“I believe that the electric guitar has a future and not just a past” Tom Morello on embracing change on The Atlas Underground Flood
The Rage Against The Machine legend tells us why he’s happy to embrace his pop side, how his latest album demonstrates that the creative potential of the guitar is undimmed, and why he recorded his guitar parts on a voice memo.
Chances are, you’re reading this on a mobile phone of some kind, and it’s easy to forget what a marvel of modern technology it is that you hold in your hand. The sheer amount of power inside that little black rectangle allows you to do all sorts of things at the drop of a hat that would never have been possible even a few decades ago. But if you’re Tom Morello, it stands to reason that you’re gonna push things beyond the limits of what a normal person would do, right?
“I recorded 95 per cent of the guitars into the voice memo of my phone,” the Rage Against The Machine legend states matter of factly over Zoom from his home studio as we sit down to chat about The Atlas Underground Flood, the second of two solo Atlas Underground albums the guitarist has released this year.
Hold up though, did he just say the voice memo on his phone? Not like Garageband or any of the other awesome phone-based recording solutions that are available?
“On the phone, dude!” he exclaims, holding up his old iPhone to emphasise. “I’d have the phone like this, hitting the red button on the voice memo, sitting on a folding chair, right over there…” he turns the camera round and sure enough, there’s a metal folding chair sat in front of the Marshall 2205 the guitarist has used since the earliest days of Rage Against The Machine. “Sitting on that folding chair right there! And there’s no engineer so it’s like, ‘Should it be six inches away? Should it be two feet away? I don’t know!’”
The question does beg, given that he’s talking to us from his well-appointed home studio, why he took such a DIY approach to recording?
“The Atlas Underground Fire and Atlas Underground Flood records were plague-era albums,” he explains. “I began making these records to preserve my sanity. It wasn’t like, ‘Wow, I’m gonna make a double-album.’ It was like, ‘I’m trying to make it through Tuesday’, you know? And that led to the unorthodox way that I was recording. I have a studio at my house, but I don’t know how to use it, and there were no engineers coming due to COVID protocols.
“The inspiration struck from a very unusual place. I read an article where Kanye West had described that he had recorded the lead vocals for several of his records into the voice memo of his phone. So I was like, ‘Well, let’s see how the guitar sounds!’ And it sounded fucking fantastic. It’s crazy. I’m gonna throw away all these expensive microphones!”
Flood risk
Listening to The Atlas Underground Fire, and its sibling from October, Fire, the records are almost obnoxiously eclectic – no song sounds even remotely the same, with each track seeing Morello bring his inimitable guitar style to a song created with a different artist or artists, as diverse as Bruce Springsteen and Idles, or Ben Harper and X Ambassadors. But that was all part of the plan.
“When every day was feeling exactly the same, it was a way to add a tremendous amount of diversity, and to be creative at the same time,” says Morello. “Also, The Clash is my favorite band and I was very inspired by their record London Calling, which is an album that has an overarching sort of curated vision, but is tremendously diverse, genre-wise. And that’s what I was aiming for with this – where the guitar as the lead voice and the common thread through all the songs on both records, but being able to sort of stylistically jump around with that anchor of my electric guitar.”
But how did he decide on who to work with given the tremendous diversity of the artists involved?
“On a daily basis I would come up here and record some riffs, licks, ideas, textures. And then I would just decide who I was gonna send them to,” he says. “So sometimes it was going through my own personal Rolodex of friends – whether it’s Springsteen, or Damian Marley, or Phantogram – or discovering new artists, via Spotify, or asking friends who have cooler musical tastes than I do what they’ve been listening to.”
One of the album’s most notable collaborations from a guitar perspecitve is I Have Seen The Way, which brings together three icons of the instrument in Morello, Kirk Hammett and Alex Lifeson and pits them against one another in a guitar free for all.