Born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Libertyville, Tom Morello will always be best known to legions of rock fans as a supreme shredder.
April 9, 2007 (Press Release) --
Born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Libertyville, Tom Morello will always be best known to legions of rock fans as a supreme shredder -- the musician who developed a new vocabulary for lead guitar by evoking falling bombs, bursts of machine-gun fire and scratching turntables with '90s rap-rockers Rage Against the Machine and the post-alternative supergroup Audioslave.
The 42-year-old musician has always worked just as hard as a political activist, however -- he is a co-founder and driving force behind the organization Axis of Justice -- and for the last four and a half years, he's quietly been building a solo career, singing and playing acoustic guitar as the Nightwatchman. On April 24, Epic will release his first album as a one-man band, and "One Man Revolution" is as much of a surprise for his rich baritone and minimalist but moving songs as it is an expected forum for his views.
"The event that kind of pushed me out of the nest to begin with was the day after the 2004 presidential election, where I thought, 'I really enjoy doing the arena rock, and also the organizing and educating work of Axis of Justice, but I'm a musician, and I really need to be using my voice as a musician to strike a blow for freedom,'" Morello says, laughing. "That's when I really got the idea in my head that I would make a record, but it was still a secondary thing. It was really only about seven months ago when there was a reorganizing of priorities.
"I played an Amnesty International benefit show with Incubus up in Portland, and Incubus was in the studio with Brendan O'Brien [Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan, Neil Young]. They came back and gave a favorable review of the Nightwatchman show to Brendan, and he called me up and said, 'What's this Nightwatchman thing?' So I sent him some demos and he called me back the next day and said, 'Let's make a record.' And I went down to Atlanta and made the record down there."
As the Nightwatchman, Morello draws on his personal experiences to add resonance to his rousing calls to arms: "On the streets of Havana / I got hugged and kissed / At the Playboy Mansion / I wasn't on the list," he sings in the title track. But it's never easy for a successful musician to reinvent himself in a world where record companies prefer their artists to stick with the expected, and he laughs again when I ask if he feels like Coca-Cola when it tried to launch New Coke.
"That's why it was important to me to have a real firewall between this and, like, the Daywatchman. I would always do it anonymously; I would never do it under my own name. Part of that was hiding behind it, because I had never sung before, and I was just trying to remember the words to the songs. But it was a process: I gained confidence doing that.
Source: http://yahoo.com.cn
The 42-year-old musician has always worked just as hard as a political activist, however -- he is a co-founder and driving force behind the organization Axis of Justice -- and for the last four and a half years, he's quietly been building a solo career, singing and playing acoustic guitar as the Nightwatchman. On April 24, Epic will release his first album as a one-man band, and "One Man Revolution" is as much of a surprise for his rich baritone and minimalist but moving songs as it is an expected forum for his views.
"The event that kind of pushed me out of the nest to begin with was the day after the 2004 presidential election, where I thought, 'I really enjoy doing the arena rock, and also the organizing and educating work of Axis of Justice, but I'm a musician, and I really need to be using my voice as a musician to strike a blow for freedom,'" Morello says, laughing. "That's when I really got the idea in my head that I would make a record, but it was still a secondary thing. It was really only about seven months ago when there was a reorganizing of priorities.
"I played an Amnesty International benefit show with Incubus up in Portland, and Incubus was in the studio with Brendan O'Brien [Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan, Neil Young]. They came back and gave a favorable review of the Nightwatchman show to Brendan, and he called me up and said, 'What's this Nightwatchman thing?' So I sent him some demos and he called me back the next day and said, 'Let's make a record.' And I went down to Atlanta and made the record down there."
As the Nightwatchman, Morello draws on his personal experiences to add resonance to his rousing calls to arms: "On the streets of Havana / I got hugged and kissed / At the Playboy Mansion / I wasn't on the list," he sings in the title track. But it's never easy for a successful musician to reinvent himself in a world where record companies prefer their artists to stick with the expected, and he laughs again when I ask if he feels like Coca-Cola when it tried to launch New Coke.
"That's why it was important to me to have a real firewall between this and, like, the Daywatchman. I would always do it anonymously; I would never do it under my own name. Part of that was hiding behind it, because I had never sung before, and I was just trying to remember the words to the songs. But it was a process: I gained confidence doing that.
Source: http://yahoo.com.cn
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