Tom Morello on the Failure That Created Rage Against the Machine, Faking Chords for Bruce Springsteen, and Teaching His Son to Shred

The guitarist tells Broken Record’s Justin Richmond about getting rejected by the Sunset Strip, a Harvard degree that led to nothing, and the Dutch teenage Nazi-killers behind his new single “Date Night”

Tom Morello has spent nearly four decades reinventing himself, from Rage Against the Machine’s riff architect to Bruce Springsteen‘s touring guitarist to a folk-protest troubadour called the Nightwatchman. Now, at 61, he’s released his first true solo rock album, Everyone Gets Everything They Want, out September 25th. Morello sat down with Broken Record’s Justin Richmond to talk through the record, a musical family affair built around his 15-year-old son Roman, and the long, strange road that got him there.

Rejected by the Sunset Strip

Morello arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s with a Harvard political science degree and, he assumed, the guitar chops to conquer Hollywood. Instead he found a scene built entirely around image. “I thought moving to Hollywood, I was going to be rewarded for my ability to play kick-ass guitar,” he said. “No one wanted to have anything to do with me.” One band manager asked if he’d be willing to wear a wig. Morello found his people instead on the East Side, the scrappier scene around Al’s Bar, where he joined the band Lock Up alongside future L7 bassist Jennifer Finch. “They didn’t care what color my skin was,” he said. “In that scene was love and open-heartedness.”

The Failure That Created Rage

When Geffen Records dropped Lock Up, a 26-year-old Morello considered himself finished. “I was an abject failure at the thing that I had tried,” he said. Sitting on a futon in West Hollywood, he made himself a vow: never again play a note he didn’t believe in. That vow produced the riffs that would become “Bombtrack,” “Know Your Enemy” and “Freedom”—the backbone of Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled 1992 debut, written before he’d even met future bandmate Zack de la Rocha. The first time Rage played publicly, at a house party in Huntington Beach, the response was immediate. “This is not a band that people like,” Morello remembered thinking. “This is a band that people believe in.”

Faking the Chords for Bruce Springsteen

Morello’s favorite backstage story involves the first time he ever performed with Springsteen, in 2008, when Springsteen abruptly transposed “The Ghost of Tom Joad” up eight steps minutes before showtime. “I’m getting the wrong chords,” Morello said. “I’m a nervous, anxiety-riddled wreck.” Unable to relearn the song in time, he improvised his way through it. “If you refer to the video of this, I’m faking all the chords,” he said. “There’s like seven guitar players playing the chords. Can I authentically sing a song of social justice? I can do that.” When his extended solo brought the crowd to its feet, Springsteen simply kept waving him on. “I said, ‘Bruce, I guess that was the right key after all.'” The two toured together on and off for the next 17 years, including a run this year Morello called Springsteen’s most overtly political.

Teaching His Son to Shred

Roman Morello co-wrote several tracks on the new record, including its lead single, after his father tricked him into picking up a guitar during pandemic lockdown by offering four-minute lessons on the opening riff of “Stairway to Heaven.” “It’s called playing music, not working music,” Morello said of the method, a direct rebuke of the guitar teacher who nearly killed his own interest in the instrument at 13 by insisting he learn scales before Led Zeppelin. When Roman mastered the “Stairway” solo, Morello sent a video to Jimmy Page, who wrote back with encouragement. Page, Morello says, remains disarmingly generous with both Morellos: “You will, and I do, ask him any question you want.”

Nazi Hunters and a New Kind of Solo Record

The album’s lead single, “Date Night,” tells the true story of Truus and Freddie Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft, teenage members of the Dutch resistance who lured Nazi officers into the woods and killed them during World War II. “These are anti-fascist songs for anti-fascists,” Morello said, adding that the position draws surprising pushback in 2026. He’ll bring the album’s politics to the stage on October 3rd at Power to the People, a festival he’s curating outside Washington, D.C. alongside Springsteen, Foo Fighters and Dave Matthews, built around voter registration and, as Morello put it, “smiting the fascists.”