Quote

Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.

Tom Morello

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tom Morello
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: May 30
Actor
Banjoist
Composer
Guitarist
Mandolinist
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Trade Unionist
New York City
New York
Thomas Baptist Morello
Around
Silt
Best
Explores
Music
Stirs
Find
Psyche
Really
Demons
Think
Demon
Thinking
Honestly
Personal

More quotes by Tom Morello

Image
I was a fan of heavy music - first metal, then punk, then hip hop.
Tom Morello
Image
You can kiss my Kiss-loving ass because Kiss was never a critic's band. It was a people's band.
Tom Morello
Image
I feel fortunate to have made records during an era where people actually bought music. But I have friends in struggling up-and-coming bands now that will certainly never be able to pay the rent, because music has been devalued.
Tom Morello
Image
Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.
Tom Morello
Image
I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.
Tom Morello
Image
When I am most successful as a guitar player is when I'm able to just sort of lose myself. You stop thinking about technique or anything like that and just trying to evoke the emotion of that song brings, which is a very strong emotion for me.
Tom Morello
Image
Well, I don't care for Paul Ryan's sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.
Tom Morello
Image
For the millennium [New Year's Eve], you really have a choice to make. You either have to be naked with your head on fire and a shotgun in Bali or else you have to spend time with friends or family around the fireplace. And I'm choosing option B
Tom Morello
Image
The problem is not cop killers...it's killer cops.
Tom Morello
Image
Bad presidents make for great music, and I'm gonna do my best to provide it.
Tom Morello
Image
When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.
Tom Morello
Image
If aliens came down and challenged us to a Battle of the Bands to decide the fate of Planet Earth, I would feel very confident putting early Van Halen forward as our champion.
Tom Morello
Image
The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent, asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.
Tom Morello
Image
We have power not just with our voices, but we have economic power in what we do for a living, too.
Tom Morello
Image
Always question the authority.
Tom Morello
Image
My parents met in Kenya. My father is African, is Kenyan. The Kenyan side of my family was involved in the anticolonial movement.
Tom Morello
Image
What draws people to the instrument is the love for guitar players that play a certain way. I mean, even though it wasn't intentional, it was hard to avoid copying Eddie Van Halen. He was basically the *bleep* back then.
Tom Morello
Image
The skin you're in makes choices for you...
Tom Morello
Image
The most powerful music is music with purpose.
Tom Morello
Image
I don't want to leave this mess around my children to clean up. I want to swing absolutely as hard as I can to straighten things out before they get to the age where it starts hurting them.
Tom Morello