If you want to tell Rise Against they sold out, lead singer Tim McIlrath won’t stop you. In fact, when fans tell him they don’t like that his band signed to a major label, or that their last album debuted at number two on the mainstream charts, he feels them, because he’s been there.

“All the way to the kid who goes ‘Hey man, you sold out! You’re on a major label and you’ve changed,’” admits McIlrath. “I was that kid! I was that fan. I was the kid who hated Bad Religion when they signed to A&M. I was like ‘I’m never wearing that shirt again.’ Far from taking offense to someone who tells me that, I see myself in their eyes.”

But the truth is that, whatever one fan or another might think about how the band’s music has evolved since they started out on the Chicago DIY punk scene in the late 90s, no one ever questions their integrity. They’re as political and subversive in their message as they were back when they were putting out short, sharp blasts of hardcore on Fat Wreck Chords a decade ago. So when mainstream success came knocking, McIlrath didn’t see danger signs, he saw a new lease on the band’s life, a new reason to keep it together.

“I saw a challenge,” he says. “The kind of challenge I hadn’t seen since the band started, and we were just trying to win people over and get them to know who we were. All of a sudden there was this whole new challenge: how do you present ideas of social change and awareness to an audience that might be used to having the music there just to rock out to and then go home?”

As they get set to play the San Jose State Event Center Tuesday (April 17), McIlrath talked to me about strategizing their success and their most recent release, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown.”

STEVE PALOPOLI: You’ve always been an activist, but what’s it like for you now to be an activist who actually has some influence and cultural reach? There are so many causes vying for your attention, how do you decide what to invest that power in?

As Rise Against have gone from scruffy Chicago punks to chart-topping mainstream hitmakers over the last decade, they’ve run into no end of blowback from early fans who think they should still be putting out minute-long blasts of hardcore for Fat Mike.

But one thing no one would dare talk smack about is their cred as crusaders. Vegan? Check. Straight-edge? Check. Angry at the Internet? Okay, I made that one up. Still, with their history of supporting indie culture and criticizing corporate greed, it should be no surprise that on their current tour they’ll be stopping in to sign at some local record stores, including San Jose’s own Streetlight Records. They’ll drop in the afternoon before their show at the San Jose State Event Center on April 17.

Tim McIlrath and company got their start as Transistor Revolt in the much-celebrated/criticized Chicago DIY scene of the late ’90s, before changing their name and getting signed to Fat Wreck Chords for their debut album, 2001’s The Unraveling. By 2004, they’d signed to a major label, and two years later they had a gold-certified, top 10 record in The Sufferer and the Witness. Those who had been chanting “sell out” since practically the beginning of the band’s existence were no doubt confused by the fact that The Sufferer and the Witness was far and away their best album, both musically and lyrically. They’ve found more to complain about on the records since, which have pushed the band further into the mainstream, with mixed results.

Interestingly, the band’s message hasn’t changed much, even as their music has. As activists, they’re as hardcore as ever. And their commitment to heavy subject matter is once again affirmed in their most recent release, a cover of Boy Dylan’s “Ballas of Hollis Brown” with an accompanying video that’s more documentary than music clip, packed with facts and figures about American poverty, economic injustice and insanely dangerous farm equipment.

Rise Against sign at Streetlight Records on April 17 at 4:30pm. Their show at San Jose State Event Center starts at 7pm that night, with A Day to Remember and Title Fight opening.

Click here to view the embedded video.