Tom Morello joins Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 to discuss his new album ’The Atlas Underground Fire’. He tells Apple Music about making the album entirely during lockdown, choosing collaborating and spotlighting the guitar, looking forward to the rescheduled Rage Against The Machine dates next year, and more.
Tom Morello Tells Apple Music About Making His New Album ’The Atlas Underground Fire’, Choosing Collaborators, and Putting The Guitar At The Forefront...
This was a record that was made entirely in lockdown. Ninety-five percent of the guitars on this record were recorded in... I have a nice studio at my house, but I don't know how to work it. I don't know how to run it. So there was no engineer coming in for an entire year. So, weirdly, it was Kanye West. I read an interview with Kanye where he said he had recorded the vocals for a couple of his records into the voice memo of his iPhone. So I started recording guitar riff. That's how the guitars for The War Inside, that solo that you just played there ... was recorded with this phone that I'm talking to you on just sitting on a folding chair in front of my amp.Making this record really was, it was a lifeline, and it was keeping me sane on a Tuesday. I didn't set out to go, "Hey, I'm going to call up Bruce Springsteen and Chris Stapleton and Grandson and Damian Marley, this one, that one." It was like, "How do I get through this particular day and continue to self-identify as a musician when there doesn't look like there's going to be any music for some time now?"And so it was in this cloistered isolation, I was able to create this global conspiracy of friends and collaborators that really not only got me through the day, but helped me push, inflict my guitar vision on an unsuspecting world…. importantly, the record starts and ends with instruments. It's a way to assert that the electric guitar has a future and not just a past. And by collaborating with these diverse artists, and with the voice of my guitar being the through thread through all of it, it's a way of going, "The capstone of it." During the time I was a lot of things. I was a plumber. I was a caretaker. I was a worrier, but I also could play some kick ass guitar. And I'm not afraid to do it.
Tom Morello Tells Apple Music About Writing “The War Inside” with Chris Stapleton...
I saw Chris Stapleton at the Chris Cornell Memorial Show. And it felt to me like he had a lot in common with my friend, Chris, just a real lovely gentleman and a tremendous talent. His ability to conjure melody out of the ether is something very unique. It's something he has in common with my Chris Cornell. And we wrote this song in the height of the plague lockdown. And he was the first person that I ever tried to write a song with on Zoom or remotely. And we sat there with guitars in our hands, and for the first two hours, we just talked about what it was like to try to keep the grandmas alive, keep the kid from going crazy, the anxiety and the fear and the hopes that we had of that time. And then that therapeutic discussion became the thematic underpinning of the song, The War Inside.
Tom Morello Tells Apple Music He Plans To Showcase The New Material Live…
Absolutely. And that's an important part of the process, is while it's therapeutic to make music, it doesn't land entirely until you connect with people, until you get to share it outside of the bunker where it was made to the four corners of the globe. Now, I can finally share it with people.
Tom Morello Tells Apple Music About The Upcoming Rescheduled Rage Against The Machine Tour...
Yeah, we've got that Rage tour, North America, starting March 2022. Fingers crossed. Honestly, fingers crossed. I know that it's still a chaotic world. And I want to tour in such a way that band, crew, and fans are all safe, and that everybody's cool. So fingers crossed.
