1st February
Written by Alan H. Rose


Linkin Park will be performing at the American Airlines Center on February 17, 2011. The show starts at 7:30 with The Prodigy as an opening act. For tickets, click here.


Mike Shinoda on what the show will look like visually… “Well, the look of the show has a lot to do with the look of 1000 Suns. A lot of the themes that are going on the new record kind of take a central role in the visuals of the show. Our art team developed technology that’s new just specific to this show and it had a lot to do with the fact that in our show we don’t play the exact same thing every night. We play different set lists and then within those set lists we improvise, so we wanted a way for the look of the show to kind of ebb and flow with whatever we do with the music. So, from night to night, the music will be different and the visuals will be different as well. No two shows will be the same.”

Mike Shinoda on merging the hip-hop and rock culture… “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, “1000 Suns,” that’s where the majority of the songs came from. Just trying to write something that sounded different and was exciting to us.”

Mike Shinoda on working on more projects with Fort Minor and the Rising Tied… “I think, well, the reason I did the Fort Minor record was because, at that time, Linkin Park was kind of, I felt like there were things that were going to work for Linkin Park and then there were things that were not going to work, and I didn’t feel like those songs could work on a Linkin Park record. Since then, the band has really broadened its horizons and the ideas that may have ended up on a Fort Minor record back in the past now can be a Linkin Park song and that’s why you get songs like, “When They Come For Me,” or “Wretches and Kings.” Those songs off the new record are, I mean, they really started as demos that sounded more like a Fort Minor demo, I think, and then once we all kind of get together and work them out, they grow and they change and they end up on a Linkin Park record.”

Mike Shinoda on the ever-changing sound of Linkin Park… “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 “1000 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.”

Mike Shinoda on the technology and visuals on the tour… “The nice thing about the tour technology that went into the visuals, the technology behind the visuals that you’ll see at the show, is that a lot of the stuff was designed with the cost of carrying it around the world in mind. And to me, I went to school for illustration and design and that is a part of it, to me. Like, good design includes all of the hurdles of communicating it to people and how you use it. It’s not just making something that looks cool on stage; it’s from concept to completion. So, in other words, part of good design is making sure it’s affordable to carry when we go to the Middle East and it’s been great. I mean, we’ve taken this same show all around the world. I think the idea has less impact on the States, because when we do shows in the States, our production is always at 100 percent, but when we do shows in Europe, generally we have to scale it down a little bit because it’s more expensive to get over there and this design is one that our team came up that has actually been able to travel pretty much to its full extent everywhere we go, and it’s really nice. It’s allowed us, first and foremost, to kind of get the kinks out and play it overseas and get it feeling really good and then we get to bring it home and it’s a well-oiled machine and the fans are going to be seeing something special.”