Linkin Park's World Domination

By: Brett Hickman

Monday January 21, 2008

It Isn't Close To Hitting "Midnight" Yet
Selling 45 million copies worldwide of three studio albums, one live release and a "mash-up" album with Jay-Z, Linkin Park are the dominant force in rock music today. That they've outlasted the "nu-metal" and "rap-rock" tags placed upon them once their debut Hybrid Theory took off and that they have further outlasted other bands they were lumped in with at the time, means a lot in this fickle time for music.

That they sold 625,000 copies of their latest album Minutes To Midnight in a year where few albums were met with such extraordinary first weeks says a lot about the band's fan base. These are loyal people and they rewarded the band for stretching their wings a bit musically and with their continued loyalty (to the tune of 2 million-plus copies sold in the U.S. in a little over eight months).

Midnight is easily the band's best foot forward, though they largely abandon their harder rock sound in favor of (for them) experimentation and slower tempo dirges. But a band that can grow, one that can recognize a need to improve and a need to change, especially at their level of success, should be commended. Even if they're not your cup of tea, Linkin Park's efforts are much more admirable than say, Nickelback's (yeah, an easy shot, but do you see Chad Kroeger changing up his formula ever? I don't think so).

To help promote their upcoming North American tour beginning February 12th with openers Chiodos and Coheed and Cambria, Linkin Park's Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda took part in a conference call interview, touching on the recording of Minutes To Midnight, their organization Music For Relief, as well as their love of their fans and what they are doing to give back to them on this tour.

Static Multimedia: With Projekt Revolution you chose bands such as Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, and now you have the post-hardcore act Chiodos and prog-rockers Coheed and Cambria. Why did you choose them?

Chester Bennington: When we choose groups to tour with, we really look at a lot of different things, but mostly we look at the quality of the band. We feel that good music speaks for itself, and I don't know about you guys, but if I go to the concert and every band sounds the same, it's kind of makes for a really long day. So we do like to keep things fresh and keep things moving, and play with acts we haven't played with before.

Could you talk a little bit about the digital souvenir package that fans are going to have an opportunity to get on the tour?

CB: The digital souvenir package is a brand new thing that we're offering on this tour. I don't think anybody else has offered it or at least offered this type of thing in this way. You can basically opt in when you buy your tickets online for the digital souvenir package. What will happen after that is you go to the show, you watch your show, enjoy that, come home, and in your e-mail inbox you'll have a link to the show, to the MP3s of our set from the show you went to. In other words, you get to take home the hopefully memorable concert that you went to.

And the best part about it to me is that our live mixer, our official mixer who mixes our show every night at the front of the house position, he finishes his night with us, then goes back to his hotel or bus or backstage and mixes the show for you. That's what's so important about this idea is that it's not a straight board mix or a cell phone or video camera, which is what you usually get on YouTube. This is a mix done for CD, so it sounds good in your car, so it sounds good coming out of your iTunes and your stereo, into your stereo. It's intended to be played in your headphones and in your car, and it's done by our official guy.

Mike Shinoda: Another thing that I think is really cool about it is we also encourage our fans to go on and trade them and kind of get to know each other. We really like the fact that, in the digital world, people who like the same things and want to be part of something can communicate and share and exchange things with each other.

CB: Plus, some shows are really special. Just the way that a certain song came off one night just really touches people sometimes. Those are the kind of MP3s that get passed around a lot.

You guys have always embraced technology. You've got a great Web site, interactive with the fans. For a band like Linkin Park, which has so many different sides, so many different styles from quieter stuff to real harder edged material that you're never going to hear unedited on the radio, do you think it's an advantage that fans can go and pick and choose the music that they want?

CB: I personally still like to buy whole records. I enjoy the journey, and especially with records that are put together well. It doesn't bother you to listen to the whole thing. But I do think that there are different kinds of people out there, and some may just want three tracks or something. If that's an option that they want to have, they should have that option afforded to them.

There is a benefit when it comes to that kind of person who maybe likes the single, but doesn't really know of the band and isn't sure if they want to buy the whole record. For us, I think we have a lot of support from our fans, and so they tend to buy our records. Every time someone is introduced to the group in a new way, they can go buy the single. I hasn't really affected us in a negative way by any means, so we're always trying to figure out new ways of staying connected and bringing our full album package to our fans and giving them something special. That's important to us, but we're not going to turn our backs on other ways of selling music as well.

You had a very public contract battle with Warner Brothers a couple years ago, and of course now people are wondering all the more if record companies are the thing of the past. Why did you stick with Warner Brothers, and how do you look back on all that now?

CB: I think that for me, with the Fort Minor record coming out before Minutes to Midnight, the concerns were – I think we voiced all our concerns back then. I don't want to get back into it at all. But we worked things out and we came to kind of a common understanding or a mutual understanding of how we wanted our albums to be treated, how we wanted our fans to be treated. We kind of made up and we stuck with Warner.

Obviously they've done a great job on this record, which has – I guess we crossed the double platinum mark last year (in the U.S., the album has sold four million copies worldwide), and we actually crossed the 45 million mark with all of our catalog by the end of last year as well. I guess we should say kudos to Warners for doing a great job in helping to make that happen.

MS: I think the second half of your question is, are labels a thing of the past? I think that there are a lot of positive things that labels provide artists. I do believe though that it's very important for the old model of the record industry to be – it's that the business model is dying. I don't think that the label side of things is dying. I think it's just going to be rejuvenated with a new plan of action.

All the details of what could possibly be, we're kind of in this new frontier where it's kind of like throwing ideas at the dartboard and seeing which ones stick. That's a really exciting place to be because the people who figure out the model that works the best, whether it's a band or whether it's a management group or whether it's a record company, is really going to forge the future of how this business is run. I think when that happens a lot of the issues that have been kind of argued back and forth from the band to a label and vice versa, I think a lot of those things could be put to rest or at least improved upon. I think we're in a very interesting and really special time in the music business right now. I think people are used to just focusing on the kind of negative aspects of what's going on and not really looking at how amazing the potential is for the future of this business.

You spent so much time on the road and people have so many opportunities to see you. How is this tour going to differ? How do you keep it different and exciting for the fans?

MS: We actually put a lot of attention on our live show this time around, ever since we came out of the studio, we were really excited about different ways we could keep the show fresh. Having so many songs now, we're definitely no longer in the position that we used to be in with Hybrid Theory where we had virtually 40 minutes of material, and we were asked to play headline sets, and we didn't even have enough songs to fill one out.

Now we've got all these songs, and we can kind of pick and choose. It's a pleasure to be able to get on stage and switch up the set every night. Not only that, but for the U.S. tour the production will be different.

CB: One of the bonuses is that people will actually get to see what Joe Hahn is wearing on stage.

MS: You usually can't see him from the waist down.

CB: It's been great to see the kind of things that Joe wears onstage from our perspective because you might actually get to watch him take a nap onstage sometimes. He lays down and takes a nap.

MS: He'll go on in little, colorful shorts.

CB: He's got like a cool shirt on, and then he's got like workout shorts and flip-flops on. It's kind of like one of those things where the news anchor isn't wearing any pants under the desk kind of thing. That could be pretty special for some really lucky people.

MS: Hopefully we can talk him into a thong or just talk him out of his shorts.

CB: Nice.

I was wondering about your interest in your opening bands, Chiodos and Cohead and Cambria, how familiar you were with them going in and what your interest was in having them open the show.

MS: We're always kind of keeping our eyes on up and coming bands because we remember how important it was to us from our point of view when we were coming up. The bands that were open to touring with us were bands that were familiar with us. That always felt cool when a band was a little bigger than you, knew who you were, and that's the reason why they wanted to tour with you. They listened to your music a little bit or had been paying attention to what you were doing.

It's important for us to remember that there are other really great bands out there that people are kind of figuring out exist, and to be part of taking some of these groups out and exposing them to broad audiences is a gift that we can give right now. Chiodos is one of those groups that's kind of making a lot of noise right now, and we felt that they would add to the bill. A lot of people aren't going to know who they are, but there are going to be some hardcore kids out there that are fans of theirs that are really going to be excited that they're on a bill like this with us and Coheed and Cambria. That's fun to me, and I think that's fun for the rest of the guys to kind of be able to do that.

You have really been involved in promoting awareness of climate change, especially in the last couple of tours. What are you doing on this tour in terms of extending what you've done before or will you introduce some new initiatives? And the second part of the question is, since this is an election year, is this something that you might decide to get involved with, especially since the two sides have such different views on this issue?

MS: As far as the Music For Relief stuff, we will be announcing hopefully more of our ideas for efforts that we can make on the tour. I know the Music For Relief booth will be up, as usual. The easiest way that fans can help out, we offer information there at the booth. Please, if you come to the show, go check that out. Buy a bandana. They're only a couple bucks, and that goes towards the charity organization.

Music For Relief, just to give a quick overview of it, started after the tsunami in South Asia. We started the organization at that point to help out with relief efforts. We continue those relief efforts through that and after the hurricane in New Orleans. We went down there after Katrina. We realized what a mess it was, and we tried to help out the best we could, raising money.

We then realized, as we were in the studio with Minutes to Midnight, that we could do things not just on the backend on the cleanup relief kind of end, but hopefully be proactive and combat global warning on other fronts, so we that we wouldn't have to have as many, hopefully, catastrophes and be doing the kind of cleanup that we were already involved in. We recently joined with Unite the United to assist in the recovery and reforesting of devastated areas in Southern California after the wild fires. That was the most recent thing that we did.

As far as your question about the election, we try and stay out of that. I think that our fans don't need us preaching politics to them. They're intelligent. They've got their own opinions, and they can make their own decisions. Obviously we encourage everybody to vote. We encourage everybody to go out and do their research on the candidates that interest them and make thoughtful, informed decisions.

You've talked about wanting not be easily categorized, one that you can't pigeonhole. Certainly you guys had your share of people calling you nu-metal or rap-rock earlier. How do you think Minutes to Midnight has helped get a little closer to that goal of not being able to be so easily categorized?

CB: The most important part of that process in my eyes was that we opened our minds up to writing music that just felt right. We went more towards how the songs themselves made us feel and how we responded to them rather than what we thought we should create, what we thought our fans would want us to make.

In doing that, we wrote a lot of different styles of songs, and we worked on a lot of songs that maybe were a little off the task for us. It really encouraged us and it opened our minds. Songs like "In Between" and "In Pieces", and "Little Things Give You Away", songs that probably we would have thought were cool, but we weren't sure if we could pull them off. I think it opened up that door for us.

The longer that we're around and the more music that we make, more people kind of realize that we're not just this band that's going to disappear or be part of a specific trend or a fad, which was where we did get kind of put into that circle of nu-metal, which came and went. We write music that we want to hear, and if that means putting a jungle beat with a saxophone is what we want to hear, then we're going to write that. Whether that makes a record or not doesn't matter, but that's what we're going to write.

I think people are opening up to that idea that we are a band that's not afraid of extending ourselves and spreading our wings and pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable for us. Our fans, they stick with us through this process, and it's pretty awesome. It's a really special kind of thing to see that our fans enjoy the music that we make, regardless of what style it is. I think that's something that they appreciate.

MS: We never felt like we belonged in that category, that nu-metal, rap-rock category. Obviously if you look back on Hybrid Theory, there was rap and there's rock in it. But it just felt like a lazy category that people were putting that name on us because they couldn't come up with anything that was better or they just kind of felt like lumping everybody together because they were kind of the same.

But, from our perspective, there were more differences than there were similarities. The more albums we make, the more chances we get to kind of highlight those differences between us and the things that people thought we were in the beginning. At this point, we're just making whatever sounds good to us. I think the big challenge or the big question that was posed at the beginning of the Minutes to Midnight studio sessions was are we going to change the sound so much that people are going to think we've gone off the deep end, it's weird, it's too different, and they're not going to like it. Well, what ended up happening, it's easy to look back at it now and say, yes, of course. It was a hit and everybody loves it. But, if you look back to the day before we turned it in, the day we finished it, we were pretty nervous because who knows if the fans had grown up in the same direction that we had.

Could you contrast just what the group spirit or group mood was going into the recording of Minutes to Midnight, realizing you had just come out of what was a fairly tumultuous time with Warner's and heading into an adventure working with Rick Rubin and new sound possibilities. And contrasting that to where the group stands now, having the album out for eight months and doing a considerable amount of touring behind it.

CB: I think where we were at was we were really hungry to make a record. We talk about how much time we like to be with our families and take off. It's important for us to kind of have a balance. I think for us, the reality is that if we take even a week longer than expected, it becomes uncomfortable.

We enjoy what we do. As much as a vacation sounds good or taking time to work through some issues, like we had with Warner Brothers, it was necessary, but it was also difficult for us. Once we got ready to make the record, we were very ready to make a record. When we started talking about producers, we knew in our hearts that we wanted to make a record that was going to be a turning point for us and a revamping of the band creatively and intellectually.

Rick Rubin is a master of that, and he kind of has a similar philosophy to producing music that we have in making music, which is he produces music based on personal taste. We write music based on our personal taste. We got together. Rick was very vocal about if he was going to work with us that he didn't want to make a record with us that sounded like Hybrid Theory or Meteora. He wanted to kind of push us to our most creative potential and see what we could do.

MS: That was one of the things that was so appealing to most of us about sitting down with Rick for the first time because, Chester, if you recall, when we sat down with him, he didn't say that right off the bat. He asked us what kind of record we wanted to make. All six of us wanted something totally different. He was like, good because that's what he was thinking. If that wasn't the answer, then maybe we wouldn't be seeing eye-to-eye. But since we all are, then let's get into this.

CB: Right. Given that and knowing that we had a person who could steer the ship, so to speak, we had Rick Rubin on our side. We had a lot of records sold behind us that we kind of knew that we were in a special position. This was our chance; this was our time to make that happen. We saw the moment, and we seized it.

Because the stars and planets kind of aligned, and given our success in the past and given the fact that we were working with Rick Rubin, who is very artist friendly, and who understands the creative process. His philosophy is that the record is not done until it's great. We afforded ourselves the time to sit back and write the 100-bazillion songs that we wrote for this record. We were like, it's good, but could we do better? We tried. We went and did it. We took the time, and we exhausted every avenue. We blazed new paths and tried new things. It was a great experience, and I think the album speaks for itself.

How was working with other artists such as DJ Lethal or Jay-Z, Depeche Mode, those collaborations? How did that aid your creative process?

I think it's important, especially when you work with guys like Jay-Z. Musically it was awesome. But then you get to see how a different creative person works, and when you see someone like Jay-Z, who has this really unearthly kind of talent that defies logic, it doesn't make any sense. It's fun to watch that and it's inspiring to see someone go, roll a beat, and come up with lyrics off the top of their head for five minutes that make sense, that are cohesive, that are enlightening or just really funny all at the same time. Then kind of have us all in shock and then say, now delete it. That was my little gift for you guys.

It was like, okay, that just happened. He just went through that and we're the only ones that get to do that. Hopefully other artists, when they work with us, they kind of feel the same thing when they're working with us that we have those kinds of talents too. Hopefully we inspire them as well.

MS: Each time I get in the studio with somebody, they've got a different MO. They've got a different style and different little tricks and techniques and maybe equipment, gear that they use that I haven't tried out before. All that stuff keeps it really fresh. At this point in the game, for us, having been a band and been playing and writing music together for ten years, a large part of the puzzle for us at this point is finding ways to make it new and interesting.

Each time we get to do that with somebody, it's just so much fun and it breathes new life into the project. So getting into the studio with Minutes to Midnight and doing that for a year and a half, just every day you come into the studio it's like we can do some more of the new thing that we did yesterday, or we can try something brand new. What do you say we rent a marimba and a xylophone and an electric banjo and screw around with those today.

CB: There's a guy in a Honda Accord that's driving next to me, staring at me and revving his engine like he wants to race.

Being that you've been together for ten years as a band, I was just wondering about the songwriting process, how you guys put songs together has evolved. Has it changed much in terms of weight? I know you guys both take care of the lyrics, but has it changed much in terms of how things come together?

MS: When we first started the band, we were doing demos as an unsigned band called Xero. It was Brad and I and a friend of ours named Mark. We would write the stuff, and then we brought in the other guys. Chester was not part of the band at that time. Then we would write the stuff, and everybody else would kind of learn it and kind of embellish on it and make it better.

That led into the version of Linkin Park that, when Chester joined the band, and Brad and I would write most of the music. Chester and I would write all the lyrics and melodies. That was basically how we did things up until Meteora or Collision Course.

I shouldn't say that the other guys were not involved, but the majority of the writing was falling on Brad and I as far as the music goes, and Chester and I did all the lyrics. I think in all of our minds that was working, but it wasn't as fun as it could be. The other guys were kind of feeling like they'd get something that was already kind of written or whatever. They'd give their input. They'd work on making it better, but they weren't as involved as they could be.

On this record, we made a huge effort to really involve everybody, and it was six votes. For any part of any song, you had six guys writing. You had six guys voting, and every vote counted. If one person said, you know I really don't like that part, then that part was in question. It didn't matter if it was five to one. That part was in question. That's just kind of how we learned to do things on this record, and for better or worse I think we enjoyed it much more.

CB: It was kind of fun to walk in and go, dude, check this out. Last week it was me and Mike working together, and this week it's me and Dave. Check out what we did to this song and check out this new idea, or listen to this pile of crap I wrote.

MS: We got demos that sounded like anything, everything. There was stuff that sounded like Public Enemy. There was stuff that sounded like '80s R&B pop songs. There was stuff that sounded like Johnny Cash. There was stuff that sounded like old Anthrax. This isn't an exaggeration at all.

CB: We even had some stuff that was considered by some of the other members in the band as it sounds like it could have been on the Little Mermaid soundtrack.

MS: Not Mermaid, Mulan. Two of the guys were like, this song sounds like it's from Mulan. I hate it. But the other four of us loved it. I think that part of the chemistry and part of the magic for us in our band is the likes and dislikes of each of the six members and how different those can be. But when they overlap, when all six members' likes overlap, that's when something belongs on the record.

CB: We call it magic sauce.