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Tom Morrello Didn't Make a New Album. He Made an Antidepressant.

Photo credit: Universal
Photo credit: Universal

Sometime during one of the early stretches of the pandemic—after the thrill of sour bread starters wore off but before days began melting together like clocks in a Salvador Dali painting—Tom Morello hit his breaking point. “How do I get through Tuesday without losing my fucking mind?" he recalled asking himself.

The 57-year-old legendary guitarist had spent the past 35 years of his life on tour, first with Rage Against the Machine, then Audioslave, and most recently as a member of the hard rock supergroup Prophets of Rage. Now he was stuck inside his house like the rest of us, his life as a guitar god reduced to the basic tasks and responsibilities of mere mortals: taking out the trash, walking the dog, tending to young children and elderly parents. “We were harboring both grandmas, 90 and 97, so nobody was coming in or going out.”

Eventually, and with a little encouragement from Kanye West, Morello picked up his guitar again and found refuge in writing riffs and sharing them among friends. “I went from being in the biggest creative drought of my life to the most prolific, fertile, creative period of my career,” he told Esquire during a recent phone conversation. The end result of that period is The Atlas Underground Fire—an album composed of a dozen new songs, written during the height of the pandemic, that don’t sound anything like the explosive rhythmic music Morello built his reputation on.

Below, Morello tells us about the making of The Atlas Underground Fire.

Esquire: You seem like you enjoy keeping busy. You’re always working on a lot of different projects. Dare we ask how lockdown has been for you?

Tom Morello: Devastating would be the first word I would use. Anxiety-producing would be the second. When the world shut down in March of 2020, everyone was confronted with a new reality, but as a musician who had manically been writing, recording, and performing music since I was 17 years old, it was a very challenging change in the weather.

I was really depressed. I didn't touch the guitar for 4 months.I felt zero inspiration to write, or play, and then inspiration struck from a very unlikely source. I read an interview with Kanye West where he was bragging about recording the vocals for a couple of his hit albums onto the voice memos of his iPhone. I thought, "Well, I've got an iPhone. I wonder if it can record an electric guitar." Sure enough, it could. It sounded fucking fantastic; so I started texting these guitar riffs to engineers, producers, and artists around the world. I amassed a global rock ‘n’ roll pen pal community.

ESQ: That sounds pretty fun, but why not just record on your own? Do you get more inspiration from other people?

Morello: Certainly in songwriting. This is the 21st studio album of my career. 19 of those albums were recorded with four other people locked in a room, staring at each other. But there was no way to do that this time.

Here's the thing, I wasn't recording these songs with Phantogram, Damian Marley, and Chris Stapleton to make a record. I was doing it as an antidepressant. Everyday it provided me with 40 to 90 minutes of unexpectedness where I would rock some riffs into my phone, send it off to some established or brand new artist, and feel a little bit better. It silenced the voices just for a moment.

ESQ: Before you had your pen pals, did you feel like your identity as a guitarist was at risk of slipping away?

Tom Morello: It was completely absent during those first four months of the pandemic. I was a plumber, a caretaker, a dog wound bandager, a child therapist. The musician in me who has existed for 35 years was totally gone. Everyday was all about keeping the grandmas alive and keeping the kids from going crazy on Zoom. But then I would cloister in my studio and feel connected and remind myself, "I'm also a musician."

ESQ: How did you choose your collaborators for this album?

Morello: It was a total roulette wheel. I’d record whatever the low hanging riffs were on that particular day and then ask myself: Who do I want to do a song with? I’d call up a friend of mine and ask them about the last cool artist they listened to.

ESQ: What about Bruce? How did a cover of “Highway to Hell” end up on this album?

Morello: That was actually the last song I recorded for the album. After working with a bunch of very talented young artists, I wanted to make a song with my rock brothers, and we all have a history with “Highway to Hell.” Back in 2014 I was on tour with the E Street Band in Perth, Australia which is the home of Bon Scott, the original lead singer for AC/DC.

One night around 11 o’clock, I went to the cemetery to pay my respects at Scott’s grave, except I couldn’t find it. Out of the mist comes a heavyset dude on a roaring motorbike with a German WWII army helmet and a t-shirt that read "I don't give a shit, but if I did, you're the one I'd give it to." And I was like, ‘that guy is gonna know where Bon Scott's grave is,’ which of course he did.

Photo credit: Kevin Mazur
Photo credit: Kevin Mazur

So I paid my respects and went back to the hotel bar where I saw Bruce and asked him, "Do you think there's a possibility of AC/DC and the E Street Band overlapping?" He kinda popped an eyebrow and was like, "Maybe." So we began rehearsing "Highway to Hell” and eventually found ourselves in Melbourne where Eddie Vedder also happened to be on a stop on his solo tour. A lightbulb went off in my head: We're in Australia; the song "Highway to Hell '' is the unofficial national anthem of rock & roll liberation; Eddie Vedder is here.

Anyway, we ended up opening the set with “Highway to Hell” and Eddie joined us on stage in front of 80,000 people. If you think you've seen a crowd go apeshit, you haven't unless you were there on that night. It was the absolute height of rock ‘n’ roll power and tribal connectedness.

Cut to me being completely alone in the solitary confinement of lockdown, remembering that moment and trying to catch a little bit of that lightning on this track with two of the greatest singers of all time—Bruce and Eddie—singing one of rock ‘n’ roll's greatest songs.

ESQ: It’s an incredible cover. Having not grown up when “Highway to Hell” was originally released, the song always seemed campy to me—like a pop culture artifact leftover from the days of hair metal. But hearing you guys do it together and rip it apart reframes it for me.

Do you have any songs or artists like that? Someone you dismissed at first but circled back to and appreciated later in life?

Morello: There's a number of them. They tend to all be part of the folk music and singer songwriter genres. I was always into heavy music. It started with metal, then punk, then hip-hop.The first folk album I really loved was Springsteen's Nebraska and then Bob Dylan’s "Times They Are a Changin.” Those records are heavier than anything in Metallica’s catalogue, you know?

Springsteen Dylan, even digging back to Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Woody Guthrie—all of them were and are so radical in their truth telling. Three minor chords and a whispered truth felt as devastating as anything I had ever heard.

ESQ: Those artists are overtly political and you’re unapologetically political yourself. That can’t be a coincidence. What role did music play in the formation of your ideological beliefs?

Morello: My passion for politics and my passion for music actually formed independently of one another. For me, politics came first. I self-identified as a radical and an activist before I even picked up a guitar. I first started playing guitar at 17. [Politics and music] were parallel paths with no bridge between them. The Clash and Public Enemy were the first to change that for me. The truth was revealed in the screams and the beats and the lyrics of Joe Strummer and Chuck D. That's when I realized there might be a way to combine my two passions.

ESQ: I’ve heard you say you’re proud of the fact that several of the collaborators on this album came to you with the music first, rather than the other way around. I'm struck by your use of the word proud. Why do you feel proud?

Morello: Normally my process is I write a bunch of riffs and send them out to people, and we figure out how to make a song. Receiving the songs pushed me as a guitar player. It forced me to get out of the traditional Morellian pattern. The songs I'm particularly talking about here are "Driving to Texas'' where Josh and Sarah [of Phantogram] reached out and said "Hey, we'd like to do a song with you." I told them, “That sounds fantastic, my schedule is pretty clear” then they sent me this electro nightmare soundscape.

The other song was the one with Sama' Abdulhadi. I sent her my traditional Blue Oyster Cult and Black Sabbath riffs and she said, "Um, I like these but I don't know what to do with them." And I was like, "Thank you for your honesty and your candor. Why don't you send me something?” So she sent me this eight minute long trans track, which when I first got it I was like, "Wow, how do I engage with this? The question made me feel very alive both as a guitarist and an artist. I put on my headphones and my Coltrane ears and just sunk into this beautiful, hypnotic track.

ESQ: So the process made you feel like an artist again. It gave you new ways to play your guitar.

Morello: That plus a way to just be alive on a Tuesday afternoon. Here’s the thing: the strength of a solo album is it has a purity of vision—an overarching curation which is done by me. This album is the kind of record I want to make, and my guitar is the essential voice in each song. However, all 12 of these songs are the product of the very specific chemistry that came from working with each of the artists. I could never make any of these 12 songs on my own.

ESQ: Did you feel conscious of a vision when putting this album together? I know you said these songs were like a lifeboat that helped you stay alive on a Tuesday. But once you decided to turn them into an album, how did you go about uniting them?

Morello: There are three lanes on this record. First is the lane you might be familiar with from some of my history which is songs confronting social injustice. Those tracks are “Hold the Line” and “The Achilles List.” Then there's the songs that authentically reflect the desperate times in which they were made—”The War Inside,"Driving to Texas,” Let's Get the Party Started” which is a rumination on partying yourself to death.

The third and most important lane is the instrumental songs. The record starts with one and ends with one, and “Charmed I'm Sure” is in the middle. The instrumental tracks are my way of saying: “I am a guitar player, I am a musician. I am alive, and at this moment I can still play some flamethrower, kickass electric guitar. I can still push boundaries, break ceilings, bust open some barn doors and salt the earth with my instrument.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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