Linkin Park (2010)
Interview Background
When the good folks from Warner played me Linkin Park’s A Thousand Suns a few weeks before its release, I hated it. Writing notes on the album during a pub listening session, I was scathing. “As enticing as a BrokenCYDE and Limp Bizkit collaboration,” I raged at one point. Strangely enough, this version of my review never made it to print. For the first time in my then-10 years of writing reviews, I ditched a completed review and instead wrote a glowing piece lauding Linkin Park for following such a resolute, divergent path. After baulking during initial listens, at some point the album just clicked for me as being a brave and powerful move by a band that could have easily sat back and reheated former glories. As I pulled this interview with Mike Shinoda into shape, A Thousand Suns revealed itself to me as being a fearless statement that Linkin Park were going off-piste, no matter what their fans thought. I feel bad that I never got to tell Mike I eventually realised what a stirring album A Thousand Suns was, although I made some sort of peace when I told guitarist Brad Delson as much a few years later. Due to Mike Shinoda only making himself available for a few interviews for A Thousand Suns, my interview was divided up and published as two separate stories by various Australian magazines.
The following are edited versions of interviews first published in Rip It Up, X-Press and Beat, September 2010.
Linkin Park - Starting Again
by Scott McLennan
A decade into their career, California’s Linkin Park have discarded the hard rock blueprint that has delivered them global album sales skyward of 50 million and started afresh. Fourth studio release A Thousand Suns finds the six-piece a long way from the tight thrills of their 2000 debut Hybrid Theory’s hit singles One Step Closer and In The End, instead opting for an impressively textured, interconnected release underpinned by the brutal maelstrom of war.
This updated sound is an initially confounding but ultimately formidable creation, with A Thousand Suns finding Linkin Park breaking free of expectation. Co-vocalist, programmer and producer Mike Shinoda is relieved that after grappling for a new sound, Linkin Park have been reborn with a brave new identity.
“We’ve been working on this album for two years,” Shinoda begins, “so as you can imagine it’s almost hard to get out of the analytical mindset and get into the music fan mindset so we can enjoy just playing it!
“We really dove into this process in a more organic way than ever before. The early demos almost had no structure in some cases, they were just these wandering vocals over wandering music and that was really new for us. Our band got started making very tight, structured songs and that was a function of us just having a short attention span – we simply liked short, fire-cracker, three-minute songs. I don’t know if it’s our age and the fact we’re getting older, but over time and having done that so much, when any of us presented something in the studio this time and it felt like it was pointing back towards those old styles, the band as a whole was kind of bored by it. It’s not like we set out to do something that was anti-Hybrid Theory per se, it’s just that whenever we wrote something that sounded like what we had done before, it just wasn’t so interesting to us.”
One feature of A Thousand Sun that separates it from former Linkin Park releases are the dynamic segues that link the main tracks. The death camp march of Empty Spaces and the industrial stormtrooper thud of The Radiance create an aural tapestry of war. Flashbacks to albums from Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile through to Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back are present, but it’s samples of three towering 20th century figures that anchor A Thousand Suns’ arcing theme. Woven into the album’s darkness are historic speeches by US activist Mario Savio, nuclear physicist J Robert Oppenheimer and human rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, all voicing dismay at the horrors of war. Shinoda suggests the red tape involved in clearing these inclusions were worth it for the result.
“I can’t say that it was easy, but our managers did a great job working out the clearances for the samples we have on A Thousand Suns because they knew how important these clips were to us. We have a clip from Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, a clip from Mario Savio and a clip from Dr Martin Luther King Jr. In all three cases we just felt that the speech clips said something that nobody could say better. We weren’t going to be able to write a lyric that could say anything better than the speeches themselves, so we just decided to put those speeches on the record.”
While past Linkin Park hits have been thick with desperation, the vivid nature of A Thousand Suns makes the outcome even more intense. Whereas debut Hybrid Theory found the band priding itself on the fact there was no cursing on the album to take away from the message, the urgent A Thousand Suns has no time for glib lyrical boundaries. On Blackout, vocalist Chester Bennington voices his anguish with the howling ‘Fuck it, are you listening to me?’. At odds with Hybrid Theory’s logic, sometimes it seems that earthy primal screams are the most ferocious way to get a point across.
“Back then if you had asked us about the swearing – and in fact people did ask us if there would ever be swearing on a Linkin Park record – Chester and I would say, ‘Sure, maybe – if it feels like the right time’. There were moments for me on my Fort Minor record when it felt like the right thing to say and there were songs on our last record Minutes To Midnight where there was some swearing. So it’s not a big deal to us when it feels right.”
Giant in status and stature, Shinoda’s co-producer on Minutes To Midnight Rick Rubin once again offered his calm Buddhist influence to the elongated recording process. A veteran of such acclaimed albums as System Of A Down’s Toxicity, The Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill and Public Enemy’s aforementioned It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, Shinoda suggests Rubin rarely clashed with the band over studio decisions.
“If Rick doesn’t like something and it’s enough to change all our minds then we’ll change it, but it’s really an easy process when it comes to stuff like that. He’s not going to keep bringing it up and hold a grudge if we disagree. The bottom line is that when you’ve got a perfectionist dynamic like a band like us has, if Rick doesn’t like an idea then chances are there are some of us that don’t like it either.”
With his artistic outlets away from Linkin Park including notable remixes for artists such as Depeche Mode, sneaker designs for DC Shoes and solo art exhibitions, Mike Shinoda has little time for rest.
“I’m a little bit of a workaholic,” he admits. “I’m constantly battling with finding time to do all the things I want to do. Linkin Park is a lot of fun, but it’s also a very work-intensive thing.”
A Thousand Suns (Warner)
Linkin Park - Suns Of War
by Scott McLennan
After reaching an impasse with early sessions for their fourth album, Californian band Linkin Park burnt the rulebook. The punchy hard rock construct that had seen their albums Hybrid Theory, Meteora and Minutes To Midnight sell more than 50 million albums was jettisoned in favour of a completely new approach. The result, A Thousand Suns, is a textured and intense collection, with Linkin Park manning their instruments like heavy artillery.
Graphically outlining the futility of conflict via impressive soundscapes and brutal lyrics, it’s a long way from the punchy fix of past singles In The End, What I’ve Done and Numb.
This exhaustive evolution pushed the band’s resilience, with the ideology of the rebirth summed up in Waiting For The End’s lyric, ‘The hardest part of ending is starting again’.
“It was kind of a subtle thing,” co-vocalist, programmer and producer Mike Shinoda says. “Over the course of the last four years we’ve been really trying to understand the ways in which we confine ourselves as musicians and writers. We’d found ourselves sticking to an old way of doing things and decided to call ourselves out. We wanted to do something different.”
Holding a comfortable position as the most successful rock act of the last decade was no longer enough of an impetus for Shinoda and his five Linkin Park bandmates. Having broken sales records and picked up multiple awards in the 10 years since their 2000 debut Hybrid Theory, the band refused to repeat the artistically deficient cycle. More than just a vehicle for more hit singles and Grammy nominations, A Thousand Suns was devised to push Linkin Park into new sonic territories and create a conceptually driven album rich with intent.
“I remember a couple of years ago we were sitting around at the studio and the subject of the next record came up. We’d already started writing some demos and stuff, but we started talking about the big picture. Phoenix [Farrell, bassist] said one of my favourite things around that time, which was that he was frustrated by music. He was frustrated about finding music that he liked to listen to, because he felt like the stuff on the radio and the stuff out there in the mainstream is like candy. He started using this food analogy that music like that is like sweets and you can have a little of it in moderation and you have a good time, but in reality what you also need is some substance.
“We took that analogy a step further and asked ourselves what kind of album we wanted to make and what sort of food we wanted to be. The answer was that it had to be something exotic, something with a different flavour that had some real substance to it. That in some ways started this whole process.”
So what meal did the aggressive and driven sounds of A Thousand Suns eventually become? A roasted rhinoceros?
“Let’s take the analogy way too far,” Shinoda chuckles. “I think that some people are just used to eating Italian food, but when they’re presented with an Asian/Indian/Japanese fusion the spices are so unfamiliar to them they might not have the words to describe the thing when they eat it. That’s the kind of experience we would love to have when they hear this album. We want them to not even be able to put words together to describe what they’re hearing, so that the only way for others to understand is for them to hear it too.”
Rick Rubin once again joins Shinoda as Linkin Park co-producer following the pair’s collaboration on 2007’s Minutes To Midnight. The bear-like Buddhist was a reassuring guide as the sextet bravely followed their new direction. A studio connoisseur with past successes including Grammy-winning efforts from Jay-Z, Johnny Cash and Dixie Chicks, Rubin’s non-interventionist style allowed the band the breathing space to find their new sound.
“Rick is an amazing person and an awesome mentor,” Shinoda insists. “I think my favourite thing about our relationship with Rick is the balance between his ideas and ours in the studio. He’s very respectful of our space. To give you an idea of how it works, we have band meetings every Monday and after that meeting the band is basically on their own to work on the music. Usually the work is done by one to three people. It’s never five or six of us – we just never write as a band as it doesn’t work for us. I’ll be either working with one or two of the other guys or I’ll be working on stuff at home. Rick just shows up once a week or once a month, checks in and lets us know how we’re doing. When we need help we can always call him up for a bit of direction, but he just tends to have that really potent direction when you really need something. He’ll give you the smallest idea and it can snowball into something incredible and really special. Not many producers are capable of doing that.”
The incidental segues that link A Thousand Suns’ key songs conjure up bombed fields, displaced citizens and the aftermath of war. The chillingly evocative pulse of the album is further enhanced by three key sound bites lifted from history. Deftly embedded in this dense presentation are speeches by US political activist Mario Savio, physicist J Robert Oppenheimer and human rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Each sample finds these formidable figures of history addressing the horrors of war, with Oppenheimer rueing his involvement in The Manhattan Project, the US development of atomic bombs during World War II. The success of Oppenheimer’s research and The Manhattan Project ultimately led to uranium bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the final days of WWII.
“The thing that struck me about the Oppenheimer quote, aside from the obvious political ramifications of the subject, was that here was a human being who was probably told his whole life that his intelligence was something that made him special. At a certain point his greatest asset, his defining characteristic, turned against him and he had no control of it. He had an idea and then his idea became a reality, at which point he said the words you hear on our album. He must have been looking back in disbelief, so understanding the depths of his own tragedy I don’t think anything I have ever done could be as heavy as what was going on there. None of us will ever understand the weight of what he was feeling at the time.”
With A Thousand Suns now unleashed and a heavy block of touring ready to kick in, Shinoda is currently in the midst of transferring this new epic to the live stage.
“It’s unfortunate Linkin Park is so much work,” he concludes, “but we can’t wait to come back and play in Australia.”
A Thousand Suns (Warner)
When the good folks from Warner played me Linkin Park’s A Thousand Suns a few weeks before its release, I hated it. Writing notes on the album during a pub listening session, I was scathing. “As enticing as a BrokenCYDE and Limp Bizkit collaboration,” I raged at one point. Strangely enough, this version of my review never made it to print. For the first time in my then-10 years of writing reviews, I ditched a completed review and instead wrote a glowing piece lauding Linkin Park for following such a resolute, divergent path. After baulking during initial listens, at some point the album just clicked for me as being a brave and powerful move by a band that could have easily sat back and reheated former glories. As I pulled this interview with Mike Shinoda into shape, A Thousand Suns revealed itself to me as being a fearless statement that Linkin Park were going off-piste, no matter what their fans thought. I feel bad that I never got to tell Mike I eventually realised what a stirring album A Thousand Suns was, although I made some sort of peace when I told guitarist Brad Delson as much a few years later. Due to Mike Shinoda only making himself available for a few interviews for A Thousand Suns, my interview was divided up and published as two separate stories by various Australian magazines.
The following are edited versions of interviews first published in Rip It Up, X-Press and Beat, September 2010.
Linkin Park - Starting Again
by Scott McLennan
A decade into their career, California’s Linkin Park have discarded the hard rock blueprint that has delivered them global album sales skyward of 50 million and started afresh. Fourth studio release A Thousand Suns finds the six-piece a long way from the tight thrills of their 2000 debut Hybrid Theory’s hit singles One Step Closer and In The End, instead opting for an impressively textured, interconnected release underpinned by the brutal maelstrom of war.
This updated sound is an initially confounding but ultimately formidable creation, with A Thousand Suns finding Linkin Park breaking free of expectation. Co-vocalist, programmer and producer Mike Shinoda is relieved that after grappling for a new sound, Linkin Park have been reborn with a brave new identity.
“We’ve been working on this album for two years,” Shinoda begins, “so as you can imagine it’s almost hard to get out of the analytical mindset and get into the music fan mindset so we can enjoy just playing it!
“We really dove into this process in a more organic way than ever before. The early demos almost had no structure in some cases, they were just these wandering vocals over wandering music and that was really new for us. Our band got started making very tight, structured songs and that was a function of us just having a short attention span – we simply liked short, fire-cracker, three-minute songs. I don’t know if it’s our age and the fact we’re getting older, but over time and having done that so much, when any of us presented something in the studio this time and it felt like it was pointing back towards those old styles, the band as a whole was kind of bored by it. It’s not like we set out to do something that was anti-Hybrid Theory per se, it’s just that whenever we wrote something that sounded like what we had done before, it just wasn’t so interesting to us.”
One feature of A Thousand Sun that separates it from former Linkin Park releases are the dynamic segues that link the main tracks. The death camp march of Empty Spaces and the industrial stormtrooper thud of The Radiance create an aural tapestry of war. Flashbacks to albums from Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile through to Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back are present, but it’s samples of three towering 20th century figures that anchor A Thousand Suns’ arcing theme. Woven into the album’s darkness are historic speeches by US activist Mario Savio, nuclear physicist J Robert Oppenheimer and human rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, all voicing dismay at the horrors of war. Shinoda suggests the red tape involved in clearing these inclusions were worth it for the result.
“I can’t say that it was easy, but our managers did a great job working out the clearances for the samples we have on A Thousand Suns because they knew how important these clips were to us. We have a clip from Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, a clip from Mario Savio and a clip from Dr Martin Luther King Jr. In all three cases we just felt that the speech clips said something that nobody could say better. We weren’t going to be able to write a lyric that could say anything better than the speeches themselves, so we just decided to put those speeches on the record.”
While past Linkin Park hits have been thick with desperation, the vivid nature of A Thousand Suns makes the outcome even more intense. Whereas debut Hybrid Theory found the band priding itself on the fact there was no cursing on the album to take away from the message, the urgent A Thousand Suns has no time for glib lyrical boundaries. On Blackout, vocalist Chester Bennington voices his anguish with the howling ‘Fuck it, are you listening to me?’. At odds with Hybrid Theory’s logic, sometimes it seems that earthy primal screams are the most ferocious way to get a point across.
“Back then if you had asked us about the swearing – and in fact people did ask us if there would ever be swearing on a Linkin Park record – Chester and I would say, ‘Sure, maybe – if it feels like the right time’. There were moments for me on my Fort Minor record when it felt like the right thing to say and there were songs on our last record Minutes To Midnight where there was some swearing. So it’s not a big deal to us when it feels right.”
Giant in status and stature, Shinoda’s co-producer on Minutes To Midnight Rick Rubin once again offered his calm Buddhist influence to the elongated recording process. A veteran of such acclaimed albums as System Of A Down’s Toxicity, The Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill and Public Enemy’s aforementioned It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, Shinoda suggests Rubin rarely clashed with the band over studio decisions.
“If Rick doesn’t like something and it’s enough to change all our minds then we’ll change it, but it’s really an easy process when it comes to stuff like that. He’s not going to keep bringing it up and hold a grudge if we disagree. The bottom line is that when you’ve got a perfectionist dynamic like a band like us has, if Rick doesn’t like an idea then chances are there are some of us that don’t like it either.”
With his artistic outlets away from Linkin Park including notable remixes for artists such as Depeche Mode, sneaker designs for DC Shoes and solo art exhibitions, Mike Shinoda has little time for rest.
“I’m a little bit of a workaholic,” he admits. “I’m constantly battling with finding time to do all the things I want to do. Linkin Park is a lot of fun, but it’s also a very work-intensive thing.”
A Thousand Suns (Warner)
Linkin Park - Suns Of War
by Scott McLennan
After reaching an impasse with early sessions for their fourth album, Californian band Linkin Park burnt the rulebook. The punchy hard rock construct that had seen their albums Hybrid Theory, Meteora and Minutes To Midnight sell more than 50 million albums was jettisoned in favour of a completely new approach. The result, A Thousand Suns, is a textured and intense collection, with Linkin Park manning their instruments like heavy artillery.
Graphically outlining the futility of conflict via impressive soundscapes and brutal lyrics, it’s a long way from the punchy fix of past singles In The End, What I’ve Done and Numb.
This exhaustive evolution pushed the band’s resilience, with the ideology of the rebirth summed up in Waiting For The End’s lyric, ‘The hardest part of ending is starting again’.
“It was kind of a subtle thing,” co-vocalist, programmer and producer Mike Shinoda says. “Over the course of the last four years we’ve been really trying to understand the ways in which we confine ourselves as musicians and writers. We’d found ourselves sticking to an old way of doing things and decided to call ourselves out. We wanted to do something different.”
Holding a comfortable position as the most successful rock act of the last decade was no longer enough of an impetus for Shinoda and his five Linkin Park bandmates. Having broken sales records and picked up multiple awards in the 10 years since their 2000 debut Hybrid Theory, the band refused to repeat the artistically deficient cycle. More than just a vehicle for more hit singles and Grammy nominations, A Thousand Suns was devised to push Linkin Park into new sonic territories and create a conceptually driven album rich with intent.
“I remember a couple of years ago we were sitting around at the studio and the subject of the next record came up. We’d already started writing some demos and stuff, but we started talking about the big picture. Phoenix [Farrell, bassist] said one of my favourite things around that time, which was that he was frustrated by music. He was frustrated about finding music that he liked to listen to, because he felt like the stuff on the radio and the stuff out there in the mainstream is like candy. He started using this food analogy that music like that is like sweets and you can have a little of it in moderation and you have a good time, but in reality what you also need is some substance.
“We took that analogy a step further and asked ourselves what kind of album we wanted to make and what sort of food we wanted to be. The answer was that it had to be something exotic, something with a different flavour that had some real substance to it. That in some ways started this whole process.”
So what meal did the aggressive and driven sounds of A Thousand Suns eventually become? A roasted rhinoceros?
“Let’s take the analogy way too far,” Shinoda chuckles. “I think that some people are just used to eating Italian food, but when they’re presented with an Asian/Indian/Japanese fusion the spices are so unfamiliar to them they might not have the words to describe the thing when they eat it. That’s the kind of experience we would love to have when they hear this album. We want them to not even be able to put words together to describe what they’re hearing, so that the only way for others to understand is for them to hear it too.”
Rick Rubin once again joins Shinoda as Linkin Park co-producer following the pair’s collaboration on 2007’s Minutes To Midnight. The bear-like Buddhist was a reassuring guide as the sextet bravely followed their new direction. A studio connoisseur with past successes including Grammy-winning efforts from Jay-Z, Johnny Cash and Dixie Chicks, Rubin’s non-interventionist style allowed the band the breathing space to find their new sound.
“Rick is an amazing person and an awesome mentor,” Shinoda insists. “I think my favourite thing about our relationship with Rick is the balance between his ideas and ours in the studio. He’s very respectful of our space. To give you an idea of how it works, we have band meetings every Monday and after that meeting the band is basically on their own to work on the music. Usually the work is done by one to three people. It’s never five or six of us – we just never write as a band as it doesn’t work for us. I’ll be either working with one or two of the other guys or I’ll be working on stuff at home. Rick just shows up once a week or once a month, checks in and lets us know how we’re doing. When we need help we can always call him up for a bit of direction, but he just tends to have that really potent direction when you really need something. He’ll give you the smallest idea and it can snowball into something incredible and really special. Not many producers are capable of doing that.”
The incidental segues that link A Thousand Suns’ key songs conjure up bombed fields, displaced citizens and the aftermath of war. The chillingly evocative pulse of the album is further enhanced by three key sound bites lifted from history. Deftly embedded in this dense presentation are speeches by US political activist Mario Savio, physicist J Robert Oppenheimer and human rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Each sample finds these formidable figures of history addressing the horrors of war, with Oppenheimer rueing his involvement in The Manhattan Project, the US development of atomic bombs during World War II. The success of Oppenheimer’s research and The Manhattan Project ultimately led to uranium bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the final days of WWII.
“The thing that struck me about the Oppenheimer quote, aside from the obvious political ramifications of the subject, was that here was a human being who was probably told his whole life that his intelligence was something that made him special. At a certain point his greatest asset, his defining characteristic, turned against him and he had no control of it. He had an idea and then his idea became a reality, at which point he said the words you hear on our album. He must have been looking back in disbelief, so understanding the depths of his own tragedy I don’t think anything I have ever done could be as heavy as what was going on there. None of us will ever understand the weight of what he was feeling at the time.”
With A Thousand Suns now unleashed and a heavy block of touring ready to kick in, Shinoda is currently in the midst of transferring this new epic to the live stage.
“It’s unfortunate Linkin Park is so much work,” he concludes, “but we can’t wait to come back and play in Australia.”
A Thousand Suns (Warner)
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