Tom Morello

Tom Morello was born in Harlem in 1964, the son of a Kenyan diplomat and a politically active teacher from Illinois. He earned a degree in political science from Harvard, worked briefly as a political aide in Washington — and quickly realised that his revolution would have to come through the guitar, not the corridors of Congress. As founder and guitarist of Rage Against the Machine, he changed the sound of rock in the ’90s: a fusion of hip-hop, punk and metallic weight that sold over 30 million records and set a new standard for political rock. When Rage dissolved, he formed the supergroup Audioslave with Chris Cornell, followed by Street Sweeper Social Club with Boots Riley and Prophets of Rage.

He has toured with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, recorded with Johnny Cash, and was named one of the hundred greatest guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone. But Morello also has an entirely different register. Under the alias The Nightwatchman, he has released three albums of political folk music — acoustic guitar, alone in a coffee house, far from the stadiums. Under his own name came The Atlas Underground in 2018 and The Atlas Underground Fire in 2021, albums where he collides guitar riffs with EDM producers, rappers and folk musicians in a kind of creative destruction.

Morello has never been afraid to crash worlds together: his signature sound is built on treating the guitar as a machine no one has written the manual for — feedback, toggle techniques, whammy pedals and unconventional picking that turn the instrument into something between a turntable and a weapon. Live, Tom Morello is a force regardless of format. Whether he stands alone with an acoustic guitar singing protest songs or fires off riffs that shake stadiums, the intensity is the same. What drives him has always been twofold: an uncompromising musical curiosity and an equally uncompromising political conviction.

Morello does not just play guitar — he uses it as a tool for tearing down walls, literally and figuratively.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​