In September 2021, I had a fantastic conversation with legendary guitarist Tom Morello for AARP. For those unfamiliar with Morello and his work, he is most widely known as the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, though he has also been a touring member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and has released solo music under the name The Nightwatchman. A graduate of Harvard University, Morello didn’t begin playing guitar until he was in his late teens, yet he has gone on to become one of the most respected musicians alive today. Rolling Stone named him No. 18 on its list of “The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” and he was inducted, along with the rest of Rage Against the Machine, to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2023.
Four years ago, Morello and I spent 30 minutes on Zoom, talking about his mom, his upbringing, his musical influences, and his new (at the time) album, The Atlas Underground Fire—a pandemic project on which Morello collaborated with a wide range of artists from all over the world, including rockers Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder, Palestinian DJ Sama’ Abdulhadi, Swedish hardcore punk band Refused, and country singer Chris Stapleton, among others.
Our interview was published as a short profile on AARP.org’s members-only website, but after a few years was pulled due to a site redesign. I’ve been given permission by my editor there to republish the piece here as a Q&A. Much of what is included has never been published before, so I’m excited to share it with you now.
SANDRA EBEJER: I have been listening to your music forever, so I'm really excited to have the chance to chat with you. This piece will talk about your new album but may also introduce you to readers who might not be as familiar with your life. Personally, I am a massive Mary Morello fan.
TOM MORELLO: Stand in line. Stand in line.
I am convinced that she is the coolest person alive.
You'll get no argument here.
Can you talk about her a bit, specifically her impact on the person and the musician you are today?
Sure. My mom who, God willing, turns 98 years old on October the first, grew up in a small coal mining town in Illinois, and she did something that no one had ever done from that town: she left, and as a single woman traveled the world for over 20 years on steamers. She had teaching aspirations, so she taught the children of officers at U.S. military bases in places like Japan and Spain and post-World War II in Germany. Eventually she was teaching in the Aberdare Mountains in Kenya, and that’s where she met my dad. And then after decades of global traveling and adventure, she moved back to small-town Illinois, where she was a public high school teacher for the next 25 years or so, where she raised me and was involved in a variety of progressive radical and revolutionary causes. She’s of Irish-Italian descent, and I was literally the only African American person in the town that we lived in. And so in contending with racism and things like that, she was always a ferocious mother bear and always standing up for the underdog, and to this day remains the most popular and radical member of the Morello family.
That’s amazing. How did being the only Black person in this very suburban white town go on to influence your work?
People will sometimes ask, “How were you politicized?,” assuming it was reading a Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn text. No, it happened at daycare when I was 5 years old. You get called all the names someone might call the only Black kid in town. And it was at that daycare where there was this older kid who’d just pound me every day and N-word me. I went home, my mom teased out of me what was going on, and she told me about a fella by the name of Malcolm X. She said, “Whenever you’re confronted with racism, you’re the one that has to resist it and has to fight back.” I was like, “I'm 5.” She’s like, “Yeah, even when you’re 5."
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