Tom Morello

Wed 21st Sep, 2011 in Features

Tom Morello needs no introduction. The Grammy Award-winning guitarist and singer/songwriter has essentially written the soundtrack to the 90’s with Rage Against the Machine, before following it up with a heavy stint in the highly successful Audioslave, with Chris Cornell, and side project Street Sweeper Social Club.

Morello’s now out on his own as The Nightwatchman, with a new album under his belt and ready to leave his mark on a new era of political causes. He was ranked #26 in Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”, and proved to FL what has made him such an influential figure in music over the last 20 years.

First of all I have to ask, in some of your songs a distrust of the media comes through… does that distrust extend to music journalists?
[laughs] Especially music journalists.

So tell me about your new album as The Nightwatchman, and how it came about.
World Wide Rebel Songs is the fourth Nightwatchman album, but it’s the first album that contains a lot of electric guitar. On this record I wanted to bridge the world between my guitar playing in Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, and my political folk music singer-songwriting of The Nightwatchman. The backup band on World Wide Rebel Songs is The Freedom Fighter Orchestra, and the initial seed of inspiration for the record was from an incident about a year and a half ago.

Some Korean workers in Seoul, Korea – the people who manufacture the low end Gibson, Ibanez and Fender guitars – attempted to unionise. They were all fired from their jobs because they attempted to form a union. The plant was shut down, it was moved to China. These Korean workers came to the United States looking for financial help. I offered to play a benefit show for them, but the day before the show, the earthquake in Haiti happened. And so the Korean workers who had travelled 6,000 miles, and were in desperate need of financial help for themselves and their families, voted to donate 100% of the proceeds from their benefit show to the Haiti relief effort.

I was very moved by their selfless act of international solidarity, that day I wrote the song World Wide Rebel Songs, played it that night at the show, it was the starting point for this record. Their generous act was a window into the kind of world that I’d like to see, and the kind of world I fight for myself.

If you had to sum up what’s wrong with the the world, what would you say that is?
In broad strokes, the world is not owned and run by the people who deserve to own it and run it. It is, for the most part, owned and run by people only concerned with profit and power. And the crime of desperate poverty and the crime of impending environmental disaster, and the lack of human rights around the globe are evidence that those that are shepherding it are not doing such a good job.

Throughout the history of progressive radicalism and revolutionary change, that change has always come from below. It’s come from people whose names you do not read about in history books, the people who organize around issues they believe in, in their place and their time. Those are people I make records for.