Forty-five years after their formation, Anthrax continues to be one of the most influential and beloved bands in heavy music. Coming together in New York City, the group released a pair of albums—1984’s Fistful of Metal and the following year’s Spreading the Disease—that, along with a ferocious live show (they supported Black Sabbath and Metallica early on), established the five-piece as one of the forefathers of thrash metal.
Anthrax’s third album, 1987’s Among the Living, was the breakthrough that put them in the pantheon of thrash greats. The critically acclaimed record, which eventually went gold, helped the band graduate from clubs to arena stages and cemented their place in the Big Four of American thrash alongside Metallica, Megadeth, and Slayer.
“It's been the fucking privilege of a lifetime to get to do this,” guitarist and co-founder Scott Ian tells PG. “We connected deep enough into the planet with Among the Living that essentially we’ve been able to have a career for 40 years since.”
In the years that followed, Anthrax zagged when other bands zigged. But remaining true to their own musical ideals is what allowed them to stand out from the metal pack. After being name-checked by Public Enemy on 1987’s “Bring the Noise,” Anthrax eventually recorded a version of that song with the Long Islanders in 1991 and followed with a joint tour, one of the landmark early metal-rap crossover pairings. In 1992, the band appeared on the Fox sitcom Married… with Children, playing a show at the Bundy residence, which replicated a 1989 MTV stunt where they trashed a contest winner’s (if you want to call them that) own house.
Those years alone would secure Anthrax’s legacy. But the band is nowhere near the nostalgia circuit. Now, a decade after For All Kings, their 11th and most recent studio album, Anthrax have finally followed it up, with the new Cursum Perficio.
Bringing Cursum Perficio to life took nearly six years. Anthrax wrapped the three-year touring cycle for For All Kings in November 2019, a run that included shows celebrating the 30th anniversary of Among the Living. Over dinner after their final show, at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, the band agreed to take some time off before starting on the follow-up. Drummer Charlie Benante had some rough demos, and the plan was for him, Ian, and bassist Frank Bello to get together in early 2020 and jam out instrumentals. First, Ian was going to finish a new album with Motor Sister, his side project with Joey Vera of Armored Saint, Jim Wilson of Mother Superior, John Tempesta (White Zombie, The Cult) and his wife, vocalist Pearl Aday. Instead, Covid hit, and like nearly everyone else in the world, he was stuck at home. For the next few years, the band worked remotely, zapping files and parts back and forth online.
“Not since the band started touring in 1984 have I ever been literally in one place for that long, let alone my house with my wife and my son,” Ian says. “Nobody knew anything. Nobody knew if we were ever going to play again.”
There was also plenty of anxiety about the unknown, the horrors of school shootings, partisan division, and cutthroat capitalism, as well as the tragedy of losing his father-in-law, the artist known as Meat Loaf, who passed away in 2022. All of it informed Ian’s lyrics.
“If you want to put it in gamer speak, we beat some final boss and we got to the next level of who we are as songwriters." —Scott Ian”
Anthrax, 2026 (l-r): bassist Frank Bello, singer Joey Belladonna, Donais, drummer Charlie Benante, Ian
Photo by Travis Shinn
“So much of that is certainly where I was at the time when I was writing lyrics for the record and my energy making the record, and I would have to think the same as for Charlie,” Ian says. “About 90 percent of the music is from his demos, and Frankie came in with fully realized stuff as well, and is also amazing at writing melody ideas. But most of it starts with Charlie.”
In early 2022, the trio finally got together at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 in the San Fernando Valley. Immediately, they realized they were onto something bigger than just another late-career album. They’d begin with one of Benante’s riffs or rough arrangements, which would quickly turn into a skeleton of a song.
“I remember that demo for ‘The Edge of Perfection,’” Ian says, “and I was thinking, ‘Holy fuck!’ If this is all we have, we're in good shape.’”
He’s not wrong. The song, built on Benante’s original demo, Bello’s chorus melody and groove-heavy bass line, and Ian’s words, runs for nearly seven minutes, with an atmospheric instrumental opening that explodes in a blast of metal riffing, aided by Joey Belladonna’s towering vocals. Benante has compared the song to Anthrax classics like “Only” and “Indians,” and Ian agrees with that sentiment, saying it ranks among the top tunes in the Anthrax catalog.
Ian wields his “Baldini” Jackson X Series Signature King V.
Photo by Travis Shinn
“I think it's the best song we've ever written,” he says. “That's my hot take on my own song that I'm a part of. When people ask, ‘What's your favorite Anthrax song?’ I usually say "Caught in a Mosh,’ based on the fact that it’s the one that's never been out of our set since that record [Among the Living] came out. But I just think on ‘Edge of Perfection’ we got to some other level, you know? Or, if you want to put it in gamer speak, we beat some final boss and we got to the next level of who we are as songwriters.”
Once the trio had the songs where they wanted them, they sent them to lead guitarist Jon Donais. Stuck at his home in Massachusetts, away from his bandmates, Donais had used the downtime to practice, and he says it made him a better player. When it came time to cut his parts, he’d get the tracks back with timestamps marking where the others wanted him to play. He’d cut a demo, take notes from Benante and Ian, then record a final version. Because the songs were already so strong, he says, he had room to get creative. “Right off the bat, I knew it was going to be great and I had to have something great cooking,” Donias recalls.
Far from cramping his creativity, the isolation felt familiar to Donais. He says the process was much the same on For All Kings, his first album with the band. Now 13 years in, making him the longest-tenured lead guitarist in Anthrax history, he was at ease with the setup, and he quickly heard how the new songs connected to the band’s classic material.
“It has some old-school Anthrax vibes to it, and is a well-rounded record,” he says, then adds, “It’s got some curveballs too.” One he didn't see coming: the black metal influence on “The Edge of Perfection.”
“It has some old-school Anthrax vibes to it, and is a well-rounded record. It’s got some curveballs, too." —Jon Donais”
Donais onstage with his Dean Exile Signature
Photo by Krista Belladonna
One early fan of that song was Dave Grohl. After mixing it at Grohl’s Studio 606, and with Grohl having played Ian the new Foo Fighters album before its release, Ian returned the favor.
“I sent him ‘The Edge of Perfection’ and ‘It’s for the Kids,’ which is a love letter to Anthrax fans,” Ian says. “He wrote me back the next day—I'm paraphrasing—‘Dude, like, holy shit! Oh my God, ‘Kids’ is classic Anthrax.” And about ‘Edge,’ he said, ‘It’s so you guys, and so new at the same time.’”
The reception has proved Grohl right. On social media, fans hailed the song as unmistakably Anthrax, and some called it one of the best releases from any of the Big Four in years. Benante’s pulsating drums, Ian and Donais’ guitars, and Belladonna’s vocals all contribute, but what seems to be connecting most is Ian’s lyric. The song, he says, is about choosing to live by love rather than fear, and sticking with that choice for the long haul. It also argues that perfection is boring and that real beauty is in facing life’s challenges, having empathy, and constantly working to keep yourself in a good place.
Navigating the intricacies of that song gave Anthrax confidence, fueling a heavy and urgent sound that permeates the entire album.
“Listening to it, I know where we were mentally when we were working on the demos,” Ian says. “How happy we were with the material we had… it’s all over the record. We've never had a moment like that, ever, in the history of the band. This is bigger than us. This one is special.”
The album’s title, when translated from Latin, has several meanings: My journey has come to an end; My journey is over; I complete my journey. But have no fear—it’s not a sign that Anthrax is ready to call it quits.
“We're not necessarily coy about it because we answer the question,” Ian says. “When people ask us, ‘Is it the last record?’ ‘Are you saying goodbye?’ I don't sit there and go, ‘Well, maybe…’ That’s not us.”
In fact, the title came from an unexpected place.
“Nobody knew anything. Nobody knew if we were ever going to play again.” —Scott Ian”
Photo by Travis Shinn
“Charlie came up with the idea after he read that a stone at Marilyn Monroe’s [home] had it,” Ian says. “He found out what it meant, and he just really loved the meaning and the feeling of the phrase. So much of it has to do with the journey to make this record.”
If you need more proof that the band isn’t done, the music makes the case. The 11-song album packs as powerful a punch as any Anthrax album in recent memory. In addition to previously released tracks, the tone-setting instrumental “Persistence of Memory” and the ferocious “Everybody’s Got a Plan” are sonically adventurous indicators of a group that isn’t ready to take a victory lap quite yet.
The response so far has been incredibly strong. Anthrax played a small club gig at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus ahead of a stadium show with Iron Maiden and Megadeth, and on the band’s European run this past summer, Donais says, “It's for the Kids” went over big with crowds.
At a time when they could be winding down, Anthrax continue to play hard and loud. "Their journey to Cursum Perficio hasn't been easy, but as Ian considers where they've arrived after 45 years, he's very aware of the payoff."
“Nobody hands you this,” Ian says of the band’s career. “I wasn't this person in another life. I wasn't this person in two other lives. Growing up in my life, it's been a road to get here.”
Anthrax Gear
Scott Ian
Guitars
Jackson X Series Signature Scott Ian King V (primary guitar, for rhythm parts; “white, the first one they built me”)
“The KHDK and the TC Electronic were used in front of a Marshall JCM800 as part of my main rhythm tone. That was combined with the EVH EL34. The rest of the pedals were used for sounds and overdubs.”
J Mascis has so many guitars that at least one of them has no obvious job. “It’s not good for songwriting, playing live, or recording. It’s not good for any of the real things we do. That leaves just playing it,” says the Dinosaur Jr. frontman, sporting a gray beard and red-framed glasses, via Zoom from a St. Louis hotel. “That’s kind of interesting: to play, knowing nothing will come out of it.”
The axe in question is a GibsonLes Paul Custom that had a broken headstock when Mascis bought it. “The guy at the shop said it was his bandmate’s,” Mascis recalls. “You could tell he just played it so much that it was somehow awesome. You could feel it was worn in just right.” Mascis had the headstock repaired, but he maintained everything else about it, including the “20th anniversary” letters stamped on the fretboard and its overall battered quality. “It’s beat up, and it’s been played at shows. It has a good feel you can only get from playing all the time. Somebody’s favorite guitar for years—it’s cool.”
The guitar has almost nothing to do with the reason Mascis is on this Zoom: to promote There Near, Dinosaur Jr.’s first album in five years. For this project, Mascis mostly employed a 1959 Fender Jazzmaster, after taking a multi-year break from the model. “I’m getting back to my roots because I never seem to,” he says, “and [playing] leads with it and stuff.” He retired the Fender from touring when he realized the guitar was worth tens of thousands of dollars, which freaked him out: “I’ll just play it when I’m recording,” he says.
Befitting Dinosaur Jr. since the Amherst, Mass., trio’s debut album, Dinosaur, in 1985, There Near is packed with Mascis’ solos and distinctively slacked-out voice meandering over the din. What’s slightly different about There Near, compared to the band’s previous album, 2021’s Sweep It Into Space, is a foundation of precise, Who-like power chords; the opening track “Several Got Away” has the feel of “I Can’t Explain” or “My Generation.” Mascis has zero theories about why that might be so: “Yeah, that’s just the songs I came up with,” he says. “At the time, I’m not sure where they came from.”
One physical piece of inspiration for There Near: a Mesa/Boogie Mark I amp, similar to the one Mascis used for the Dinosaur album 41 years earlier. Mascis purchased the more recent one secondhand, learning that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame had once utilized it for bands onstage. It had hemp cone speakers, and he plugged it into a Marshall cabinet he miked for the recording. “It was an interesting, clean sound that I hadn’t gotten again—this thicker-than-a-Fender sound,” he says. In 1985, he “didn’t know anything about amps,” he adds. “I had a Yamaha solid-state amp, because I saw Bob Mould had one. I thought, ‘How bad could it be?’ But my friend, the good guitarist in town, told me how terrible it sounded. I just used the amp they had at the studio”—the Mesa/Boogie Mark I.
The band’s core—Mascis; bassist Lou Barlow, who would go on to front acclaimed indie-rock band Sebadoh; and drummer Emmett Murphy, known as Murph—has been together off and on since 1984, following the breakup of Mascis’ and Barlow’s hardcore band, Deep Wound. The new trio developed a distorted, sludgy sound that would resonate amid the ’90s alt-rock and grunge explosion.
The group put out Dinosaur on an indie label, Homestead, which employed a young Boston punk-zine publisher and show promoter named Gerard Cosloy. He had briefly managed Deep Wound and, after joining Homestead—also home to hardcore heroes Big Black and Naked Raygun—offered to release a record by Mascis’ new band. “Back then, the Minutemen were a band we liked, and they said, ‘You need an album. That’s like a flier for the gigs. It’s better to have an album than a tape if you want to get gigs,’” Mascis recalls. “It seemed more legitimate or something.”
After the first album gave Dinosaur Jr. a reputation as noise-rock innovators—their concerts reinforced this perception by cranking up the volume beyond healthy human-hearing capacity—the band shifted to a new label. Mascis had always admired SST Records, which had signed Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, and the Minutemen, so he left Homestead to go there. “That kind of ruined my relationship with Gerard,” Mascis recalls. “He kind of got pissed off and jumped ship. But I had to follow my dreams.”
Photo by Rafael Novak
In 1990, Cosloy went on to join Matador Records, which released landmark indie-rock albums by artists like Pavement, Guided By Voices, and Liz Phair. Did Mascis ever reconcile with him? “Yes and no,” he says. “I mean, we’re not great. We never were as good of friends after that. But we definitely hung out a little bit.”
Mascis’ early professional bridge-burning had little impact on Dinosaur Jr.’s career. The band’s first SST album, 1987’s You’re Living All Over Me, was simultaneously more focused, song-wise, and more insanely packed with innovative guitar leads. The guitar-rock masterpiece was one of many crucial albums that soon revolutionized MTV and radio while helping the band become a touchstone for the Lollapalooza generation. (Dinosaur Jr. was on the storied festival’s 1993 bill with Alice In Chains, Rage Against the Machine, and others.)
“As I get older, my attention span gets less and less. I can’t play guitar for eight hours straight in the studio like the old days.”
The original Dinosaur Jr. lineup, though, was fraying. Mascis and Barlow were silently feuding. Mascis maintained tight control, writing almost every song, but Barlow was evolving into the band’s George Harrison, and he needed an outlet of his own. In 1987, Barlow released a four-track cassette of home recordings under the name Sentridoh, with his friend Eric Gaffney contributing percussion; that project helped lay the groundwork for Sebadoh and the lo-fi aesthetic at the core of the band’s music. Tensions within Dinosaur Jr. continued to grow: As the story goes, Mascis informed Barlow he was disbanding the lineup, but he put a new version together instead, initially with a rotating cast of bassists.
Both entities kept moving forward: Dinosaur Jr. signed with a major record label, Sire, and released their Mascis-produced 1991 album, Green Mind; Sebadoh was prolific, peaking with 1994's electrifying Bakesale, and Barlow formed several other projects and collaborations, including the Folk Implosion, best known for the 1995 Kids soundtrack hit, “Natural One.”
Mascis and Barlow continued on their separate trajectories until 2005: Indie label Merge Records reissued their early albums, and they reunited for a tour, which led to a 2007 record, Beyond, with the original lineup.
How has the Dinosaur Jr. dynamic between Mascis, Barlow, and Murphy changed over the years? Mascis pauses for a long time before responding: “Um. It’s hard to remember. At some point, it seemed like Murph and Lou flipped. When we first started, Murph wasn’t sure he wanted to do it all the time, sometimes. He’d quit for a week, but me and Lou were super-dedicated to the band.
Dinosaur Jr. (l-r): Lou Barlow, Mascis, Murph
Photo by Jeff Fowler
“When we got back to the band, it seemed like they had switched the roles. Murph was way more into it than Lou,” Mascis continues. “Other than that, it seems similar. I’d write the drum parts and Murph learns them. Or, for Lou songs, me and Murph would both drum—just try to write some drum parts, because Lou doesn’t think of drums.”
The band created There Near in bursts over the course of a year at Bisquiteen Studio, in Amherst. That’s a function of age, says the 60-year-old Mascis: “As I get older, my attention span gets less and less. I can’t play guitar for eight hours straight in the studio like the old days. Now we just figured—[don’t] push it at all. Record for an hour and a half, four days a week. At that schedule, it takes a while.”
The approach, Mascis says, tightened the album and made it easier to focus on a unifying sound. There Near follows Dinosaur Jr.’s nearly 40-year formula—moaned and mumbled Mascis lyrics set to a stomping rhythm, which is especially pronounced on the faster songs like “Several Got Away” and “Gone Off,” but slower tracks such as “Walk Me Back” open up to sharp torrents of shredding as well. “It’s good for quality control because you have time to weed out what you don’t like and see if you still like the thing four months later,” he says.
The two songs that deviate from this style are the Barlow-written “Blowin’ Up” and “No One’s Ready,” which have a softer, more melodic feel, with more space to accentuate the pointed lyrics: “You’re about as dumb as they come / and telling stupid stories every day,” he begins on “Blowin’ Up.” Mascis cedes control on Barlow’s compositions, playing guitar and bass as needed. “I just step back a bit and see what he wants me to do on the song,” he says.
“Back then, the Minutemen were a band we liked, and they said, ‘You need an album. That’s like a flier for the gigs.’”
Mascis, Murph and Barlow take it to the stage
Photo by Jeff Fowler
In the early days, Dinosaur Jr. put out a new album every two or three years; more recently, in part due to the band members’ solo projects, the gap has expanded to four or five years. But there’s no strategy for the timing of There Near, according to Mascis: “We just kind of do ’em. There’s no rhyme or reason. It just feels like time to do a new album. You’ve played all these places already, so it feels like you need a new album so you can play all the same places again. I guess that’s the logic in our head. That’s how we grew up.”
During the mixing process, Mascis adds, he wrote a couple of other songs “that were on the back burner,” and recorded them in the studio living room. Eventually, Dinosaur Jr. will release a seven-inch single as an addendum—but Mascis refuses to divulge any information about these additions. “Like what? What do you say about a song?” he asks. “Songs that didn’t quite make it. The one song sounded a lot like all the other songs. There were three that were vying for the last slot on the album, and one was just slower. It seemed to be good to have a slower song.”
At one point during the half-hour interview, Mascis refers to a Fender Super Champ as his “favorite around-the-house amp,” which he uses to “just watch TV and play the guitar and hope for the best.” He adds: “It sounds really good at a low volume.”
It’s one of many public references Mascis has made over the years to his lifelong passion for watching television; in 1997, he informed this reporter, for a Billboard story, of his obsession with MTV’s The Real World. The streaming-and-bingeing era hasn’t changed his habits much—including one specific and unexpected technical characteristic of his TV time. “I still watch it on my computer. I like the computer because it’s 15 inches—and that’s the size of the TV I had when I was a kid in our kitchen,” he says. “It was an odd size back then, but somehow I’m always drawn to 15-inch screens.”
All this talk of TV leads Mascis to an even more passionate subject: guitars. He brings up his Gibson Les Paul Junior in TV Yellow, which, he says, “supposedly looks white on TV, because white guitars would get blown out. You wanted the look of a white guitar on TV, you get the TV model.”
Did Mascis ever play the “TV Model Junior,” as he calls it, on TV? Dumb question, as it turns out. “Well, it’s black-and-white TV,” he says with a small smile. “So I don’t know if that would work now.”
J Mascis’ Gear
Guitars
1959 Fender Jazzmaster (leads)
Gibson Les Paul Junior, TV Yellow (rhythm)
Rickenbacker 620-12 12-string
Amps
Mesa/Boogie Mark I
Marshall JCM800 Model 4104, 50-watt 2x12 vertical-input combo
(All amps miked through a Marshall cabinet)
Pedals
Tone Bender MkI-circuit fuzz (“I’ll use that as a base and then add other fuzzes to it.”)
At 27, Tom Morello was at rock bottom—or so he thought. After growing up in Chicago’s northern suburbs and attending Harvard, Morello had moved to Los Angeles to pursue his musical ambitions. His band at the time, Lock Up, had signed to Geffen Records, and his plan to make it in music had seemed to be trending up and to the right.
Then came some tough lessons. During the recording of Lock Up’s 1989 debut, the band deferred to their A&R rep and producer, only to realize afterward that the finished album wasn’t a fully accurate representation of their sound. But the experts know best, right?
Wrong.
“The record was out for about 15 seconds before they stopped returning our phone calls, and at 27 years old, I had failed,” Morello says today. “I moved to Hollywood to try to be a rock star, to make albums. I had the opportunity, and I failed.”
He continues, “So I made a solemn vow that I was never going to play another note of music that I didn't believe in. That's when I began conjuring the riffs that would in part make up the first Rage Against the Machine record.”
Over the past three decades, few, if any, artists have been as synonymous with the guitar as Morello. He’s shredded with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, joined Bruce Springsteen on several tours and made a prominent appearance on the Boss’ 2014 album, High Hopes, showcased his singer-songwriter side with the Nightwatchman, and released music with Prophets of Rage, Street Sweeper Social Club—his project with multi-hyphenate Boots Riley—and the Atlas Underground, where he collaborates with a wide range of artists.
But don’t let the baseball-card stats fool you. Morello is as selective as he is prolific, and his sonic palette is remarkably wide.
That said, when it came time to compile the riffs that comprise his new solo album, Everyone Gets Everything They Want, he knew exactly how it would work within his vast discography.
“I wanted to make an album that took the Morellian riffs, the Morellian DNA of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, and brought it not just into the present, but into the future,” he says. “I wanted to make the heaviest record since the Rage Against the Machine debut. Then the other goalpost is my love of Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town, the Woody Guthrie side, and not shying away from that. I wanted it to have the purity of vision of the acoustic records that I've made.”
Unlike his previous albums, where he approached the material with a clear creative vision, here he had to find his footing as a frontman. “I wanted to make this record kick as much ass as any record that I've made, and the bar is set pretty high,” Morello says.
“I made a solemn vow that I was never going to play another note of music that I didn't believe in.”
Inspiration, and some of the album’s biggest and baddest riffs, came from a source that surprised Morello: just down the hallway.
“There’s a great quote about Van Gogh, that he found the way to concentrate sufficiently to catch fire in a way. My son Roman, on this record, was my muse who allowed me to concentrate sufficiently to catch fire,” Morello says of the 15-year-old. “What that basically means is I stole some great riffs by listening through his bedroom door.”
Photo by Danny Clinch
In addition to his son’s bombastic riffs, the album includes longtime pals such as System of a Down singer Serj Tankian and Beartooth’s Caleb Shomo. Sonically, Everyone Gets Everything They Want showcases the many faces of Tom Morello. The album glides across genres, from the straightforward hard rock of “Soldier in the Army of Love” to the Knife-inspired electronic beats of “Unbreakable,” which features Irish rabble-rousers Kneecap, to the folky “They Can’t Kill Us All.”
Following Rage Against the Machine’s sudden halt after a successful 2022 tour, Morello has spent much of his time on the road, performing at festivals around the world and mixing battle-tested classics with new songs that appear on Everyone Gets Everything They Want. Playing the new material in front of those crowds made him confident that the songs were strong enough to anchor a proper solo album. And from a performance standpoint, Morello says, the shows captured the same high-octane energy his bands have always been known for.
For Morello, those shows also became a way to unite the disparate strands of his musical life onstage.
“Not shying away from paying tribute to Chris Cornell, not shying away from people’s love of Rage Against the Machine riffs and the timeliness in 2026, not shying away from my love of the existential dread woven into my favorite folk music and some blistering guitar solos,” he says, surveying the scope of his sets. “We’re playing in front of 80-90,000 people, with a song wholly unfamiliar to them, and they’re going absolutely ape shit. I was able to give a test run to some of these jams and really try them out in front of a discerning metal audience.”
Morello onstage with Lock Up at L’Amour in Brooklyn, 1990.
Photo by Frank White
But the album also faced another astute listener: his mother, Mary, whom he calls a “candid music critic.” She’s been a massive influence on multiple levels: Morello’s long history of activism is rooted in the lessons he learned from Mary, who was a fervent advocate for free speech, a civil rights champion, and a longtime volunteer for causes that helped the less fortunate. A presence across his platforms—she famously introduced Rage Against the Machine at a 1996 concert in Chicago and frequently appeared on Morello’s SiriusXM show One Man Revolution—she died earlier this year at age 102.
Morello says he played her his new album before she passed, noting that it earned her approval. Of all the brave things she did and all she accomplished in her life, however, one stands out to him.
“I wanted to make an album that took the Morellian riffs, the Morellian DNA of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, and brought it not just into the present, but into the future.”
“The bravest act she might have been a part of was allowing my punk band to play in her basement when I was in high school,” he says with a laugh. “In the more recent years, she lived next door, where my studio is actually in her basement. So I was once again playing in my mom's basement, where she would freely make editorial comments about whatever was going on downstairs.”
Morello is keeping his mother’s legacy alive through the Mary Morello Memorial Project, which will support many organizations that were meaningful to her, ranging from animal shelters to homeless shelters to human rights organizations.
In early October, a year after serving as musical director of the Black Sabbath tribute show Back to the Beginning, Morello curated the Power to the People festival. Billed as a “non-partisan celebration of peace, justice, solidarity, music, and community action,” the one-day festival took place at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, with a lineup including the Foo Fighters, Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Joan Baez, Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, Jack Black (performing with Roman Morello and other young musicians in a Black Sabbath cover band), Killer Mike, Serj Tankian, and others.
“This is something that we don't need to just do at Hotel Cafe [in Los Angeles] and raise 1,500 bucks for a homeless charity,” he says. “We did it on a much bigger scale here, and the artists stepped up.”
Whether through the festival or Everyone Gets Everything They Want, Morello remains focused on the same mission that has guided him for nearly four decades: using rock ’n’ roll as a vehicle for both expression and action. Along the way, he’s experienced just about every high and low the music business can offer. But as he continues forward, the lesson he took from Lock Up all those years ago—the one that ultimately led him to Rage Against the Machine—remains remarkably simple.
“There is only one barometer, there’s one North Star,” Morello says. “It’s to be true to yourself as an artist, as a musician, and not care what anybody thinks.”
USA's largest festival celebrating rock, metal & punk hosted over 250,00 fans to see Iron Maiden, TOOL, Limp Bizkit, Megadeth, Pantera, and dozens more. Here's our selection honoring the headbanging heroes that rocked Derby City.
The last song on Joe Satriani and Steve Vai’s first album together begins with the oldest thing on it, a recording made in a teenage Satriani’s bedroom in Carle Place, Long Island, sometime in 1973. More than 50 years later, neither of them can tell you who’s playing what on it.
“The recording is pretty flat,” Satriani says. “There’s no low end, there’s no high end. And there’s a lot of personality in those areas. You can tell the way people play. But it’s just this sort of midrange thing going on.”
The 1973 recording is called “Reflections on a Year and a Half,” the year and a half in question being how long Vai had been playing guitar at the time it was made. He was still turning up weekly for lessons from Satriani, a few grades ahead of him at Carle Place High and also his guitar teacher, in a bedroom that he describes five decades later with the reverence of a 13-year-old.
“It was a glorious teenage bedroom,” Vai says. “It had all the greatest posters and albums stacked up all over the place.” In one corner was a two-track, reel-to-reel tape machine. “I would just ogle at it.”
“I think it was a Sony,” Satriani says.
“It was a Sony,” Vai continues. “And then one day Joe said, ‘Hey, let’s record.’ So Joe showed me this riff, and he was playing with some chords…”
“…every time I hear it, I still can’t figure out who’s who,” Satriani says with a laugh.
Fifteen years or so after the fact, Satriani mailed the reel to Vai, who transferred it and then did nothing further with it for a very long time. What brought it back out was this new album, and specifically an email from Satriani containing two pieces of music, which eventually became two new Satriani-Vai songs, “The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 1” and “The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 2.” Vai had an idea for a third. “I just got the idea, oh, I’m gonna take this little snippet of us both playing when we were kids, basically, and start the song and embellish the riff,” Vai says. “Try to make a song out of it.”
Photo by Jon Luini
The song that resulted is “The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 3: Reflections on a Year and a Half,” and it closes the new record, which is also called The Sea of Emotion, and is officially credited to SatchVai. All of which means that an album made better than half a century into one of the most thoroughly documented friendships in the history of the instrument starts its final track with two Long Island kids and a tape machine that neither of them can identify himself on—and then builds the rest of the song out of what they were playing.
The Sea of Emotion is the first album Satriani and Vai have made together, which is a strange thing to consider given these two players’ careers have been entangled since one of them was 12 years old (the other was a ripe old 16). They’ve toured together, on and off, for three decades under the G3 banner, turned up on each other’s records, and shared magazine covers going back to the 1980s, but until the formation of the SatchVai Band—the two of them plus guitarist Pete Thorn, bassist Marco Mendoza, and drummer Kenny Aronoff—they had never actually been in a group together. And until now, they had never written an officially-released song together as adults.
Photo by Larry DiMarzio
While the SatchVai Band is a touring proposition, the record itself was cut with a rotating cast of musicians drawn from both players’ inner circles, with Gregg Bissonette, Jeremy Colson, Aronoff, Matt Chamberlain, and Mike Mangini trading off behind the kit and Billy Sheehan, Bryan Beller, Philip Bynoe, Matt Bissonette, Mendoza, and Henrik Linder handling the bass. The album takes its title from a field on the Carle Place school grounds where Joe and Steve used to go after dark to talk, memorialized in the suite that takes up the final three tracks. By the time The Sea of Emotion hits streaming services and store shelves, Satriani and Vai will have spent a spring playing a good deal of it live, on a 40-date North American run that also featured openers Animals as Leaders. (We’re talking backstage at one of the stops, in Durham, North Carolina, a few hours before doors open.)
Arguably, none of this would have happened without Satriani’s filmmaker son, ZZ, who called him a few years back about documenting what was then the 25th anniversary of the G3 tour, an idea that turned into a reunion tour with Satriani, Vai, and Eric Johnson—the same three who had headlined the inaugural G3 run in 1996. Afterward, Joe and Steve decided to keep going, with nothing more ambitious in mind at that point than maybe cutting a track together and playing some shows.
“We were so busy,” Satriani says. “We had finished the G3 reunion, and then we realized we weren’t going to be able to continue with G3, and we decided, well, Steve and I’ll go out. And the idea was to also do a track. But we still had work that was booked immediately, so we were either on the road with somebody else, or we were at home in our studios going, ‘I’ve got eight hours to come up with something and send it to the other guy.’”
Photo by Jon Luini
Despite the time crunch, the ideas started flowing. To the point, eventually, where they found themselves working on an album. “We had probably 17 relatively roughed-out ideas,” Vai says. “And then it comes that time where you’ve gotta cut off one of your toes, you know? And you just start hacking at the songs. But it went very seamlessly. We kind of resonate similarly like that—’How does this record feel? What is it missing?’”
Before they could answer those questions, they hit the road together as SatchVai—first in America and then across Europe. These runs were, as far as the album was concerned, a hiatus. “I like a bit of solitude to get away from influences,” Satriani says. “And when you’re on tour, it’s just nothing but influences—especially our tour, because we’re improvising onstage every night. You can’t be locked into your own writing mode.”
“It’s remarkable to me how Joe has just been a profound figure in my life through my whole life.”—Steve Vai
Once they were home, they approached the material with fresh ears, and with the experience of having played together night after night. “We’re slowly going, ‘Oh, that song’s not gonna work. It’s the wrong character.’ That kind of thing,” Satriani says. “And then there were other songs that started to get written and sort of snowball, and you go, ‘Wow, that song that we didn’t think was a winner is just turning into this huge thing.’ So that was a nice surprise.”
Co-writing isn’t something Vai does much of, and he says so himself. “I usually don’t do that. I like being the master and commander of my own ship. But Joe has such a great ship.”
For 50 years he had been listening to Satriani’s playing as a fan, but what changed here is that there were now stakes attached. “Okay, we gotta get down to business,” Vai recalls. “We have to impress each other. And we have to raise our bar the best we can. And for us, that means better, more effective melodies. And of course you want to try to up the technique game. But the real fun for me was when the emails would come in…”
One song, “The Feeling I Know,” started as a voice memo on Vai’s phone of some chord changes he liked, which he sent over and got back with what he calls “this beautiful samba-esque Lydian thing” on top of it. “And then we went, ‘Oh, chop this up here.’ ‘What about a melody there?’ ‘Okay, you do that melody there, I’ll put the harmony and then I’ll do this here.’ And it was very seamless. I’ve never had an experience like that,” Vai says.
“And what I also noticed was, yes, we are different musically. We reach for different [sorts] of notes at times. But there was almost an intrinsic understanding—yes, this will work. No, this won’t work. It got to the point where I would go to think about doing something and I would have an instinct whether he was going to like it or not. And my only fear was that he would say yes to something that he actually didn’t like. But then, I know Joe better than that. He’s not that—”
“—nice,” Satriani cuts in.
“No,” Vai says with a laugh. “He’s not that guy.”
Which tracks, given that this is the same teacher who once sent a 13-year-old Vai home early from a lesson for not memorizing the notes on the fretboard—and still made Steve pay for the session.
Photo by Larry DiMarzio
At one point Vai sent Satriani a video of the Italian singer-songwriter Paolo Conte performing “Dancing,” a song the two of them went on to cut for the record. “That [song] is something I would never do,” Satriani says. “I’d probably hear it walking down the hallway somewhere and never stop to say, ‘Who is that?’ But knowing Steve, I thought, well, he wouldn’t be attracted to it unless he heard something really outrageous. And sure enough, when the session arrives and I hear 15, 20 guitars playing all those horn parts, that’s when I know—ah, he did have a vision. He’s not crazy.” Satriani laughs. “He’s not totally crazy.”
Vai also sent over “Bronco Freight Train,” but was unsure of where it was heading. Satriani had no such doubts. “As soon as I heard it, I thought, well, this has to be on the record,” he says. “And he sent it like, ‘I don’t know about this thing, this isn’t really a song yet.’ And I’m like, are you crazy? Don’t call me, ’cause I’m working on it right now.”
“I liked the core, I liked the guitar effect, and I liked the bridge,” Vai says. “And Joe just whacked the whole rest of the song and rebuilt the parts. I finally had somebody that I could really co-create with. And I’m sure there’s other people out there, but I never bothered to find them.”
The other key voice on the record belonged to producer and keyboardist Eric Caudieux, whose suggestions could be unusual, but tended to make the songs better. “He could just do the craziest things with these demos that we would send him,” Satriani says. “Changing whole passages that were in minor keys to major keys, and just assaulting our brains.” He was also the one who cut those guitar-generated horn parts out of “Dancing,” telling Vai they weren’t authentically him. Vai pushed back, but ultimately wound up agreeing it was better that way.
“Knowing Steve, I thought, well, he wouldn’t be attracted to it unless he heard something really outrageous.”—Joe Satriani
The rest of the record covers a lot of ground. Opener “Mayhem” came from Satriani, built on a riff he wrote in his home studio and sent over half-apologizing for how adolescent it was, and which Vai answered by doubling his own lines alongside Satriani’s solo. “Zoot Suit Riot,” with Mike Keneally on keys, was something of Vai’s that he thought had an “odd groove,” and had been sitting around for a while until Satriani helped finish it. The riff on “Old Sins Have Long Shadows” was Satch’s as well, with a groove inspired by Buddy Miles’ drumming on Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.”
Guitar-wise, Satriani primarily stuck to his signature Ibanez JS models on most of the record, while Vai’s workhorses were two signature Ibanez Jems: FLO, which is slightly scalloped and equipped with a Fernandes Sustainer unit, and REVO, which he says is wired similar to a standard Jem. Both are loaded with DiMarzio Evolutions in the neck and treble positions. Interestingly, Satriani cut all his guitars direct, via TONEX, SansAmp, and Brainworx SE100 plugins, and Vai used plugins for most of his parts, too—a variety of Neural DSP Archetypes, a prototype Neural DSP Vai plugin, and a SansAmp. The one exception in the amp department is “The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 3,” where Vai used his live touring rig.
On paper, what Satriani and Vai have in common is technique—fast, difficult, incredibly complex playing. But go back to the two kids in Carle Place and the thing they actually shared was composition. Both of them were writing music, and thinking seriously about writing music, at an age when most kids just want to play riffs and solos—and look cool doing it.
The SatchVai Band onstage (l-r): drummer Kenny Aronoff, Satriani, Vai, bassist Marco Mendoza, guitarist Pete Thorn
Photo by Jon Luini
Both credit the same man for it: Bill Westcott, their music theory teacher at Carle Place High who, as Satriani puts it, could “make anything sound like Bach or Chopin or Gil Evans.”
“I have great memories of him just sitting down at the piano with me and saying, ‘Now, Joseph, listen to this,’” Satriani says. “And he put one hand here and he goes, ‘You hear those two chords? They can go together. And when they go together, you add up the notes, and then those are the notes you can use to play on top of the chords.’”
“Jazz was born,” Vai says.
Westcott also told them each something they still go back to. “He specifically said it to me one day, ‘Your brain will keep developing as a musician after all these points where you figure out that maybe your hands don’t do this, and your fingers won’t do that, and you’re not hitting these technical milestones that you thought you were gonna hit. Don’t worry about it. It’s all what happens up here [in your head]. So learn to write away from your instrument,’” Satriani recalls. “And we both got that. Whenever he told us separately, we both agreed and said, ‘He’s right, we’re gonna follow that.’”
There wasn’t much precedent for what the two of them would go on to do with any of it. Instrumental rock songs existed, but instrumental rock artists—players whose catalogs were instrumental and categorized as rock rather than, say, fusion—weren’t really a thing. The closest thing was Jeff Beck, and Beck had made his name in bands, playing three-minute songs. Vai dates the start of it precisely, and not to himself.
“It wasn’t until Surfing with the Alien,” he says. “And I wasn’t surprised when I heard it, because I knew that Joe had a pull toward pop, simple pop. I would listen to the Squares [Satriani’s late ‘70s/early ‘80s power-pop trio] tape that he sent me when he was in the band, and it was this intense, raging guitar being played in a pop format. There wasn’t anything to stack it against. And then when I heard [Satriani’s 1986 full-length solo debut] Not of This Earth, I said, ‘Okay, something is really forming here.’”
He continues. “And once Surfing came out, it felt like the perfect amalgamation between Joe’s polished, classical musical ear, the culmination of an evolution of guitar technique in the fingers, and a sense of the absurd coupled with pop sensibility. It was a perfect storm. And that was really, to me, the first instrumental rock guitar record.”
Vai also thinks some younger guitarists draw the wrong lesson from it. “A lot of young players feel that there was a time when instrumental rock guitar was popular and you could get signed, but it’s not now. ‘You were lucky, I’m not.’ But they’re missing the point. He created it. It’s not because it sits under the moniker of instrumental rock guitar. It sits under the moniker of inspired melodic energy.”
For Vai, all of it goes back to the field behind the school and the bedroom with the Sony in the corner. “It’s remarkable to me how Joe has just been a profound figure in my life through my whole life,” he says. “Joe always represented excellence. Just excellence. Like, this melody is written by an inspired person. Everything I hear, everything I see. Now, it could be from my perspective as a kid that was ogling at his teacher. But now it goes beyond that. I had many teachers. I’ve seen many guitar players, I’ve played with a lot.”
What’s most striking about The Sea of Emotion, in the end, are those inspired melodies. It isn’t the speed, it isn’t the near-impossible feats of agility, it isn’t the technical dazzle—it’s that the record is musical.
“It has to be,” Vai says. “If it isn't, you’re a novelty.”
Joe Satriani Gear
Guitars on The Sea of Emotion:
Ibanez signature JS Series models (JS1CR, GD, Paisley, MCR)
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Photo by Travis Shinn
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