(SOUNDBITE OF TOM MORELLO SONG, "EVERYONE GETS EVERYTHING THEY WANT")
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
That's the kind of guitar riff fans now expect from musician Tom Morello. But this time, the Rage Against the Machine co-founder is going solo.
TOM MORELLO: I really wanted to make a record that - and try to make one guitar sound like an entire revolution, though I do fear this may be the last record I make before they throw us all in jail.
SUMMERS: Like the 21 albums that came before it, "Everyone Gets Everything They Want" is Morello's answer to the political moment.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EVERYONE GETS EVERYTHING THEY WANT")
MORELLO: (Singing) Everyone gets everything, everyone gets everything, everyone gets everything they want, they want.
This is rebellion as self-care, honestly. You know, this is like radical rock 'n' roll as a way to, one, resist the rising tide of tyranny and authoritarianism, but two, to just find a way to kind of weave my convictions into my vocation.
SUMMERS: It's his first solo rock album, but Morello wasn't totally alone (ph).
MORELLO: I was very much helped out in this effort by my 15-year-old son, Roman Morello, who is a contributor to five of the songs on the record and has, in a lot of ways, sort of surpassed me as a technical guitar player on the record.
SUMMERS: What's it like collaborating with your son?
MORELLO: Sure. He's become a muse in a way. One, I - you know, I poach his best riffs listening at his door. But unlike when you're in a band, sometimes there are contentious things that happen, and when you're in a band with your son, if there's contention, I can just send him to his room.
(LAUGHTER)
SUMMERS: One of the songs you wrote with him on this album is "Soldier In The Army Of Love." And you've described that song elsewhere as a mission statement. Tell us about it.
MORELLO: Sure, sure. In these days, every act of art is an act of resistance. You know, every song sung is a beacon of light in the gathering darkness and every truth spoken and riff dropped is a bulwark against the rising tide of authoritarianism. So one - I tried to write a song that I could open my shows with for the next 10 years.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOLDIER IN THE ARMY OF LOVE")
MORELLO: (Singing) In the maquiladoras and at Carnegie Hall, in the grain elevator making fascists crawl. On the banks of the Volga...
Really a mission statement about the fact that history is not something that happens.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
MORELLO: History is something that we make. And there's no one coming to save us except us. And especially at this desperate and dangerous crossroads, we have to stand, you know, in our home, in our place of work, in our country at large to do what we can in an uncompromising way to aim for the world that we really want.
SUMMERS: It's clear that you feel like this is a moment of urgency and potential peril for our society. I wonder what gives you hope right now?
MORELLO: Well, I mean, every show that I play, we try to create a little bit of the world that we'd like to one day see. And you see in those rooms, you see different generations, different ethnicities, different genders, like, all sort of coming together in the celebration of resistance that can be a rock 'n' roll show. For example, on October 3, near D.C. at the Merriweather Pavilion, I'm hosting the Power to the People Festival with Foo Fighters, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Joan Baez, Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, etc., etc., to try to do that on a much larger scale hopefully at the turning of the tide, in a lot of ways. One, it's three weeks out from the midterms.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
MORELLO: But, you know, my mom, Mary Morello, who recently passed away at 102 years old, was a, you know, lifelong freedom fighter and truth teller. And she - her thought on the electoral process was this. She says, you've got to fight the fascists every which way you can. One of those ways is at the ballot box. And so the proceeds from this show are going towards voters' rights organizations. But that's just a strategic move and one piece on the chessboard. And the day after the elections, you know, we try to do the best we can to create a playing field...
SUMMERS: Right.
MORELLO: ...Where the real work begins. And that's what will hopefully happen and energize people with this Power to the People show.
SUMMERS: Your song "Date Night," it takes us back in history, and it tells the story of these three young women who resisted the Nazis. Tell us about the inspiration behind that song.
MORELLO: Sure. "Date Night" is a story of three teenage girls in the Netherlands in World War II who seduced Nazi officers, lured them into the woods and killed them.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DATE NIGHT")
MORELLO: (Singing) We killed them in the ditches. We killed them in the streets. We killed them in the forest, in the fields and on the beach. We blew up their trains and bridges, my sister, Hannie, and I. It's date night, and I've never felt so alive, so alive. Hey.
They're heroes of mine. Hannie Schaft was only 14 years old when she began her guerrilla campaign. The other two were sisters who survived and lived to a ripe old age. Hannie was captured, tortured and killed by the Nazis in the final months of the war, but she never snitched on her sisters. They're great heroes of mine. And I actually went around to, like, every Hollywood studio trying to get them to make this into a movie or a TV show, and no one - apparently it was not marketable enough as, I don't know, "Dancing With The Stars" or, you know, whatever, you know, "Goonies 5" or whatever is in theaters this week.
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
MORELLO: But so I did it myself. I wrote the song myself. Now, the crazy thing is that, one, it's a very inspirational song.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
MORELLO: Two, my 15-year-old son Roman wrote the hot riff in it. But the crazy thing is that it's been controversial, and there's been a lot of pushback. You know, I make anti-racist songs for anti-racists. I make anti-fascist songs for anti-fascists. And in this case, I made an explicitly anti-Nazi song for anti-Nazis, and in 2026, that pissed some people off.
SUMMERS: Did that surprise you?
MORELLO: Unfortunately, it didn't. You know, I'm - while I try to stay out of the comment section, I realized just how terrible (laughter) people can be. And the fact that, you know, writing a song about these anti-Nazi heroes was going to ruffle some feathers unfortunately did not surprise me at all.
SUMMERS: I do have to ask you about the closing song on this album. It's this beautiful acoustic track called "They Can't Kill Us All." Tell us about it.
MORELLO: Yeah. "They Can't Kill Us All" was actually sort of inspired by student protests on campus over the course the last couple years, including, you know, in my son's campus, where there was a lot of pushback, you know, people who their only mantra was, please stop killing children. Please just stop killing children. And it became very controversial. There was a lot of censorship on that. And the idea is that - it was an inspiration from my mom, Mary Morello. Like, there's an ember that burns inside all of us that cannot be extinguished.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THEY CAN'T KILL US ALL")
MORELLO: (Singing) And hit the ignition. Hold on tight, friends. This is the mission. They can't kill us all.
There is something in the human race that is continue to fight back. It's going to continue to resist, that is going to be unrelenting in the desire, whether there's billions of us or whether there's a handful.
SUMMERS: Tom, you've been making politically explicit music for more than three decades, and I wonder - is there something that you understand at this point in your career that perhaps you didn't when you first started doing this, when Rage first started?
MORELLO: Well, I don't separate someone who fights for justice, for lack of a better term, in their music than someone who does it via their labor union or someone who does it via their anarchist black block or whatever. Like, this is just - I'm kind of stuck doing this. I didn't choose to play guitar. It chose me. So now I just have to find a way as a guitar player to say what I think is true and to raise money for causes that are important and try to steel the spine of the real grassroots workers who are fighting for justice every day. So I mean, it's only sort of reconfirmed my belief that, one, we are in this together, two, that solidarity is the key to a better world, and three, that, like, as my mom said, like, you got to fight the fascists every which way you can. And creating mosh pits in a field or mosh pits in people's mind was what was behind making this record, "Everyone Gets Everything They Want."
SUMMERS: Tom Morello, his new album, "Everyone Gets Everything They Want," is out now. Tom, it's a pleasure.
MORELLO: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate you.
(SOUNDBITE OF TOM MORELLO SONG, "THEY CAN'T KILL US ALL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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