For over 20 years, Tim McIlrath has been the unflinching, compassionate voice behind Rise Against. It’s hard to overstate the Chicago punks’ importance as the torchbearers of politically-charged music – here is a band who’ve addressed everything from climate change to gay teenage suicide on record.
Despite this rich legacy, Tim McIlrath was not born a firebrand. Raised in an Irish Catholic family, he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. It was, in his words, “Pleasantville”. He wore a uniform to school until he was 14, his idyllic days punctuated with games. Today he is all too aware of the real Chicago he was shielded from.
“The violence is sad, the segregation is sad,” he reflects. “There’s a disconnection. Something like the murder rates of Baghdad exist not 20 minutes away from where I am right now, and yet life hums on and no-one really does anything about it.”
It would be punk that first shattered his Pleasantville reality as he fell in love with bands like Pegboy, Fugazi and Earth Crisis. Soon enough, pamphlets distributed at hardcore shows also opened up another world to him: vegetarianism.
“I started being less able to ignore the realities of animal agriculture,” he reflects. “So yes, I stopped eating meat, but I think the bigger picture of that was the idea that something cracked inside me. I figured I was being told everything by my teachers and my parents, and if this was something I didn’t know, it was like, ‘What else don’t I know?’ The problems of the world fascinated me, because they were all hitting me at once coming out of the suburban Chicago I’d grown up in.”
Eager to be part of the solution, he entertained becoming a schoolteacher, journalist or photographer, but it was music that dug its claws in. First came post-hardcore group Baxter, then a foray into metalcore with Arma Angelus – which featured a pre-Fall Out Boy Pete Wentz (“Just meeting Pete, you knew he was always destined to have a vision and connect with a lot of people”). It was with Rise Against, though, that things would click.
Today, they stand as one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful punk bands ever. Sounds like the perfect time for an interview…
Let’s rewind to 2001. Tell us about the Tim McIlrath who recorded Rise Against’s debut, The Unraveling…
“That was a guy who’d already spent years toiling away in Chicago trying to make music. My bands were fizzling out, there was no success on the horizon. My flame was slowly dying. That’s when I hooked up with Joe [Principe, Rise Against bassist] – we were some of the last local musicians left that were dead serious. I was more focused, too, because I’d already done a lot of unmemorable musical endeavours and I wanted something people could sink their teeth into. I had always written very vague lyrics that weren’t always well thought out. With The Unraveling I wanted songs that had a message, so that even if they sucked you could still say what it was about. I was a pretty mediocre singer, too – I was still figuring out how to do it. The whole process of being ‘The singer of Rise Against’ was intimidating – we already had more attention than any band I had ever been a part of, because [Fat Wreck Chords label head] Fat Mike was agreeing to sign us before we even played a show.”