Tom Morello
Tom Morello
Thomas Baptiste "Tom" Morellois an American musician, singer-songwriter and political activist. He is best known for his tenure with the band Rage Against the Machine and then with Audioslave. Morello was most recently a touring musician with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. He is also known for his acoustic solo act called The Nightwatchman, and his latest group, Street Sweeper Social Club. Morello is also the co-founderof the non-profit political activist organization Axis of Justice, which airs a...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth30 May 1964
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I think that new artistic challenges help you grow both as a person, as an artist, and then they feed back into your other work, and tend to magnify it.
I think you might be considered a terrorist for asking the question! It can be so broadly defined now. And the thing is, you're not privy to those decisions. Anyone who expresses any opinion can be considered a terrorist.
There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.
Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.
We were playing some RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE and SOUNDGARDEN songs in the past, but we'll probably be playing a wider variety of those this time out. Between RAGE , SOUNDGARDEN and TEMPLE OF THE DOG , there's 11 or 12 records of our own that we could draw from, so it's pretty exciting.
We're very involved in picking the bands. KASABIAN is great. I know less about SEETHER , but I hear they rock.
The video tells a very simple story and a very real story. It's a story of a woman who loses her husband and a child who loses his father. That's the simple story. The bigger picture is that the culture of violence at home breeds a culture of violence abroad, and there's a price to be paid for that. And that price is the loss of lives and families destroyed and to sum that up in a three-and-a-half-minute video is something that was pretty incredible.
We've done smaller tours at the beginning of records, we've done Lollapalooza , but this is our first real official AUDIOSLAVE tour.
Music is not some stuffy college lecture, ... On a good day, Rage Against the Machine is not able to just rock you like a hurricane, but also to fuel the engine with indignation and the band's activist convictions.
We offer a stark contrast to the bland escapism that chokes the charts,
It's not like we just changed a rapper for a singer, ... We happen to have one of the greatest rock singers of all time.
It's a venue where you can really feel the history. You know, it was one of my first pilgrimages. I went on a rock tour just to go there and check it out.
It was a terrible natural disaster but an even greater human catastrophe.
We've been able to have our cake and eat it, too. Every song, every T-shirt, is absolutely a pure expression of what we want to do. And it connects.