Tom Morello has a message about his new solo album, Everyone Gets What They Want. “This is a record for people who have had enough,” he says. “These are anti-racist songs for anti-racists. They’re anti-fascist songs for anti-fascists. And if any of that comes across as controversial to any of your readers, they should just look in the mirror and do the math.”
It would be tempting to say the 62-year-old has come out fighting on what he calls his “first-ever full-length solo rock album” – the 22nd record of his career but “the first time where I’ve been at the microphone with Marshall stacks blazing”. But he’s never been any other way. As founding member and guitarist with pioneering LA rap-rock band Rage Against the Machine, for 35 years Morello has been resolute in using music as activism.
RATM’s 1992 hit “Killing in the Name” – with its defiantly iconic lyric “f**k you I won’t do what you tell me” – has been his protest calling card, with the band’s recorded catalogue between 1992 to 2000 mixing Morello’s unique and celebrated heavy-rock-meets-electronic-sounding-guitar style with uncompromising lyrics and messaging about racism, social justice, corporate greed and police oppression.
And whether with Audioslave (a band he formed in 2001 with the late Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell), Prophets of Rage (a trio from 2016 with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Cypress Hill’s B-Real) or on his quasi-solo albums as the more folk-iterated The Nightwatchman, Morello has continued to fight the good fight. The excellent Everyone Gets What They Want is a call to arms against a worldwide far-right uprising – “it’s my State of the Union address” – featuring guest appearances from fellow travellers Serj Tankian of American-Armenian metal band System of a Down and Irish rap group Kneecap, as well as Morello’s 15-year-old son Roman, following in the family footsteps as guitar prodigy. “Terrible presidents often make for great albums,” he says.
Yet still some people tell him to stay out of politics and “stick to music”. “Too late for that,” he smiles. Morello got online kickback in June after he displayed the message “F**k Tommy Robinson” on his guitar during a show at Download Festival in protest at the far-right activist. Some older RATM fans have become hostile to Morello’s political message: on social media, he’s often told he’s now not raging against, but actually the machine, especially over his advocacy of the Covid vaccine.
“Yeah that’s the line,” he says dismissively. “Well, here’s the thing: there’s a lot of old white men that never understood what that band was about at all. ‘Killing in the Name’ is a song about how white supremacy kills black people. It’s not about you not taking the jab, and it’s not about how you’re mad at your folks.” He quotes the lyrics to The Clash’s anti-fascist song “Clampdown”: “‘You grow up and you calm down, you start wearing blue and brown.’ Which has happened to a lot of these fans. It concerns me not in the least. You stand up for people who are oppressed, against racism, against authoritarianism, against imperialism. Period.”
Morello is at home in LA on video call; behind him on the wall is a poster, red with a yellow raised fist. “It’s from an old Soviet factory. They were selling it on the streets of Moscow in ’96 when we played there.” He’s justifiably proud of Everyone Gets What They Want, a record that mixes trademark heavy Rage riffs with occasional hard-hitting ballads, such as the Leonard Cohen-like “I Am Not Yours to Command”.
“It’s a personal manifesto inspired by quiet heroes who refuse to bend the knee to tyranny in their home, in their school, at their place of work, in their jail cell, in their country.” But why now for the full-on solo album? “Well, on the one hand, rock and roll for me has always been an act of self-defence,” he says. “But in this very dangerous time, making rock and roll rebellion is really more self-care. In this day and age, every act of art is an act of resistance.”
The album starts with a short instrumental, “Beth from Electronics”, a tribute to Beth McGrath, who went viral in 2021 after quitting her job at Walmart in Louisiana in an expletive-ridden rant at the company over the shop loudspeaker. “That’s the energy I wanted [for the album]. That encapsulates the best of raging against the machine.”
“Soldier In The Army of Love” is a call to fight hate with love, while “Date Night” tells the true story of three Dutch sisters who fought the Nazis during the Second World War, going undercover to lure officers into the woods to kill them. Kneecap duet on “Unconquered”. “They’re carrying the torch for artists fearlessly willing to speak their minds, suffer the consequences, and stand up for the oppressed. I feel a great kinship with them.”
“Adjourn It”, featuring System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian, is a pro-immigrant, anti-ICE riot of a track. Morello has been on the front line at the ICE protests against President Trump’s large-scale, aggressive mass deportation initiative in New York, Chicago and Minneapolis. “It’s a country under siege,” he says. But he has been impressed with the resistance. “How they’ve warned their neighbours with whistles and follow the ICE agents around. A lot of white moms are putting Mexican flags on their cars so the ICE agents will waste their time following them. The second that an ICE vehicle parks illegally, they have been towing them away. So there’s this underground resistance.”
But the album is also a family affair. Morello’s son Roman has co-written five tracks: still just 15, he has been in Morello’s live band for the past three years. “First thing, it’s crazy you’re in a band with a little kid who lives in your house. But what’s stranger is when you get used to it, and he’s just a dude in my band. It’s a real joy.”
Morello says Roman has been a huge musical inspiration. “In some ways, he’s been my muse for this. I listen at his bedroom door and poach his best riffs. I always think that the best riff wins. If he’s got the best riff, I take my ego out of it and tip my cap to the 15-year-old.” He says Roman first picked up a guitar during the pandemic. “He had really no interest prior. But I lured him in. I said, ‘If you give me five minutes, I’ll teach you the first three notes of ‘Stairway to Heaven’.” He said, ‘I’ll give you four.’ That’s when the traction began. I didn’t start playing till I was 17, so he’s got quite the jump.”
Is he politically engaged? “I mean, he’s been pushed in his stroller to protests and picket lines, barricades, and union rallies since he was a baby, so yeah. His emphasis is more on the music, but he’s down for the cause. He has not rebelled against the family policy.”
In Libertyville, Illinois, from the late 60s, Morello was brought up in exactly the same way by his mother, Mary Morello. “A single white mom with a black child in an all-white town, fearlessly standing up against racism,” he says. “She was a beacon of radicalism in a conservative town.” Mary died in June aged 102; Morello has set up The Mary Morello Memorial Project in her honour, encouraging people to follow her example through donating, volunteering and protesting causes she believed in.
“My mom lived a humble yet purposeful and powerful life,” he says. “From feeding hobos on the back porch during the Great Depression to raising war bonds during World War II to stop the Nazis. She stood up against Jim Crow laws, helped anti-colonial movements in East Africa in the 60s. For her 100th birthday, she wanted to do two things: feed the hungry at the midnight mission in downtown Los Angeles, and walk the picket line for a hotel workers’ strike, which she did in her wheelchair.”
Morello remembers the moment when her attitude was instilled in him: aged six, when he went to the grocery shop during the 1970 United Farm Workers grape boycott. “I loved grapes, and she said, ‘Today we can’t have grapes.’ And I threw a tantrum. And she explained that we’re sacrificing us enjoying grapes to help these farmers. She said – ‘We have to help them because we can.’ And that sentence really made me pause.”
There and then, Morello forged the outlook he’d take to the world, armed with his guitar. “That message is in the DNA of every song I’ve ever written,” he says. “I got from my dear mother the unwavering belief that ordinary people can change the world. You can stand up against the racist, fascist tide across the globe. We’ve stood up to it before. We’ll stand up to it again. And we have to stand up to it now.”
‘Everyone Gets Everything They Want’ is out now via Mom + Pop Music