Linkin Park, Kerrang!, August 2010
IT’S A curious thing that today, for the first time in the seven or so years that I have been interviewing Linkin Park, they appear to be approaching something like being at ease. We’re in Los Angeles at the impossibly pleasant Sunset Marquis hotel – a luxurious retreat just off the fabled Sunset Strip whose walls groan under the weight of signed black and white photos of the musicians who have trashed rooms there.
The latest rock stars to be enjoying the hotel’s hospitality are Linkin Park’s singer Chester Bennington, bass player Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell and the band’s musical lynchpin and other frontman Mike Shinoda. The rest of the band – guitarist Brad Delson, turntablist Joe Hahn and drummer Rob Bourdon – have been spared interview duties for the day, but the three here today are all smiling, making jokes and seem pleased to be present. It makes a nice change.
It’s a curious thing that, in the past when speaking to Linkin Park, they were exceptionally skilled at saying absolutely nothing at all. They were defensive, they appeared paranoid and they seemed to want you out the door before anything could happen. As a journalist you would leave feeling as if you’d spent 30 minutes batting a ball against a blank wall: each time the ball coming unrelentingly back, progress impossible.
Bennington has been the only exception. He’s spoken about his troubled childhood and the problems he had with drugs and alcohol that once made him an outsider from the rest of his band. He’s talked about his divorce and how furious and broke it left him. He’s revealed there have been times in his life that he’d “wake up and have a pint of Jack Daniels to calm down, then I’d pop a bunch of pills and fucking freak out.” And it’s this that has made him seem, at times, to possess the only personality in the band.
Shinoda has, hitherto, remained a closed book. If it belongs to anyone, Linkin Park belongs to Shinoda: he is its musical mastermind; it is to him that the rest of the band turn when they need leadership or new songs. Yet, from his public persona, he appears more marketing manager than musician. Today, to my pleasant surprise, he is different.
Farrell, too – possibly by dint of not being one of the two frontmen – has managed to remain fairly anonymous. Yet to meet him is to meet someone laidback and amiably happy-go-lucky. He’s keen to crack jokes, he gently mocks Shinoda and, in return, is teased back. Odd, then, that this hasn’t much come across before.
But this afternoon, for some reason, the usual guards are down. For the first time in my experience of speaking to them the conversation flows, the spirits are high and the mood is relaxed. It’s an enjoyable way to pass a few hours – which is not something that is often said about interviewing Linkin Park.
THEY’RE HERE to talk about A Thousand Suns – an album that will raise eyebrows. It follows 2007’s Minutes To Midnight, on which they took a sharp left turn and rejected the nu-metal genre they both led and epitomised. Their fourth album continues the veer from the path and seems intent on deconstructing the very ordered music they created on both first album Hybrid Theory and second album Meteroa (or Hybrid Theory I and II as Linkin Park, reflecting on their similarities, call them in private).
It was with those first albums that they came to define nu-metal. Honed, rigorously and rigidly structured they teemed with choruses and riffs that brimmed with both catchiness and commerciality. Such was the success of the first album that it was certified Diamond, putting it in the same category, sales-wise, as Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Led Zeppelin IV and AC/DC’s Back In Black. In total they’ve sold over 50 million albums worldwide and, rumour has it, more than U2 in the last decade.
But they weren’t entirely happy with the sound that they had come to characterise and third album Minutes To Midnight was designed to manoeuvre them into more classic rock territory. That Shinoda accompanied its release by saying things like “you can shove nu-metal up your ass” only reinforced their desire to go in a new direction. The record did not sell anything like as many copies as each of the two before it though still went double Platinum – but, then again, that wasn’t the point.
All of which brings us to A Thousand Suns. Unfortunately, paranoia about leaks being what it is, there are only six tracks available to which to listen before questioning its creators. Three of those are, at the time of interview, untitled as well, which makes imagining the whole album trickier still. But what those songs do reveal is that Linkin Park have taken further steps to reject their past.
Processed beats dominate. There are tracks here that are far closer to dance music than they are to rock, hip hop and nu-metal. You have to hunt for choruses; certain tracks have no structure whatsoever but simply flow, whimsically, from start to finish while others contain diverse influences far removed from the big guitar, big hooks formula of old. Listening to the six songs made available today, it’s hard to see how they will fit into the band’s live set alongside the old favourites – “Yes, I do wonder what we’re going to be able to do live,” Bennington will later admit. In fact, often the only thing that lets you know it’s Linkin Park at all is the sound of their singer’s distinctive voice.
Three immediate thoughts spring to mind: where Minutes To Midnight sounded like a Bennington record, this sounds entirely like a Shinoda record; if the record company were hoping for a return to commercial hits, they’re going to be upset and are Linkin Park trying to disassemble their former achievements and start again?
WHEN LINKIN Park started to think about A Thousand Suns, they began by having a meeting. There was nothing in particular on the agenda – just a catch-up to see where everyone’s thoughts lay. Gradually, they got around to the subject of their next record.
"We ended up just talking for hours. Then we went home. We didn’t even work on anything,” says Shinoda. “The conversation was all about what kind of record we wanted to make, what we thought of what we had already done and what we should be doing. What was so exciting was that we were all really on the same page. We all had the same vision.”
That vision, according to Bennington, was ambitious. “We looked at some of the bands that we wanted to emulate: bands like U2, bands like The Beatles. They’re bands that changed their style at will,” he says. “I wanted to make a record that made people feel as though they were on drugs. I wanted it to be fucked up. I want people to feel not normal when they’re listening to it. The question was how to achieve it.”
First they experimented with sounds, often independently of each other and with Shinoda taking the lead.
“When it began, it was really, really loose,” he says. “You couldn’t call them songs, they were just experiments. The songs at the start of this process were raw and challenging. Some had no verse, no chorus and no structure whatsoever. They were just words and melodies – sometimes not even real words but just syllables – which we put over these wandering progressions. Over the course of months, those evolved into actual songs. But because they started from jams, the structures tended to be more adventurous.
This, in itself, is a radical departure for Linkin Park. Listen to those first two albums and you can hear their structural blueprint repeated on virtually every song. In fact, ask Bennington about it, and he can recite the structure by heart.
“Verse, pre-chorus, chorus; verse, pre-chorus, chorus; bridge, double chorus, out. Bam! There you go,” he says. “We didn’t want to do that again. Instead we started making music. It could wander, it could build, it could do what it wanted. We made these long, spacey instrumental tracks that were just fucking insane. We did it all just with the idea of creating something with a free mind.”
The spirit of exploration infused all they did. One day they filled the studio with 3,000 balloons just to create an unusual atmosphere, for example. Shinoda made use of Hahn’s collection of electronic toys and recorded the noises they made (and also the noises they made when he destroyed them) and filtered those onto the record too. “There were times,” he says, “when I couldn’t tell if a sound had been made by [keyboard manufacturer] Roland or Fisher Price.”
And the results are songs that, as they say, wander. From a band whose music was once so unbendingly focused, so three-and-a-half minute commercial, this is quite a departure. I ask Bennington if they are deliberately trying to dismantle what came before and be the anti-Linkin Park. He nods immediately.
“I’d agree with you there. We don’t want to write radio hits. We don’t want it to be the case that if, say, a chorus is coming then we have to introduce big guitars to give it a lift.
We are really good at those things – but that’s what we’ve done. So we intentionally set out to be different from what we felt was expected of us. We want to create our own sounds: we were hearing things in our heads that didn’t exist and we wanted to make them. And so we found a way of being aggressive without guitars, we found a way of doing hip hop that doesn’t sound like rap rock.”
“IT’S A real shame you couldn’t hear the whole record,” says Shinoda to me. “It’s an album album, if that makes sense. It’s intended to flow from the start of the first track to the end of the last. I think part of the strength of the first album was that it was a collection of strong, individual songs. But you could have put them in any order on the album and they probably would have been fine. This album works in a different way. It really takes you on a journey.”
He looks, as he says this, exhausted. In fact, compared to his customarily sleek public appearance, he seems unusually shabby today. His hair is long and swept across his face, almost hiding his eyes. He’s wearing a shirt borrowed from Delson and his facial hair is somewhere between beard and forgot-to-shave. He looks oddly like a workaholic, mad scientist.
“I’m definitely not very laidback,” he says. “A couple of the guys actually try to get me to focus more on relaxing. I tend to stay in work mode.”
Anyone who has to ‘focus’ on relaxing clearly doesn’t really understand the concept of relaxing, I point out.
“It’s very entertaining to me to see the stress Mike goes through in trying to relax,” says Farrell. “We joke that Mike has more hours in the day than everyone else. I’ll look back at what I’ve done in a month then I’ll look at what Mike has done. He’ll have done everything I’ve done, but he’ll also have put on an art show, worked on a side-project, recorded an album and all sorts of other things.”
“I worry that makes me sound neurotic or crazy. I don’t think I’m crazy,” says Shinoda, laughing. “I don’t really golf, I don’t like television, I don’t get out to the movies often, so the studio is where I spend most of my time. The studio and doing my art.”
I put my mad scientist accusation to him and he thinks for a second before partially agreeing.
“I didn’t think I was until I saw some footage recently,” he replies. “We were filming a documentary for the making of the album and some of the footage made me afraid of myself. I was watching it going, ‘Dude, you are crazy! You are obsessed!’ And I was at that moment.”
This acknowledgement, coupled with the fact Bennington was often absent with his side-project Dead By Sunrise during some stages of A Thousand Suns’ creation, suggests A Thousand Suns is more a Shinoda album than a Bennington one. I ask them if this is so but both sidestep the question.
“Doing the Dead By Sunrise record was actually very good for the Linkin Park record because I had got all that shit out,” says Bennington of the album that addressed both his divorce and drug and alcohol problems. “It meant I could come in and make a record with Linkin Park that wasn’t typical. It wasn’t just me talking about my poor, hurt, little feelings again.”
“Most of the stuff that was done outside of the main studio was done at my house and Joe’s house,” is all Shinoda will say before politely moving on.
However, it seems reasonable to assume this album was helmed chiefly by Shinoda. It’s his obsession that’s at the heart of the band, it’s he who comes up with many of the ideas and Linkin Park is chiefly his vision. He admits to me that the strain of this can cause problems.
“There is pressure, yes,” he says. “There have been times when I feel that everyone’s looking at me and saying that they need me to make it happen. Usually I can do it. But there have been occasions when I can’t and that makes me feel that I’ve let myself and the other guys down. It can be rough.
“A good example is the song we did for the Transformers movie [2009’s New Divide]. We had to write something new and the band were looking at me like, ‘Okay Mike, what do you have?’ So I brought in a few things and it wasn’t there. That made me think, ‘Shit, am I going to be able to do this?’ Obviously, in the end, I did. But that’s when the pressure’s on. That’s when it’s time to find out if I can actually deliver.”
The reason, then, for Shinoda’s perceived intensity is clear: it’s because he’s intense.
FARRELL IS almost his opposite. He can be found on the golf course as much as the studio and the relaxed, carefree attitude he gives off is nicely at odds with the impression Linkin Park have often given of being ruthlessly focussed. His yin helps relax Shinoda’s yang too.
“When Mike gets too crazy, I’m here to counsel him,” he says, joking, before adding seriously: “I think people see the band as one entity. But individually, we’re all quite different in our interests and personalities.”
“People think the band is something cold, calculated,” adds Shinoda. “I don’t know what it is but we give people that feeling. It’s too bad they don’t get a sense of it. One of the things that makes the band tick is that, surprisingly, we all get on. When we’re not in interviews, we screw around in a way that we never would in front of other people.”
What Shinoda says is true. Ask around about what people think of Linkin Park and the answers will be various. Few, though, will contain the words warm, welcoming or friendly. From the earliest days onwards, they’ve come across as insular and single-mindedly professional. I ask them why they think that is.
“To be brutally honest, early on we had quite a chip on our shoulder,” says Farrell. “We were both blessed and cursed with what appeared to be very quick success. In a lot of ways we got defensive about that. We were pretty bad when we came to talking [in interviews] because we already felt uncomfortable so our guard was always up. I think we’re still a little bit defensive… well, actually, we’re definitely still defensive and protective.”
“Protective is the right word,” adds Shinoda. “We work so hard that when someone comes in and judges us, sums us up or takes a shot at us, it puts us on the defensive. If we even <<think>> someone is going to [take a shot] then we get closed off. I regard the album as such an important part of who we are that I find it terrible for someone to take something away from that.”
Is it perhaps like family, I suggest. Family members can criticise each other but, if an outsider attempts the same, the whole family will turn on them.
“Actually,” says Shinoda, “That’s the perfect analogy.”
AS MY time with Linkin Park draws to a close I wonder why they’re still here doing it at all. With millions of sales under their belts and millions of dollars in the bank, why bother anymore? Why step outside their comfort zone and make a record that, in all probability, some of their fans will hate? Why take that risk rather than simply knock out formulaic hits and count the sales? I ask all three the same question.
Bennington says this: “We asked what was going to make us happy. For us the challenge was to keep ourselves guessing as to what was coming next and so, hopefully, keep everyone else wondering what the hell we’re going to do too.”
Farrell’s reply is slightly different: “In all bands, you get to a point where you either love the guys you’re doing this with or you don’t. And by ‘don’t’ I mean you hate them. I love the guys I’m playing with. That’s why I do it.”
But Shinoda, the workaholic, obsessive leader of a band marked by their seriousness, has by far the simplest and most surprising reply. He just says this: “Because it’s fun.”
And with that, he smiles, shakes my hand and settles back to wait for what the world will make of his “fun”, or A Thousand Suns as it otherwise known.
© Tom Bryant 2010
The latest rock stars to be enjoying the hotel’s hospitality are Linkin Park’s singer Chester Bennington, bass player Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell and the band’s musical lynchpin and other frontman Mike Shinoda. The rest of the band – guitarist Brad Delson, turntablist Joe Hahn and drummer Rob Bourdon – have been spared interview duties for the day, but the three here today are all smiling, making jokes and seem pleased to be present. It makes a nice change.
It’s a curious thing that, in the past when speaking to Linkin Park, they were exceptionally skilled at saying absolutely nothing at all. They were defensive, they appeared paranoid and they seemed to want you out the door before anything could happen. As a journalist you would leave feeling as if you’d spent 30 minutes batting a ball against a blank wall: each time the ball coming unrelentingly back, progress impossible.
Bennington has been the only exception. He’s spoken about his troubled childhood and the problems he had with drugs and alcohol that once made him an outsider from the rest of his band. He’s talked about his divorce and how furious and broke it left him. He’s revealed there have been times in his life that he’d “wake up and have a pint of Jack Daniels to calm down, then I’d pop a bunch of pills and fucking freak out.” And it’s this that has made him seem, at times, to possess the only personality in the band.
Shinoda has, hitherto, remained a closed book. If it belongs to anyone, Linkin Park belongs to Shinoda: he is its musical mastermind; it is to him that the rest of the band turn when they need leadership or new songs. Yet, from his public persona, he appears more marketing manager than musician. Today, to my pleasant surprise, he is different.
Farrell, too – possibly by dint of not being one of the two frontmen – has managed to remain fairly anonymous. Yet to meet him is to meet someone laidback and amiably happy-go-lucky. He’s keen to crack jokes, he gently mocks Shinoda and, in return, is teased back. Odd, then, that this hasn’t much come across before.
But this afternoon, for some reason, the usual guards are down. For the first time in my experience of speaking to them the conversation flows, the spirits are high and the mood is relaxed. It’s an enjoyable way to pass a few hours – which is not something that is often said about interviewing Linkin Park.
THEY’RE HERE to talk about A Thousand Suns – an album that will raise eyebrows. It follows 2007’s Minutes To Midnight, on which they took a sharp left turn and rejected the nu-metal genre they both led and epitomised. Their fourth album continues the veer from the path and seems intent on deconstructing the very ordered music they created on both first album Hybrid Theory and second album Meteroa (or Hybrid Theory I and II as Linkin Park, reflecting on their similarities, call them in private).
It was with those first albums that they came to define nu-metal. Honed, rigorously and rigidly structured they teemed with choruses and riffs that brimmed with both catchiness and commerciality. Such was the success of the first album that it was certified Diamond, putting it in the same category, sales-wise, as Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Led Zeppelin IV and AC/DC’s Back In Black. In total they’ve sold over 50 million albums worldwide and, rumour has it, more than U2 in the last decade.
But they weren’t entirely happy with the sound that they had come to characterise and third album Minutes To Midnight was designed to manoeuvre them into more classic rock territory. That Shinoda accompanied its release by saying things like “you can shove nu-metal up your ass” only reinforced their desire to go in a new direction. The record did not sell anything like as many copies as each of the two before it though still went double Platinum – but, then again, that wasn’t the point.
All of which brings us to A Thousand Suns. Unfortunately, paranoia about leaks being what it is, there are only six tracks available to which to listen before questioning its creators. Three of those are, at the time of interview, untitled as well, which makes imagining the whole album trickier still. But what those songs do reveal is that Linkin Park have taken further steps to reject their past.
Processed beats dominate. There are tracks here that are far closer to dance music than they are to rock, hip hop and nu-metal. You have to hunt for choruses; certain tracks have no structure whatsoever but simply flow, whimsically, from start to finish while others contain diverse influences far removed from the big guitar, big hooks formula of old. Listening to the six songs made available today, it’s hard to see how they will fit into the band’s live set alongside the old favourites – “Yes, I do wonder what we’re going to be able to do live,” Bennington will later admit. In fact, often the only thing that lets you know it’s Linkin Park at all is the sound of their singer’s distinctive voice.
Three immediate thoughts spring to mind: where Minutes To Midnight sounded like a Bennington record, this sounds entirely like a Shinoda record; if the record company were hoping for a return to commercial hits, they’re going to be upset and are Linkin Park trying to disassemble their former achievements and start again?
WHEN LINKIN Park started to think about A Thousand Suns, they began by having a meeting. There was nothing in particular on the agenda – just a catch-up to see where everyone’s thoughts lay. Gradually, they got around to the subject of their next record.
"We ended up just talking for hours. Then we went home. We didn’t even work on anything,” says Shinoda. “The conversation was all about what kind of record we wanted to make, what we thought of what we had already done and what we should be doing. What was so exciting was that we were all really on the same page. We all had the same vision.”
That vision, according to Bennington, was ambitious. “We looked at some of the bands that we wanted to emulate: bands like U2, bands like The Beatles. They’re bands that changed their style at will,” he says. “I wanted to make a record that made people feel as though they were on drugs. I wanted it to be fucked up. I want people to feel not normal when they’re listening to it. The question was how to achieve it.”
First they experimented with sounds, often independently of each other and with Shinoda taking the lead.
“When it began, it was really, really loose,” he says. “You couldn’t call them songs, they were just experiments. The songs at the start of this process were raw and challenging. Some had no verse, no chorus and no structure whatsoever. They were just words and melodies – sometimes not even real words but just syllables – which we put over these wandering progressions. Over the course of months, those evolved into actual songs. But because they started from jams, the structures tended to be more adventurous.
This, in itself, is a radical departure for Linkin Park. Listen to those first two albums and you can hear their structural blueprint repeated on virtually every song. In fact, ask Bennington about it, and he can recite the structure by heart.
“Verse, pre-chorus, chorus; verse, pre-chorus, chorus; bridge, double chorus, out. Bam! There you go,” he says. “We didn’t want to do that again. Instead we started making music. It could wander, it could build, it could do what it wanted. We made these long, spacey instrumental tracks that were just fucking insane. We did it all just with the idea of creating something with a free mind.”
The spirit of exploration infused all they did. One day they filled the studio with 3,000 balloons just to create an unusual atmosphere, for example. Shinoda made use of Hahn’s collection of electronic toys and recorded the noises they made (and also the noises they made when he destroyed them) and filtered those onto the record too. “There were times,” he says, “when I couldn’t tell if a sound had been made by [keyboard manufacturer] Roland or Fisher Price.”
And the results are songs that, as they say, wander. From a band whose music was once so unbendingly focused, so three-and-a-half minute commercial, this is quite a departure. I ask Bennington if they are deliberately trying to dismantle what came before and be the anti-Linkin Park. He nods immediately.
“I’d agree with you there. We don’t want to write radio hits. We don’t want it to be the case that if, say, a chorus is coming then we have to introduce big guitars to give it a lift.
We are really good at those things – but that’s what we’ve done. So we intentionally set out to be different from what we felt was expected of us. We want to create our own sounds: we were hearing things in our heads that didn’t exist and we wanted to make them. And so we found a way of being aggressive without guitars, we found a way of doing hip hop that doesn’t sound like rap rock.”
“IT’S A real shame you couldn’t hear the whole record,” says Shinoda to me. “It’s an album album, if that makes sense. It’s intended to flow from the start of the first track to the end of the last. I think part of the strength of the first album was that it was a collection of strong, individual songs. But you could have put them in any order on the album and they probably would have been fine. This album works in a different way. It really takes you on a journey.”
He looks, as he says this, exhausted. In fact, compared to his customarily sleek public appearance, he seems unusually shabby today. His hair is long and swept across his face, almost hiding his eyes. He’s wearing a shirt borrowed from Delson and his facial hair is somewhere between beard and forgot-to-shave. He looks oddly like a workaholic, mad scientist.
“I’m definitely not very laidback,” he says. “A couple of the guys actually try to get me to focus more on relaxing. I tend to stay in work mode.”
Anyone who has to ‘focus’ on relaxing clearly doesn’t really understand the concept of relaxing, I point out.
“It’s very entertaining to me to see the stress Mike goes through in trying to relax,” says Farrell. “We joke that Mike has more hours in the day than everyone else. I’ll look back at what I’ve done in a month then I’ll look at what Mike has done. He’ll have done everything I’ve done, but he’ll also have put on an art show, worked on a side-project, recorded an album and all sorts of other things.”
“I worry that makes me sound neurotic or crazy. I don’t think I’m crazy,” says Shinoda, laughing. “I don’t really golf, I don’t like television, I don’t get out to the movies often, so the studio is where I spend most of my time. The studio and doing my art.”
I put my mad scientist accusation to him and he thinks for a second before partially agreeing.
“I didn’t think I was until I saw some footage recently,” he replies. “We were filming a documentary for the making of the album and some of the footage made me afraid of myself. I was watching it going, ‘Dude, you are crazy! You are obsessed!’ And I was at that moment.”
This acknowledgement, coupled with the fact Bennington was often absent with his side-project Dead By Sunrise during some stages of A Thousand Suns’ creation, suggests A Thousand Suns is more a Shinoda album than a Bennington one. I ask them if this is so but both sidestep the question.
“Doing the Dead By Sunrise record was actually very good for the Linkin Park record because I had got all that shit out,” says Bennington of the album that addressed both his divorce and drug and alcohol problems. “It meant I could come in and make a record with Linkin Park that wasn’t typical. It wasn’t just me talking about my poor, hurt, little feelings again.”
“Most of the stuff that was done outside of the main studio was done at my house and Joe’s house,” is all Shinoda will say before politely moving on.
However, it seems reasonable to assume this album was helmed chiefly by Shinoda. It’s his obsession that’s at the heart of the band, it’s he who comes up with many of the ideas and Linkin Park is chiefly his vision. He admits to me that the strain of this can cause problems.
“There is pressure, yes,” he says. “There have been times when I feel that everyone’s looking at me and saying that they need me to make it happen. Usually I can do it. But there have been occasions when I can’t and that makes me feel that I’ve let myself and the other guys down. It can be rough.
“A good example is the song we did for the Transformers movie [2009’s New Divide]. We had to write something new and the band were looking at me like, ‘Okay Mike, what do you have?’ So I brought in a few things and it wasn’t there. That made me think, ‘Shit, am I going to be able to do this?’ Obviously, in the end, I did. But that’s when the pressure’s on. That’s when it’s time to find out if I can actually deliver.”
The reason, then, for Shinoda’s perceived intensity is clear: it’s because he’s intense.
FARRELL IS almost his opposite. He can be found on the golf course as much as the studio and the relaxed, carefree attitude he gives off is nicely at odds with the impression Linkin Park have often given of being ruthlessly focussed. His yin helps relax Shinoda’s yang too.
“When Mike gets too crazy, I’m here to counsel him,” he says, joking, before adding seriously: “I think people see the band as one entity. But individually, we’re all quite different in our interests and personalities.”
“People think the band is something cold, calculated,” adds Shinoda. “I don’t know what it is but we give people that feeling. It’s too bad they don’t get a sense of it. One of the things that makes the band tick is that, surprisingly, we all get on. When we’re not in interviews, we screw around in a way that we never would in front of other people.”
What Shinoda says is true. Ask around about what people think of Linkin Park and the answers will be various. Few, though, will contain the words warm, welcoming or friendly. From the earliest days onwards, they’ve come across as insular and single-mindedly professional. I ask them why they think that is.
“To be brutally honest, early on we had quite a chip on our shoulder,” says Farrell. “We were both blessed and cursed with what appeared to be very quick success. In a lot of ways we got defensive about that. We were pretty bad when we came to talking [in interviews] because we already felt uncomfortable so our guard was always up. I think we’re still a little bit defensive… well, actually, we’re definitely still defensive and protective.”
“Protective is the right word,” adds Shinoda. “We work so hard that when someone comes in and judges us, sums us up or takes a shot at us, it puts us on the defensive. If we even <<think>> someone is going to [take a shot] then we get closed off. I regard the album as such an important part of who we are that I find it terrible for someone to take something away from that.”
Is it perhaps like family, I suggest. Family members can criticise each other but, if an outsider attempts the same, the whole family will turn on them.
“Actually,” says Shinoda, “That’s the perfect analogy.”
AS MY time with Linkin Park draws to a close I wonder why they’re still here doing it at all. With millions of sales under their belts and millions of dollars in the bank, why bother anymore? Why step outside their comfort zone and make a record that, in all probability, some of their fans will hate? Why take that risk rather than simply knock out formulaic hits and count the sales? I ask all three the same question.
Bennington says this: “We asked what was going to make us happy. For us the challenge was to keep ourselves guessing as to what was coming next and so, hopefully, keep everyone else wondering what the hell we’re going to do too.”
Farrell’s reply is slightly different: “In all bands, you get to a point where you either love the guys you’re doing this with or you don’t. And by ‘don’t’ I mean you hate them. I love the guys I’m playing with. That’s why I do it.”
But Shinoda, the workaholic, obsessive leader of a band marked by their seriousness, has by far the simplest and most surprising reply. He just says this: “Because it’s fun.”
And with that, he smiles, shakes my hand and settles back to wait for what the world will make of his “fun”, or A Thousand Suns as it otherwise known.
© Tom Bryant 2010
