In a new Rolling Stone interview, former Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello revealed that he offered Dave Grohl and Tim McIlrath to sing on a Steve Aoki collaboration, and McIlrath accepted the offer first.
His unorthodox approach shines on tracks like “How Long,” a summit between Morello, Aoki and Rise Against singer Tim McIlrath. For the cut, Morello sent Aoki “some plutonium-grade riffs” to see what the producer would cook up. Aoki says the track came together “incredibly, intuitively fast,” and claims to have devised its drop in 10 minutes. “I wanted to go hard,” he says. “I wanted to get reinvigorated by that blog-house-era electro sound that was my flag back in the day that I was waving, bringing back the punk and hardcore sound and ideology into electronic music.”
Within two days of sending his “riff pack” to Aoki, Morello received a text: The producer wanted to play him a draft of the song via FaceTime. “I’m like, ‘Man, I’m running around, can you just send it to me?’” Morello recalls. “He’s like, ‘No, I want to see your face when you listen to it!’” Hours later, Morello had a “one-man mosh pit” going in his Southern California home, while Aoki was “headbanging furiously” in his Vegas studio. (When Aoki suggested McIlrath or Dave Grohl as vocalists, Morello texted both, offering the gig to whoever responded first; McIlrath, a frequent collaborator whom Morello says he calls whenever “there is a cause that needs to be rocked for,” got there fastest.)
Morello told Radio.com, “Nah Dave, that’s another jam for for another time. I love Dave, he would have been fantastic. He is fantastic, we’ll work on something else.”
