Complex Music has done an in-depth interview with Mike about Living Things, Linkin Park’s live show, his side projects, his ambitions, and what the future looks like, read an excerpt below and the full article here.

The last time we talked, you were still working on Living Things. Now that you’ve finished it up, how do you feel about it?
Well, how do I feel about it? I feel good. For us, what we tried to do when we started working on it is we wanted to bridge the gap between all the previous records. We wanted to bring some of the old fans into the new and some of the new fans into the old and mix it up. At this point, I feel really good about the response. The response to the singles has been awesome. It’s been even better than I thought it would be. At the same time, I’m really excited to be playing some of the other tracks live. Some of those are a little more adventurous. I really want to play, for example, “Until It Breaks” in the set. That will be fun.


How do you feel about the current state of rock? One of the cool things about Linkin Park is that you guys have always brought so many different genres together, and that seems to be a big thing in rock right now.
Yeah, rock is maybe more fragmented than it has been. It’s more fragmented than it was 10 years ago, that’s for sure. 10 years ago, when our band first came out, it was very much about a certain sound, and everybody was making variations of that certain sound. We hated being lumped into that shit. We didn’t even mind the bands that we were being lumped in with, we just didn’t like the idea of somebody saying that there’s a nu-metal movement and having the flag shoved into our hands. In every interview, we said we are not trying to hold the flag of that thing, because we knew that wasn’t our thing, and it never was. We’ve got six guys with drastically different tastes in music, and we’re always feeding each other different stuff. And that stuff is just moving from one guy to the other, and it ends up influencing the music. The more we play together it’s manifested itself in what we write and what we record.


Over the years, how has your live show evolved?
We put a lot of work into our live show. In the beginning we only had one album that was less than 40 minutes long, and within the first nine months we were expected to play headline sets. Can you imagine? You’re expecting a band to play at least 60 minutes, and we didn’t even have 45.


What did you do?
We occasionally played a cover. We occasionally dicked around and made our songs longer. We talked a lot in between songs. Now we have the opposite problem, where we’ve got so many songs and it’s like how do we work it all into the set and make it interesting and keep the flow really nicely. These new sets are some of the most high-energy sets that we’ve played in like seven years.


Do you have a favorite song on the favorite album?
No, I mean day to day I guess I could, but it changes. I mentioned “Until It Breaks” earlier. I just like that one because it’s a little more wild than a lot of the other stuff on the record. Today we’re going to play “Lost In The Echo,” which is another favorite of mine. I just like to play it because it’s got a lot of energy.


How is working on a Linkin Park album different from working on your side projects, like Fort Minor, or the Raid Redemption score?
Well, they’re all different. I think we know what’s at stake when we do a Linkin Park album, so our attention to detail couldn’t be more forefront. With Fort Minor it was very loose, and in fact I never intended on releasing it when I made it, so it was a very different approach. With Linkin Park there’s a rigidity to the process. Every Monday we get together to talk about where the songs are at, what’s changed, ideas, what we like, what we don’t like. We throw all of that stuff around and then that day and for the rest of the week, we work on the songs. So on Monday it’s super rigid, then as soon as we leave the Monday meeting it’s amorphous, it’s whatever works.


So what’s next for you? Do you have plans to continue with any side projects?
People always ask about Fort Minor and shit like that. I’m definitely open to do some more of that some day, it’s just a matter of when. I’ll do some more scoring too, probably produce some rap. Other than that, we’re going to keep our heads down and power through some more Linkin Park stuff. Creatively, we’ve got a lot of momentum right now.


Now that you’ve finished this album, do you just jump right back into writing again?
Traditionally, bands will write and then tour a record until the end of the cycle. Things for us aren’t as cyclical anymore. So we’ll place the tours where they need to be, and then work in writing time. And if it doesn’t look like enough writing time we’ll block out more writing time. It wouldn’t work for every band, but it works for us because it’s like a muscle. If you run every day you’re not going to be sore. If you haven’t run in six months, the first few times you do it you’re going to feel like shit. If you go in the studio and you haven’t written in six months, it doesn’t work.


The last thing I want to ask you is about the fans. It’s weird because you guys have had so much mainstream success, but your fans still seem like a very tight-knit group of hardcore fans. We were riding the bus here and it was an experience. People were all singing, and one guy was like, “You guys aren’t singing, you don’t know the words!”
[Laughs.] Oh, shut up! Really? That’s funny. What was the age group like?


It was a mix. The one leading the whole sing-along was a father with his kid.
That’s the thing that trips me out at this point. There are people who got into Linkin Park and were older than us. I was 24-ish, and there were dudes that were older than us then, and now they have kids and their kids are old enough to be getting into us as teenagers. It’s a really interesting thing that happens out at the shows.


I was told a great story. A guy told me, “If you want to see pure musical joy, pure joy from a fan’s experience, I’m going to e-mail you a picture of my son at your show. It’s his first show. He’s 13 years old. From the moment the lights turned off, he stood on the base of his seat with his hands in the air, screaming every word.” I said, “Are you okay with the profanity?” He told me, “As long as it’s in the song, he’s allowed to scream it as loud as he wants for the duration of the show. Once he gets home, no more.” I thought that was a great rule. I looked at the picture and it truly was, like, the essence of a perfect first concert for a kid. When I see stuff like that, it’s exactly what we get excited about, it’s exactly why we do it. It’s so inspiring to see that happening out there.