SENDING UP A FLARE
TOM MORELLO HAD BIG PLANS FOR 2020 — first and foremost, a world tour with a reunited Rage Against the Machine that would’ve seen him rocking stages from Pittsburgh to Prague, Kansas City to Krakow. Instead, like all of us, he was stuck at home. “Pretty frankly, it was a time of great anxiety and depression,” Morello admits to Guitar World.
But then something shocking happened. “Weirdly,” he continues, “inspiration came… from Kanye West.”
Let us state for the record that, no, Morello has not collaborated with the hip-hop icon. Rather, he found encouragement in something West had said in an interview. “He was talking about how he recorded the vocals to a couple of his big hit records on the voice memo of his phone,” Morello recalls. “And I thought to myself, well, I have a voice memo on my phone. Can I just record guitar riffs that way? So I did.” Those riffs, he continues, “sounded kind of great, so I started sending them out to various engineers and producers around the world. And that was the genesis for The Atlas Underground Fire.”
The follow-up to Morello’s 2018 solo effort, , the new is built on a similar foundation, with Morello collaborating with a variety of musicians in a wide range of genres, from rock (Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder on a cover of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell”), metal (Bring Me the Horizon on “Let’s Get the Party Started”) and country (Chris Stapleton on “The War Inside”) to punk (the Refused’s Dennis Lyxzén on “Save Our Souls”), alternative (Grandson on
