Tom Morello names his favourite heavy metal albums
Most Tom Morello guitar tracks sound like they come from a completely different planet. Throughout his work with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, Morello was always expanding his guitar’s capabilities, often trading in some of the shredding solos for strange ambient sounds that he could get off of his fretboard. Outside of being the unofficial DJ of the band, Morello was always indebted to the heavy side of music.
Beyond the rap foundation of Rage, Morello always had an affinity for metal music, counting Judas Priest and Black Sabbath among some of his favourite acts. In the grand tradition of other metal acts, Rage were meant to be subversive and get listeners out of their usual comfort zone, and the influence of great bands like Sabbath was the stone age version of those principles.
Even though Rage came to prominence when metal music was looked down on, he did mention having some hair metal artists in his collection, citing the early records from the likes of Van Halen and Mötley Crüe among his favourites. Although most of those acts were either history or going through some rough spots during the era of grunge, Morello still maintained his fandom, thinking that it all came back to spark a feeling in one’s gut that makes the world feel more exciting.
Outside of the traditional metal bands, Morello also had love for the adjacent hard rock bands that got lumped in with metal, such as AC/DC, Aerosmith and Guns N’ Roses. Though not each of these acts normally fit under the traditional umbrella of metal, they paved the way for heavier acts to come after them, with their odes to hard living becoming customary in the genre later on.
When picking some of his favourite metal albums of all time, Morello was quick to mention his love for guitar greats like Randy Rhoads, telling MusicRadar when speaking about Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz: “It combined awesome musicianship with furious rock, and it revitalised Ozzy’s career and began to make him the household name he is today. More importantly, if there were no vocals at all on the record, it would still hold this high position due to Randy Rhoads’ axe mastery”.
It was this love of metal music that helped Morello define his place in music as the years went on. When he was putting together the beginnings of Rage Against the Machine in the early 1990s, Morello always came back to some of his favourite records for inspiration, noting that Rage was meant to be the perfect marriage of his love of hard rock riffs through the filter of hip hop.
Each of those lessons that Morello was taught by the likes of Rhoads, Van Halen, and Joe Perry impacted how he sculpted his guitar solos. Despite being focused on raw sounds, Morello also threw down different shredding techniques throughout his solo work, including some of his career’s most piercing lead work on their debut album like ‘Take the Power Back’.
That love for metal didn’t stop when Morello became famous, either. Well after Rage’s formation, Morello still kept his ear close to the ground, applauding bands like Tool and System of a Down for their ways of subverting the genre. While both bands fit in the vein of traditional metal, there’s almost a bit of Rage’s spirit in those acts, being outspoken about what they were and not wanting to compromise their sound by any means.
Once he moved into hard rock territory with Chris Cornell in the group Audioslave, Morello was free to wear his influences on his sleeve more, with ‘Cochise’ having the same stomp that one would expect from a Sabbath riff. Morello has definitely changed as a guitar player since his origins in metal, but there’s a part of him that will always be that little kid throwing on whatever he could to make himself look like his own metal gods.
Tom Morello’s favourite metal albums:
- Strangers in the Night – UFO
- Too Fast For Love – Motley Crue
- Piece of Mind – Iron Maiden
- Undertow – Tool
- Van Halen – Van Halen
- Toxicity – System of a Down
- The Last in Line – Dio
- British Steel – Judas Priest
- Blizzard of Ozz – Ozzy Osbourne
- Appetite for Destruction – Guns N’ Roses
- Rocks – Aerosmith
- Back in Black – AC/DC
- Sabbath Bloody Sabbath – Black Sabbath
