There’s seriousbusiness at hand AN AUDIENCE WITH TOM MORELLO
“Controversial music is not something you can take for granted, you have to fight for it”
LISTENING to Tom Morello’s raucous new “Comandante” EP, on which he pays tribute to Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen before trading licks with Slash, it’s hard to believe that it was recorded at home during lockdown. “My 97-year-old mom and my 89-year-old mother-in-law are with us,” he explains, “so we’ve literally been under corona house arrest for eight months with nobody in or out.” But after reading an interview where Kanye West extolled the virtues of recording to voicemail, Morello decided to make a whole EP doing just that. He’s particularly proud of how his version of “Voodoo Child” turned out: “It sounds pretty massive for a phone balanced on a little folding chair as the microphone.”
Such restrictions are nothing new for Morello. “Historically, I’ve written my most bombastic riffs on an acoustic guitar, which runs back to a time when
