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Best of ‘08: Linkin Park interview

December 2nd, 2008 Jon Chattman Leave a comment Go to comments

As the year comes to a close, thecheappop will look back at its favorite posts of the year… here’s an interview from January.

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“Midnight” Show: Linkin Park ready to hit the road
By Jon Chattman and Oren Phillips

Linkin Park have more hits than Fraggle Rock’s Uncle Traveling Matt had adventures. After their smash albums in the early 2000s (Hybrid Theory, Meteora…that remix cd that kicked ass but we forget the name) the countdown was on last year for Minutes to Midnight, their less-than-Nu-Metal follow-up almost four years after Meteora. Starting Feb. 12, the band will embark on North American tour to support the Midnight, which has already spawned such hit singles as “Bleed It Out,” “Shadow of the Day,” and the breakout “What I’ve Done.” On an unrelated note, I enjoy making the sound effects in that song with my mouth to mimic a Transformer. (Insert: huh? here)

We were fortunate to speak with Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda about the tour, and their current album, which they believe has helped them stay fresh and not get pigeoned holed into any one genre. Without further delay…here’s the interview.

You toured with My Chemical Romance and Taking Back Sunday last year, and will have Chiodos and Coheed and Cambria open the tour this year. What’s the logic behind these eclectic bands?
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 before.

You had a contract dispute with Warner Bros. a few years ago, but ultimately returned to them. Are you glad you stuck with them, and where do you see the industry going?
Bennington: 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, [and] 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, and we actually crossed the 45 million mark with all of our catalog by the end of last year as well, the end of 2007 as well. I guess we should say kudos to Warner for doing a great job in making that or helping making that happen.

Shinoda: 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 – you know there’s going to be times to kind of work it out of the future, the future of the music business. 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 that 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 kind of 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 really 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.

Bennington: I don’t think I was clear, just in case anybody was going to print the numbers. The two million is two million U.S. Minutes to Midnight has done over four million worldwide. And the 45 million is all catalog worldwide.

How is this tour going to differ from shows in the past? How do you keep it different and exciting for the fans?
Shinoda: We actually put a lot of attention on our live show this time around, ever since we kind of came out – 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, with Hybrid Theory, 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 and fans want to hear different things at different times. 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, and this kind of goes out to the people that have come and seen us play on Projekt Revolution, the production will be different. The set will look different.

As you may have heard from some of the – how the ticket sales are going, a number of shows are being sold to 360 degrees. That means that the stage is obviously set up for a 360-degree show. A number of venues, such as Staples Center, Madison Square Garden, they sold out to 270 degrees. Now we opened it up to 360, so it’s a great thing that the shows are selling out, and we’re able to open them up and play in the round.

Bennington: What’s great about that is the fact that one of the bonuses is that people will actually get to see what Joe Hahn is wearing on stage.

Shinoda: You usually can’t see him from the waist down.

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

You guys promote climate change awareness. Are you doing anything on this tour in terms of that initiative?
Shinoda: 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, 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, raise money for that as well.

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. I don’t know exactly what – we’ve already been talking. We talked just yesterday on a conference call to figure out what we’re going to do on this tour, so more information will come on that.

Are you guys going to get involved in the upcoming election at all?
Shinoda: 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.

Minutes to Midnight was really a detour. What was the process while making it and how has the reaction been?
Bennington: From point of view, I think that Minutes to Midnight really, I think the most important part of that process in my eyes was really the fact that we kind of 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.

I think that the longer that we’re around and the more music that we make, I think the more people kind of realize that we’re not just this band that’s going to kind of disappear or be part of a specific trend or a fad, which was kind of where we did get kind of put into that circle of new metal, which was kind of like you know it came and went, but you guys are still here. How much longer do you think you’ll stick around because no one listens to that kind of music anymore? It’s like our response has always been, we’re not that.

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.

Shinoda: We never felt, I mean, just to echo some of Chester’s sentiments, we never felt like we belonged in that category, that new metal, rap rock category. Not because, 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 I think for us, from our perspective, there were more differences than there were similarities. And the longer we – 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, like Chester said, 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—

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 it’s not – 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.

We went underground and we worked on this record, and we popped up somewhere that was different from where everybody else ended up. Luckily, I guess, that was not the case.

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