“I won’t claim to be a gamer, but I was aware, broadly, of some of the concepts present in Final Fantasy,” Tom Morello – singer, songwriter and political activist, and Rage Against the Machine guitarist – tells me when I ask him if he was aware of the political themes of Final Fantasy 14. Since its (re)release in 2014, FF14 has tackled issues such as anti-colonialism, class struggle, and nationalism, extolling the virtues of active resistance, open rebellion, and pushing back against the established status quo in order to defend the rights and liberties of all people.
It makes sense, then, that Tom Morello is getting involved with the game. Morello has collected a lot of labels in his time – anarchist, warrior-poet, human rights activist – and to me it feels fitting he’s penned a song that’ll live in a world as politically dense as Final Fantasy 14. The track, with the rousing title Everything Burns, is a high-octane rock belter instantly recognisable to anyone that’s even vaguely familair with Morello’s music (and fitting for the increasingly rock-focused way FF14 has been moving over the past few years).
“I’m not trying to make songs for video games,” he tells me.”Like, that’s not the thing that I get up in the morning and think. I want to be a part of making great songs that have meaningful content, that find their way into the world in meaningful ways. And in collaborating with Caleb and with the producer Tyler Smith, we made a song that checked all the boxes for me.
“One, it’s a banger. It’s got riffs like crazy. It’s a compelling artistic work that we hope was going to integrate well into the compositions of Final Fantasy. But, two, to me, it has to exist outside the game, as well. It has to be a song that has sort of depth and meaning and meets the moment of 2025 at this crazy political crossroads that the world is in.
“For me, Everything Burns is both a reflection of the world that we’re seeing and a warning, irrespective of anyone touching a controller, or a computer, or playing a game. This is a song that has a life – a very vibrant life – within the game. And my hope is that it has a very meaningful and vibrant life outside of the game as well.”
“I could not agree more,” agrees Caleb Shomo, lead vocalist and studio instrumentalist for the band Beartooth. Previously in the interview, we’d chatted about how Rage Against the Machine’s music had radicalised a whole swathe of youths in the 90s (myself included), and that now, by appearing in a game built around a loyal and vocal community like FF14, Morello and his collaborators have the opportunity to do that again for a wholly different audience. “Like yourself, obviously I was incredibly influenced in my life by Tom and what happens when you get obsessed with that band and what it teaches you, and who you become and what you stand for,” Shomo continues.
“And to be able to work on a song like this with somebody like Tom… I think the nature of the beast is there’s no way I’m going to be able to do that – to have it come from my heart – and not mean something.
“For me, I think I’ve kind of had a hard time in my life standing up for myself. And that has a lot of what this song has to do at this period of time. Because I think that can be the nature of the beast when a climate gets this gnarly. And obviously it has its twists and turns, sure, but that really is what this song to me is about: the song is about empowerment. Like, to the absolute furthest degree. And for it to have come around in the way it has, with so much horsepower, between it being with Tom Morello and in it being in Final Fantasy 14, yeah, the nature of the beast was it was just going to mean something. It’s from deep in the heart.”
“And that’s the trick, isn’t it? I mean, the vehicle is important,” Morello adds, “but Rage Against the Machine isn’t a great political band. Rage Against the Machine is a great band that has political context. And so you are engaged with the music, the powerful music and the beats and the rhythm section and the aggression, the guitar solos, etc. And then you’re forced to be confronted with a set of ideas, right? I’ve made 22 records and that’s the through line: you have songs that are compelling and then because they’re about something, it matters to people here. The vehicle is this banging track that we’ve made. The vehicle is Caleb’s compelling vocal performance and the big guitar riffs. The vehicle is Final Fantasy 14, where it’s a crossover of a song that meets a particular historical moment outside of the game, that also meets a particular narrative moment within the game.”
The song actually came together really quickly. Morello plays tabletop role-playing games with Jason Charles Miller, who you may know as lead vocalist and guitarist of the industrial rock band Godhead and from various appearances on the FF14 Endwalker soundtrack, and he told Morello that Soken is a massive fan of Rage Against the Machine. “[Jason and I] played together, and he learned about Soken’s love of my riffs and Rage Against the Machine, and it got in the ether. Then all of a sudden, I remember getting a message that there was the [FF14 team] needed a song in the next 36 hours. This is about a year ago, right? And so I was working with producer Tyler Smith – who produces a lot of great rock and metal songs these days – and I said, ‘bro, like, let’s go’, and we turned around a musical track very fast.”
Shomo was, fortunately, off that very same day. “Literally. That same day, I was off,” he laughs. “And I just happened to get a phone call from Tyler Smith saying, ‘hey, you want to do this song for Tom Morello?’ And I was like, ‘uh, yeah, I can be available’ [laughter]. A few hours later, I don’t know, man, I just kind of ascended to some ethereal plane, and then a few hours later, I was bouncing down tracks and sent it to Tyler. It was insane, to say the least.”
Morello continues: “It was lightning in a bottle. Had the circumstance not arisen on that particular day, it might have gone in a very different direction.”
For Masayoshi Soken, long-time Rage Against the Machine fan and lead composer for Final Fantasy 14, the experience has been humbling. “I’m pretty close to death right now,” he laughs. “We’ve been doing a lot of interviews, and he has a different, cool Rage Against the Machine shirt every time we join a call,” adds Morello.
It’s clear to see, from listening to Everything Burns and talking to the collaborators for 20 minutes, this is more than just some thoughtless tie-in fired off for publicity. For everyone involved, this is a labour of love, and a collaboration that is designed to reflect both real-world and in-game sensibilities, from creators that do not compromise on their creative vision, no matter what the vehicle is for delivery. This is a crossover that makes more sense, the more I think about it, and I cannot wait to experience the full impact of the release in Final Fantasy 14’s latest raid.