Former Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello revealed that a new song solo of his is a reworked unreleased 1994 Rage Against The Machine song idea in a new Premier Guitar Rig Rundown video, transcribed by Ultimate-Guitar.
Do you typically ride in the neck position?
“I’m a person that is a great believer in, like, a good riff is a good riff whenever it happens. For example, the opening riff for the ‘Bombtrack,’ I wrote that when I was 19 years old and a college freshman at Harvard put it on RadioShack tape. I thought, ‘One day, this is gonna rock people.’
“Similarly, on ‘Atlas Underground’ there’s a song called ‘Vigilante Nocturno,’ played with this guitar in drop-D tuning.
“I wrote that riff during the ‘Evil Empire’ sessions in Atlanta in 1994, and again, it didn’t find sort of fertile ground there so I stuck it in my back pocket and knew that one day it would rock people, and that day has come.”
I think this record [‘The Atlas Underground’] is a Trojan horse of sorts, of bringing the guitar back – because I know with The Nightwatchman, you’ve gone acoustic a bit; with this, it’s back to your roots.
“The idea was to make a record in 2018 that was an unapologetic rock ‘n’ roll record with unapologetic guitar record, but it had some of these sonic elements, it’s a record I look at like it’s a sonic conspiracy.
“So it’s my guitar playing, but it’s married with Bassnectar and Knife Party and Killer Mike and Wu-Tang clan, some friends – new and old – really, the Trojan Horse is a right way to describe it.
“We’ve got a song on the record that is sort of alternative, and for the first time in many many years, there’s a song on the radio that had a blessed guitar solo.”
What was it like collaborating with such EDM-based performers?
“With Bassnectar, we sat down in my studio, we tried a bunch of different riffs and nothing was really tickling his fancy. So I was just warming up, played a random riff. He said, ‘What’s that?’
“I said, ‘That’s me warming up.’ He asked, ‘Do we record it?’; I said, ‘I think we do.’ So we just took that, that was, like, the main mornerstone. And then he put a huge beat in it, we sent it over to Killer Mike and they rapped on top of it. That one came together pretty quickly.”
