January 18, 2011

Linkin Park

Catalysts For A Musical Evolution

by Treasure Groh

Life is good … if you’re Linkin Park. Reigning as one of the top rock bands in the world (fact: they just came back from a sold-out European tour), the fellas of LP have been going steady and strong for almost 10 years – and without a single faltering on their part. From the beginning stages of the Hybrid Theory, where fans could witness a blonde-headed Chester Bennington screaming his lungs out surrounded by his bandmates – Mike Shinoda, Joe Hahn, Rob Bourdon, Brad Delson and Dave Farrel – rockin’ out in a dingy underground scene, to their new, high concept, almost apocalyptic themes, LP’s evolution only continues.

A little over a week before the guys are to start the U.S, leg of their A Thousand Suns world tour, Shinoda and Bennington took some time to chat about their philanthropic ideals, their new musical direction and influencing a generation.

In Haiti, the problem goes a lot deeper than throwing money into it and maybe right now, it still seems like it’s a fashionable thing to do in the music business to, “Yeah, we’re going to donate money to relief for Haiti.” Do you guys ever think that maybe you’re doing the wrong thing right now?

Chester Bennington: One thing about that, I hear you loud and clear that it is smart to continue to evaluate the situation in a project that is receiving your aid. And, in fact, some of our team, a woman named Whitney and our bass player, Phoenix, are the day before our first show on this tour, they’re all going down to Port au Prince and they’re going to see it in person and see how things are going. So, we’re with you on that and we do want to make sure that when we are telling people, we are donating $1 from every ticket on this tour to something that we believe is important and the money is being handled respectively and handled in the right way to get the people who need help some help and it is our responsibility to get down there and make sure that that stuff is happening.

How do you guys just continue to hit the nail on the head as far as fusing and cultivating the hip-hop culture and the rock culture?

Mike Shinoda: I appreciate you saying that. I don’t think we think of it in those terms so much at this point trying to make efforts to bridge that gap. I think that gap has been bridged a million times and we just happen to have grown up on many different styles of music and when we write music, that’s how we write it. I think one misconception about how our band or maybe other bands, too, might write is that when you sit down to write a song you’re thinking of imitating something else. When we go into the studio, we don’t set out to say, “Let’s write a song like another song.” We just sit down and try and write something that is exciting to us and something that’s fresh and especially on the new record, A Thousand Suns, that’s where the majority of the songs came from. Just trying to write something that sounded different and was exciting to us.

Every new record that you guys put out seems to almost reinvent the sound, especially if you compare the new record with Hybrid Theory. Do you set out to do that or does it just happen naturally?

MS: Yes and no. The difference in the band sound from record to record is something that we set out to do in the sense that we want to make something that sounds fresh and exciting to us, but at the beginning of a record, we pretty much, we may have a sense of what that sounds like, but we don’t have a definite understanding of what that sounds like. So, just to give you a working example, when we were doing demos for A Thousand Suns, we wanted them to sound different, we were making demos and we knew that the sound was a little bit more electronic-based and it was more loose and almost more abstract and, at that time, we hadn’t even hired a producer. So, in the discussion about hiring somebody, at one point we thought, “Maybe we’ll just go it alone,” because we didn’t want somebody else to come in and kind of muck up the thing that we were doing that we liked. At the end of the day, we decided that Rick Rubin was a good match, that when he came in it was obvious that he loved the stuff we were making and he didn’t intend to change that, he intended to try and help us get there in the best way possible. So, that’s why we ended up working with Rick. But that is to say we had a sense of what it was in the beginning and then along the way we made decisions that helped us stay on track and keep our minds open to experimentation and new things.

How do you feel having such an influence over this generation?

CB: Well, it’s definitely something that I think it’s hard to see what kind of impact you have. I mean, we know that we play, we go and play our shows for quite a few people and we do meet a lot of people. It’s difficult to see how deeply people react to our music and every once in awhile we come across a fan who or somebody who relates to a song in a particular way or had an experience at one of the shows that kind of, you can see it in their eyes, that they kind of, that we’ve touched them in a very special way. We’ve interacted with their life in a way that kind, our music becomes, the soundtrack is a portion of their life, their life story. And that’s like, as a songwriter, that’s, like, the ultimate goal. That’s like the big wet dream, to write something that really means and that really matters to somebody. And we’re fortunate that we are open enough to write a very diverse style of music and that we kind of think that we expect that from ourselves to really kind of have an open mind in terms of the kinds of songs that we write and the variety of the songs that we write and stylistically we have a chance to reach to, I think, a lot more people that maybe some other bands do. | RDW

Linkin Park w/ Pendulum & Does It Offend You, Yeah? • 1/25, 7 p.m. • Joe Louis Arena • 600 Service Center Dr., Detroit • 313.396.7444 • olympiaentertainment.com • $35-$69.50