Showing posts with label Tom Morello. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Morello. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 04, 2021

Good Morning! Tom Morello - Highway To Hell (ft. Bruce Springsteen & Eddie Vedder)


Eddie Vedder and Bruce Springsteen appear in the first single from

Tom Morello's New Album The Atlas Underground Fire Out Oct 15th, 2021

Tom Morello explains that they’re “bringing this legendary song into the future. One of the greatest rock’n’roll songs of all time sung by two of the greatest rock’n’roll singers of all time. And then I drop a shredding guitar solo. Thank you and good night.”

The Atlas Underground Fire: 01 Harlem Hellfighter 02 Highway to Hell [ft. Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder] 03 Let’s Get the Party Started [ft. Bring Me the Horizon] 04 Driving to Texas [ft. Phantogram] 05 The War Inside [ft. Chris Stapleton] 06 Hold the Line [ft. Grandson] 07 Naraka [ft. Mike Posner] 08 The Achilles List [ft. Damian Marley] 09 Night Witch [ft. Phem] 10 Charmed I’m Sure [ft. Protohype] 11 Save Our Souls [ft. Dennis Lyxzén] 12 On the Shore of Eternity [ft. Sama’ Abdulhadi]








Sunday, March 07, 2021

Remembering Bloody Sunday

Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Death to My Hometown

by Gregg Chadwick

Death to My Hometown
(Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball)


Wisconsin Hometown
photo by Gregg Chadwick

Last year Bruce Springsteen took a turn as guest vocalist on the Boston based Irish American punk band The Dropkick Murphys' version of Peg O' My Heart. They played Boston's House of Blues together in March 2011 and the sound seems to have carried over into Springsteen's rollickingly powerful Celtic inspired song Death to My Hometown (Listen Here). 

The Dropkick Murphys and Bruce Springsteen
House of Blues, Boston, Mass 2011

Like Springsteen, The Dropkick Murphys have been influenced by Woody Guthrie, going as far as using Guthrie's unpublished lyrics as the basis for their song I'm Shipping Up to Boston which Martin Scorsese used masterfully in his film The Departed



We Stand With Wisconsin
(Madison, Wisconsin 2011)
photo by Gregg Chadwick 

Inspired by Guthrie's progressive politics, The Murphys were involved with the Wisconsin Union solidarity movement last year. Their song Take 'Em Down is a pro-union romp that would sound right at home on Wrecking Ball. Tom Morello, whose powerful guitar solos provide a sonic edge to Wrecking Ball, also was influential in backing the protestors gathered in Madison, Wisconsin in February 2011. Morello's deeply political album from last year, World Wide Rebel Songs, can be seen as a harbinger for Springsteen's Wrecking Ball.



Gregg Chadwick
Drum Taps
24"x24" oil on linen 2011

In Death to My HometownBruce Springsteen combines the influence of The Dropkick Murphys and Tom Morello with what Greil Marcus has called "the old, weird America".
The song starts with a booming martial drum beat accompanied by penny whistle and a ghostly looped choir sampled from Alan Lomax's field recording of the Sacred Harp Singers' version of  The Last Words of Copernicus.

Oh! No cannonballs did fly, no rifles cut us down
No bombs fell from the sky, no blood soaked the ground
No powder flash blinded the eye, no deathly thunder sound
But just as sure as the hand of God, they brought death to my hometown
They brought death to my hometown, boys.


 In Yonkers, Jacqueline Borrero says the payment on her family’s home is $4,800 a month,
up from $4,000 last May. The loan will rise to $5,100, starting in November.
“We’re really scared,” she said.


October 2007, The New York Times
photo by George M. Gutierrez for The New York Times

No shells ripped the evening sky, no cities burning down
No armies stormed the shores for which we'd die
No dictators were crowned
I awoke from a quiet night, I never heard a sound
Marauders raided in the dark and brought death to my hometown, boys
Death to my hometown

A sign leans on a fence at a new Occupy Oakland encampment at a foreclosed property on November 22, 2011 in Oakland, California. About a dozen Occupy Oakland protestors set up an encampment on the grassy area of a foreclosed property after Oakland police shut down three different Occupy encampments over the past week, including the biggest one that was in Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of Oakland City Hall.
             November 21, 2011 - Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America

They destroyed our families' factories and they took our homes
They left our bodies on the plains, the vultures picked our bones

So listen up, my sonny boy, be ready when they come
For they'll be returning sure as the rising sun
Now get yourself a song to sing and sing it 'til you're done
Yeah, sing it hard and sing it well

Send the robber barons straight to hell
The greedy thieves who came around
And ate the flesh of everything they found
Whose crimes have gone unpunished now
Who walk the streets as free men now

Springsteen's Death to My Hometown is not just a lament for what has been lost, but also a musical call to action to gather the 99% together and to bring Wall Street and the pushers of unjustly weighted loans to justice. As I listen to the finale of Death to My Hometown, the chorus begins to shift into the massed crowd in the Italian painter Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's monumental work, The Fourth Estate. Coupled with Springsteen's powerful music, Volpedo's painting provides an inspirational reference for international camaraderie and action. I am reminded of the powerful words of Martin Luther King Jr., "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

We are not alone.


Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo
Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate)
293 x 545 cm oil on canvas 1901
Civica Galleria d'Arte Moderna
Milan, Italy

All lyrics from Death to My Hometown -  Copyright © Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP)


More Song by Song Reviews of Wrecking Ball:


More at:

"Bruce Springsteen's widescreen vision of America on Wrecking Ball is filled with terror, tension, tenacity and above all else, triumph which may not replenish your bank account, but it will replenish your soul."
-Anthony Kuzminski, Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball, antiMusic
All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly
The Working Man's Voice - The Wall Street Journal
Bruce Springsteen, Théatre Marigny press conferenceParis, February 2012

This Depression

by Gregg Chadwick

This Depression
(Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball)

"Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire.":
 - Bruce Springsteen, Paris, February 2012


Margaret Bourke-White
The Louisville Flood
 9 11/16'" × 13 3/8" gelatin silver print mounted on board 1937
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Midway through Wrecking Ball, Bruce Springsteen's haunting song This Depression (Listen Here) limns the album's lowest emotional point. In contemporary America, empathy seems to be an underrated virtue. Talk radio and squawking television news channels attempt to prejudice their audience with the idea that economic victims of this latest recession have created their own reality through a lack of hard work or because of some sort of moral failing. In an unjustly weighted society split between haves and have-nots, social mobility is nothing more than a pipe dream. Those who attempt to cross the economic divide are doomed to fail while playing on Wall Street's real life version of Chutes and Ladders.

This is a subject that Bruce Springsteen knows well. In a recent press junket in Paris, Springsteen said, "my father had been emasculated by losing his job in the 70s and that he never recovered from the damage to his pride. Unemployment is a really devastating thing. I know the damage it does to families. Growing up in that house there were things you couldn't say. It was a minefield. My mother was the breadwinner. She was steadfast and relentless and I took that from her."

This Depression opens with slapping drums, mournful synth, a ghostly choir and Springsteen's gritty evocation of time's wounds.  Tom Morello's guitar sweeps in with washes and sighs. The singer, perhaps reminiscent of Springsteen's father, sings for hope, love, and retribution:

Baby, I've been down, but never this down
I've been lost, but never this lost
This is my confession, I need your heart
In this depression, I need your heart



Gregg Chadwick
Poem of L.A.
12"x12" oil on wood 2010 

In This Depression, Springsteen sings of the things that couldn't be said through the voice of a man who has lost his job and who yearns for the certainty of place and meaning that comes with employment:

Baby, I've been low, but never this low 
I've had my faith shaken, but never hopeless
This is my confession, I need your heart
In this depression, I need your heart


Destitute peapickers in California. Florence Owens Thompson
Mother of seven children.
Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California. 
photo by Dorothea Lange 1936 March
 The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division


Listening to This Depression, I think of Dorothea Lange's portrait of Florence Owens Thompson. The portrait is visually well known but the subject is almost as anonymous as the woman Leonardo da Vinci depicted in the Mona Lisa. 


Leonardo da Vinci
Mona Lisa 
photo by Gregg Chadwick
The Louvre
Paris, France

The Mona Lisa has obviously become an icon as has Dorothea Lange's portrait. Geoffrey Dunn in the San Jose Metro reported that Florence Owens Thompson "came to regret that Lange ever made the photographs, which she felt permanently colored her with a 'Grapes of Wrath' stereotype. Thompson, a Native American from Oklahoma, had already lived in California for a decade when Lange photographed her. The immediate popularity of the images in the press did nothing to alleviate the financial distress that had spurred the family to seek seasonal agricultural work. Contrary to the despairing immobility the famous image seems to embody, however, Thompson was an active participant in farm labor struggles in the 1930s, occasionally serving as an organizer. Her daughter later commented, 'She was a very strong woman. She was a leader. I think that's one of the reasons she resented the photo—because it didn't show her in that light.'1"

Springsteen is cogniscent of this possibility. The first person delivery of This Depression forces us to confront the pain and emotional depression of the singer and hopefully embrace the possibility of healing. What is needed is empowerment, not charity - programs, not canned goods. Those without jobs, without hope, without place, need employment, empathy and possibility.

And I've always been strong, but I've never felt so weak
And all my prayers have gone for nothing
I've been without love, but never forsaken
Now the morning sun, the morning sun is breaking

 Springsteen's This Depression echoes his recent statement that, “My job is to do for you what Bob Dylan did for me, kick open the door to your mind, reach for something higher than yourself and grovel around for something lower too. That’s the job: to be paid for something that can’t be bought.”

NOTES
1. Geoffrey Dunn, “Photographic License,” San Jose Metro, January 19-25, 1995, p. 22

All lyrics from This Depression -  Copyright © Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP)

More Song by Song Reviews of Wrecking Ball:


More at:

"Bruce Springsteen's widescreen vision of America on Wrecking Ball is filled with terror, tension, tenacity and above all else, triumph which may not replenish your bank account, but it will replenish your soul."
-Anthony Kuzminski, Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball, antiMusic
All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly
The Working Man's Voice - The Wall Street Journal
Bruce Springsteen, Théatre Marigny press conferenceParis, February 2012