you have not until you’ve seen those people,” Morello said. “In Australia, AC/DC is king and ‘Highway To Hell’ is like the national anthem of the country.”
That historic moment was what Morello wanted to capture on The Atlas Underground Fire. “When I was making this record, I remembered back to that moment. [...] One of the greatest rock and roll songs of all time being sung by two of the greatest rock and roll singers of all time.”
Morello is, not surprisingly, a big fan of both Springsteen and Pearl Jam.
“The riff from ‘Animal’ of [Pearl Jam’s] Vs. is a big riff right there,” he pointed out. “And [B-side release] ‘Yellow Ledbetter’ is a beautiful Mike McCready composition.”
While not known for being a fan of love songs, Morello added that Springsteen’s “If I Should Fall Behind” has personal meaning for him.
“It’s a beautiful song that was played at my wedding. It’s got a really good message – if I should fall behind, wait for me, if you fall behind, I’ll wait for you – and that’s like not just in a relationship, but something that has broader implication as Bruce often writes, the great nuanced lyricist that he is,” said Morello.
On no touring & Afghanistan
While some states in the United States are opening up and concerts have started up again, Morello simply doesn’t want to risk playing live during the prolonged pandemic.
“Some people are touring, some are not, I don’t wanna tour until it’s safe for the fans, the band and the crew,” he said. “I want people to experience joy at a concert, I don’t want them to go home and kill their grandmas, you know what I mean?”
Continuing, Morello said that public health had been politicized in the US following the divisive Trump era and people were disagreeing about the science, such as over the use of masks and vaccination.
Morello’s criticism for his country doesn’t stop there. He also has a lot to say about the chaotic situation in Afghanistan following the US’ military withdrawal.
“The nightmare in Afghanistan is US imperialism in practice, you know what I mean? That’s what we do,” Morello said.
“It wasn’t a failure for the US because the military industrial complex made trillions of dollars off of it, that’s all they ever cared, they didn’t care about the Afghanistan people, the womens’ rights, they didn’t care about any of that, it was a scam from day one.”
Morello has a personal connection to Afghanistan through his collaboration with the Afghan-based group Girl With A Guitar, a project under the Miraculous Love Kids nonprofit organization. The collaboration aimed to raise awareness and funds for the vulnerable, poverty-stricken children in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
American musician Lanny Cordola founded the Miraculous Love Kids in 2015 after meeting Mursal, an Afghan girl whose two sisters had been killed a few years prior in a suicide bomb attack.
Morello says he is “very concerned” about the children and is working to try and get them out of Afghanistan.
“These young Afghani girls endured trauma, and through the healing power of music were sort of being made whole again. And now they are once again in danger,” he said.
