How Lockdown, Kanye West & Mount Everest Impacted Tom Morello's New Album

As an abundant artist and advocate for social and political issues, the burgeoning legacy for prolific muso and actual guitar hero Tom Morello has spanned decades while continually influencing the course of modern musical history.

Whether you know Morello best for his tenure with rockers Rage Against the Machine, the riffing Chris Cornell-fronted supergroup Audioslave, Prophets of Rage or beyond, Morello has also spent his career campaigning for social justice and flying the flag for protest music that educates as much as it excites.

With three years passing since Morello's well-received 2018 solo release The Atlas Underground, much around the world has changed - and, as we all are unfortunately aware, much of that change has not been entirely for the better. But as Morello approaches the impending release of his brand new album The Atlas Underground Fire this Friday, the journey to this new outing has been one laden with unexpected twists amongst the more obvious setbacks, as Morello explained on today's episode of The Green Room podcast.

"From the time I was 17 years-old until March of 2020, I had constantly been writing, recording, touring and releasing music - and all of that came to a screeching halt," Morello mused to The Green Room host Tiana Speter. 

"It was really just, sort of, staring down the barrel of a new reality, there was going to be no shows, there was no idea when people might get in a room to record again. I have a recording studio in my home - but I don't know how to work it!"

Recalling how he would normally have an engineer in his home studio, the staggering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that ensued resulted in Morello being, for the first time ever, entirely alone in a studio setting. 

"It really was...a time of anxiety and, like, depression and musical drought. For my whole life I had been a musician, and now there was no music to be played.

"I didn't touch a guitar for about four months."

To hear an artist like Morello recall not touching his lifeblood instrument for months only echoes the heartbreaking reality for musicians and creatives all over the world, with inspiration and motivation lagging for many as the pandemic continues to rage on. But, as Morello divulged on today's episode of The Green Room, creative revelations were found in the most unexpected places as a result of isolation and lockdown.

"Inspiration came from a very, very unlikely place...I read an interview with Kayne West where he was bragging that he'd recorded the vocals for a couple of his albums onto the Voice Memos of his iPhone. 

"I said, well: that's interesting! So, I recorded some guitar into my iPhone - and it sounded fucking fantastic!" Morello enthused.

"And I started shipping out these guitar licks and riffs to different engineers and producers around the world, during a time when I was completely alone...completely isolated in my, you know, one-man, lonely studio here...[I] began forging this global collective of collaborators - and friends!"

While many familiar Morello friends make appearances on The Atlas Underground Fire, including the team-up of actual rock royalty, with Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder joining Morello for a diabolically fun cover of AC/DC's Highway To Hell, the overall album boasts a cavalcade of diverse collaborators, covering nearly every inch of the genre-sphere.

"At a time where every day felt like it was exactly the same, there was this spice of the creative unknown on a daily basis where I'd come up here, just grab a guitar," Morello recalled.

"Whatever I was feeling on that particular day, not other-thinking it, and going: 'oh, maybe I'll send this to Bruce Springsteen, or Bring Me The Horizon or Damian Marley and just see what happens!

"And it became this, like, rock'n'roll pen pal situation," Morello chuckled.

While crafting The Atlas Underground Fire, Morello sent tracks out to potential collaborators, including some brand new artists he'd discovered along the way. The Atlas Underground Fire soon ignited, with guests recording from all over the globe - and one collaborator even going as far to record vocals while summiting the Earth's highest mountain above sea level.

"We were all over the map, geographically," said Morello. 

"Bruce Springsteen was in New Jersey, Eddie Vedder in the Pacific Northwest, Bring Me The Horizon was in both Brazil and the UK, Chris Stapleton was in Nashville, Phantogram in L.A.

"Mike Posner recorded his vocals at 25,000ft in Nepal on his way to summiting Mount Everest! For real, between the beginning of the recording of this album and the end, Mike Posner summited Mount Everest."

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Tom Morello's new album The Atlas Underground Fire will release this Friday 15 October.

You can listen to the full episode with Tom Morello and host Tiana Speter below or here, including a chat about how exactly the cover of Highway To Hell came to life right here in Australia. Alternatively, you can also listen to full The Green Room podcast episodes below, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts - or wherever you usually get your podcasts from.

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Need more music, film, TV and comedy in your life? Check out all previous episodes of The Green Room here - and did you know you can also watch episodes of The Green Room too? Head here to check out some of the recent videos, and if you're still hunting for content to feed your ears, be sure to check out some of the other exciting Handshake Agency podcasts below!

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