June 12, 2018 • 44 mins
On the debut episode of Inside the Studio, host Joe Levy sits down with Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda to discuss his first official solo album, “Post Traumatic”, and the process of creating music after the passing of his bandmate and friend Chester Bennington. Mike walks us through the inspiration for his new album and tracks like “Hold it Together”, “World’s on Fire” and more. Special thanks to Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park and Warner Bros. Records. Follow Inside the Studio on iHeartRadio, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. -------------------- We can all help prevent suicide. The Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I Heart Radio Presents Inside the Studio. I'm your host
Joe Leaving. My guest today is Mike Shinoda, the rapper, producer,
songwriter of Lincoln Park. Although he's here to talk about
what's essentially his first solo album, it's called Post Traumatic,
and although Mike has released music under the name Fort
(00:22):
Minor before, this is the first album he's released under
his own name now. Last year, on Lincoln Park released
their seventh studio album, One More Light. It became their
fifth album to debut at number one on the Billboard
Album Chart, and in fact, all the two of their
(00:43):
albums have debuted at number one, which is a pretty
remarkable run over an eighteen year stretch. But what should
have been a moment of celebration was marked by tragedy.
On May eighth, the day before the release of One
More Light It, Chris Cornell of Sound Garden took his
own life. Cornell and Lincoln Park's Chester Bennington were close,
(01:06):
and at a memorial service in Los Angeles ten days later,
Bennington saying Hallelujah, accompanied by bandmate Brad Delson on guitar.
Here's how Bennington paid tribute to Cornell on Twitter. Your
voice was joy and pain, anger and forgiveness, love and
heartache all wrapped up into one. I suppose that's what
(01:27):
we all are. You helped me understand that thing week. Indeed,
Bennington had a lot of pain and heartache of his own,
more than a share who cares it for more like
goes out in the sky of fa millions, and two
(01:50):
months later, on July, he took his own life, as
some people immediately noted that day was Chris Cornell's birthday.
Kind of thing that can make you think you understand
an action that at its core resists easy explanations or understanding.
As Mike Shinoda explains, he himself grew up a visual
artist and a musician, and he's always used his art
(02:13):
as a way of processing his experience of making sense
of things. But immediately after Chester's death, he really wasn't
sure what to do. It was weird because when I
look back at it, I don't think there's ever been
a time when I've not been able to go write,
(02:34):
Like when I felt like weird about writing a song.
It's always like, if I have something going on, that's
like the best time to go write a song. You
know you're dealing with stuff. I use my visual art
and my music as therapy, so it's always like a thing.
If I'm going through something difficult, oftentimes I'll go straight
to the songwriting stuff. But with this, there was a
(02:58):
time where I was really like scared to be in
the studio a little bit. Let'm like scared, but just
like anxious. What was going on? Well, yeah, so after
Chester passed, it was hard for me to go in
the studio for a while. And then at a certain point,
I remember speaking to Dave Phoenix from the band and um,
(03:19):
actually all of us got together at Dave's house and
he had said, oh, have you guys listened to any
of our music yet? And everyone was like, no way,
but he had, and he was like, you know, it
was hard. It seemed scarier than it was, you know,
And now that I've listened to it, I know I
can listen to it. Well. The same thing happened to
me with getting in the studio. It's like, at first
(03:39):
it seemed like, oh man, it's gonna feel really weird
to go in and write about anything. And I did
a few I just kind of, you know, bit the
bullet and went in and did some stuff and some
of it was really just screwing around and just playing whatever,
like play guitar for a couple of hours, or just
doodle around on the piano, or make some sounds, make
a little like beat. Eventually I was making songs every day.
(04:03):
It seemed like all the ones that were about stuff
that was actually going on, songs that were actually serious songs,
most of those just kind of turned in this record,
I Don't have a Leg to Stand, spinning like a
(04:27):
whirl and in the Land. The solo music Shinoda began
to release starting in January, talked about loss in ways
that we're both deeply personal and universal. In a song
called Place to Start, he sang about feeling like he
was in a whirlwind, sometimes scared that everything he'd built
might fall apart, sometimes feeling like he was so focused
on endings that he'd run out of the will to
(04:49):
find a beginning. But it felt less like a song
and more like a page out of his journal. And
that feeling was reinforced by a video he put out
of him simply singing this ang into his phone, which
was more like a skype call than a video from
a musician who's been selling out arenas for almost two decades,
and that immediacy was the whole point. Shonota was figuring
(05:11):
out things as he went and sharing the process. And
when I say figuring out things as he went, I
mean it very literally. The first verse of over Again
was written and recorded on October, the day Lincoln Park
played a memorial concert at the Hollywood Bowl, with friends
from Blink, No Doubt, Korn, and many others stepping in
(05:31):
to help honor Chester Bennington. Shinodah is describing the feelings
he had beforehand, right down to wanting to puke his
guts out rather than get on stage. But at the
same time, anyone who's experienced the death of a friend
or a loved one is wrestled with what's expressed in
the chorus of this song. That's saying goodbye isn't confined
(05:53):
to a single moment or even a series of moments.
It happens over and over and over again. And anyone
who's experience loss also knows the moment when someone comes
up to you and expresses his or her condolences, and
it is more to do with them than it does
with you. Shinodah talks about this and hold it together,
(06:25):
they say that they sympathize. I'm grateful they take the
time for bringing it up. But to six year old,
what I really wanted to do with a lot of
those things, and it happens in the show too, is
to take you and put you in my shoes, you like,
and make sure that when you're hearing it, it's like,
oh shit, like I haven't thought of what it must
(06:48):
be like, right. And there were a few moments like
like that on the record where you know, somebody's asking
about you know, oh, it must be so hard, are
you okay? And whatever, and it's like, you know what, motherfucker,
I was doing really good until you started bringing it up,
Like I haven't even thought about that all day. Now
I'm thinking about it and we're at a birthday party.
(07:10):
Maybe you could have stopped yourself like thirty seconds ago
and said, wait, it's now the appropriate time to ask
this or to say this, like maybe we wait till
later to understand the magnitude of the loss that charges
post traumatic and you have to understand how Chester Bennington
(07:31):
in My Shinoda each served as the engine of one
another's dreams. When Lincoln Park first released their debut album,
hybrid theory. In two thousand, they were lumped in with
a lot of other bands that had grown up on
both heavy guitars and hip hop, and some of them
shared a pensiont for the gratuitous use of the letter
K when spelling their names. I'm thinking here of Corn
(07:51):
and Limp Biscuit. But Lincoln Park were bigger and have
lasted longer in part because they did more, not just
made me USI with a broader range, more open to
other sounds and feelings than pure rage. It's also as
they were coming up, they cared about nothing but playing
shows and meeting fans afterwards. We're shooting for the title
(08:14):
of hardest working band in America. Bennington boasted to Rolling
Stone in two thousand and one, and that is the
year that they did three hundred and twenty four live performances,
which is not exactly one a day for a full year.
It's one every one point one seven days. I did
the math. They also had something that other bands with
the K didn't too, vocalists Mike Shinodah and Chester Bennington.
(08:37):
Shinodah was the rapper, Bennington was the singer and also
the screamer and also everything in between. On breakthrough songs
like In the End, Bennington could sound delicate like the
piano and raw like the guitars. It was like a
whole band in one throat. It starts with I don't
(08:57):
know why it doesn't need no matter how hard to
keep that in mind, I protect to was playing to
do one thing. I don't know why it doesn't need to.
(09:27):
It took more than a year for Hybrid Theory to
climb to number two on the album chart. Don't let
that number to fool you. It was a dominator. Hybrid
Theory would become the best selling album of two thousand
and one, beating out records from jay Z and Sinc.
And Britney Spears, and it stayed on the Billboard chart
for two hundred and nine weeks. A little more than
(09:48):
four years gets sold better than ten million copies. Lincoln
(10:14):
Park went added hard when they were on stage and
hard when they weren't, but not the way most bands did.
We'd rather go to somebody's house and write a song
than go to a party, Shinoda told Rolling Stone in
two thousand and three. At parties, you knew what was
going to happen, you knew who was going to get drunk.
But when we got together to write songs, we never
knew what was going to happen. It was much more exciting.
(10:38):
Lincoln Park became the biggest new rock band of the
two thousand's for years. They had their own touring festival
project Revolution that in two thousand and four featured both
Corn and Snoop Dogg. Thank You, Thank You, Thank you
kind And that's the same year they get a special friend,
TV jay Z that became the Collision Core CP, the
(10:59):
rare man ship project that works for more than a
few minutes at the time. It's amazing how well Numb
and Encore go together and how much each side gets
from the other. Lincoln Park is a whole new kind
of swagger. Jay Z has a new kind of thunder.
It shouldn't work, but it totally does, you know. After that,
(11:19):
it was natural that Lincoln Park hook up with producer
Rick Rubin, who had masterminded some of the first fusions
of rock, guitar and hip hop with Run DMC and
The Beastie Boys. They recorded three albums with Ruben, who
pushed them to write songs rather than make tracks, and
on songs like Shadow of the Day from two thousand
and sevens Minutes to Midnight, they sounded more like a
(11:40):
band than ever. In fact, they sounded like they were
ready to be the next you Tube. At the beginning
for Lincoln Park, everybody played two roles, one in the band,
one behind the scenes. Shinoda and keyboardist turntablist John handled
the visuals, with Han directing the videos. Guitarist Delson and
(12:00):
drummer Rob Borden handled some marketing and finance duties. Bassist
Dave Farrell was the tour correspondent, doing updates for their website,
but Bennington's job was more like being the heart of
the band. He and Shinoda wrote the lyrics, and in
interviews he embodied the pain, the angst, and the positivity
expressed in the songs. He talked about his past, his
(12:22):
struggles with addiction and childhood abuse, and he talked about
being a regular guy, about working hard, and about life
being good. The band had existed before Chester Bennington joined.
They'd written songs, they'd played together, they had recorded, but
it only really came together once he was there to
add a voice and a face and a heart to
the music. It's no surprise that you notice says, now,
(12:45):
the future of the band is an open question. It's
tempting to hear all of post Traumatic as a reaction
to Bennington's death. Some songs aren't so sometimes even those
have a way of coming back to the subject. But
there's a post in post Traumatic for a reason. Mike
Shinoda is struggling to find the way to move forward,
(13:07):
and in one of his first in depth sit downs
since Chester Bennington's death, we talked about whether or not
there's a future for Lincoln Park, what it's going to
be like to go on tour playing his own music
and some Lincoln Park songs by himself on stage in
massive festivals, and how much Chester Bennington meant him. Let's
(13:27):
hear what Mike Shinoda has to say. So, how are you.
I'm good, Yeah, I'm good. Yeah. Tell me about putting
this record together. First, Let's start at the beginning. Now,
the songs that we heard on the post Traumatic EP
seemed to very directly address Chester's death and your feelings afterwards.
(13:50):
But are you saying that there were other songs you
were making during that period that we're about something else
or or didn't fit into this project but had a
different direction. It was mostly that I was writing about
whatever was on my mind, so usually that would fit
under the umbrella of this album. I did a couple
of things that were a little more like stylistically like
(14:13):
way different, Like I've joked around. It was like the
sounded like like a bad Smashing Pumpkin song or like
a Nine Inch Nails song or something. Yeah, those just
didn't pan out like I did them for fun, just
to do it. But the vast majority of the stuff
I made became post traumatic. And there's sixteen songs on
the record, which is the longest album I've ever done
(14:34):
or been involved with. I should say, you know, it's autobiographical.
It had this live journal feel to it. I mean
it's journalistic in some sense, particularly once those videos started
coming out. Tell me about the process of putting together
those videos. There's place to start over again. I had
done the first few songs. I didn't know where it
was going to go, but I knew I had some songs,
(14:56):
and the first ones it seemed to me that it
should be in some chronological order or something that resembled that.
So the first few songs I had were the ones
you just named, and I decided At one point I
was listening back to them in my studio on the sofa,
and I pulled out my phone and I I had
this idea of what a video for that song could
look like, and I just pulled out my phone and
did a selfie video of it. I just saw the
(15:21):
look of the thing, and I thought that would actually
make a kind of cool video, so I just shot it,
and then later, having done that, I did another one,
and I did some more little shots and it became
stylistically that again, like autobiographical kind of depiction of what
I was doing felt like the right way to visually
represent the songs. What it did is it removed any
(15:44):
kind of like intermediary in the conversation. It was just
me talking to you right as opposed to like it's
being shot by a director. Here's Mike talking about this
really personal stuff, and we storyboarded out this really cool narrative.
All of that was removed, the feelings happening in time
and the songs being documented that way. Yes, And once
I did them, it became part of the visual aesthetic
(16:07):
of the whole thing. Part of the idea was from
the paintings that I was doing at the time, those
became the packaging, they became the merchandise. The videos and
the autobiographical nature. Just like the communication style is there
on the record, it's there in the visuals. In one sense,
it just blurs the line between real time social media
(16:29):
and videos and things that you don't usually think of
as a real time Like the most recent when I
did was for a song about you, which we just
put out a couple of weeks ago. Decided to put
it out. The week that we were putting it out,
I decided to shoot the video while I was out
promoting the record, and I flew to China. I was
already going to be out there to do some record
(16:51):
promo and shoot some stuff for tour announcements in Asia,
And while I was there, we shot the video and
then a few days later it was on the internet.
Like everything is in real time. And just to be
clear for people who haven't heard it, about you, like
a lot of songs on this record is addressing loss,
so about you. The idea of the song is even
(17:12):
when I don't think the song is about this, even
when I don't think the moment is about this, it
comes back to this, right or there's two versions of it.
Sometimes when I'm writing about something, it does come back
to the context of having lost Chester or the uncertainty
of the band's current situation. The other thing is, though,
(17:34):
that even when I actually don't write a song having
anything to do with those things, people see it through
that lens. So, in other words, just to put it
into somebody else's context entirely, so that you can see
where I'm coming from. Joe, if you have a public
breakup with a woman, let's say you get both super
celebrities and you're dating, this is going to be really imaginary.
(17:55):
But okay, Scarlett Johansson, right, good for me. And then
you broke up and everyone's like, oh man, they broke up.
It's on the front page of all the things and
all that, and people are talking about it. And then
you go and you get coffee in your sweats and
they take pictures of you and it's like, oh see,
he's super depressed, Like didn't put on jeans in the
(18:17):
shirt today today it was sweats, Like he must be
super depressed. It's all about her. And then you get
a slice of pizza. You see he got the like
five different toppings could have been. Yeah, he's really hurting
right now. They see everything through this lens of like
what they think you're going through, and even if you're
like no, I literally just felt comfortable in my pj's
and I went and got a slice of pizza because
(18:39):
I like pizza. Guys, Like, that's all there is to it.
There's no reason to read further into it. But that's
just how our world works. They're gonna start seeing things
through that lens. In fact, just this weekend I had
my first show. Two shows. Actually, I did a double
header and did a radio show in the afternoon and
did a longer headline set in the evening. It was
(18:59):
in front of City Hall in l A. It was
part of an Asian festival. Really special way to like
kick things off. Perfect for me. I just loved it.
A couple of the journalists who came and wrote about
the events called it a tribute show. So I asked
online just today, I tweeted, did you guys think that
(19:19):
these were tribute shows? And if so, like, do you
feel like that means it was sad? Did it feel
like sad overall? Not that it didn't feel bitter sweet
at certain moments. There was definitely a tribute moment I
played in the end and we sang it together, just
piano and me and the crowd. You mentioned that you
were working these tracks chronologically, and I'm curious to know
(19:40):
is the album sequenced that way. For the most part,
it's not exact chronology. It doesn't follow exactly in the
order in which they were written or have happened, because
I did, as a listener have this sensation of getting
too not exactly the more upbeat songs, but definitely the
sense of as the tracks go on, I'm getting this
(20:03):
feeling of you're going on, You're moving on right, And
I think that one thing that's different about this album
than most albums I've put out, from all the Lincoln
Park albums to the fourth Minor album. Usually, when you
put out an album, it's hey, I finished a thing,
check out the thing I made. It's finished. And this
(20:23):
is almost like I started a thing, like this is
an album that captures a moment in time for the
last six to nine months, and it is what it is,
and now I'm going to continue to evolve and move
on from here. Because we get deeper into the album,
we come to these tracks like make it Up As
(20:43):
I go World's on Fire. These are songs that seemed
to me we're addressing the same sorts of problems or feelings.
Make it up as I go? How do I go? On?
Worlds on fire? This is a bad time. But they
were also had another side to them. They had this
side of like, here's how I get past this? Yeah,
(21:03):
so like make it up as I go. Actually started
the hook of that we wrote towards the end of
One More Light. It was Brad and I and k Flay.
That song is more about in its inception of having
that feeling of like not knowing what the next steps are,
but you just kind of power through it and figure
it out as you go. And I thought, you know,
(21:26):
I came back to that song because I just always
loved it, And then I wrote the verses more recently.
I think that one relates a little more closely this
stuff of this last year. But the other one you
mentioned the World's on fire. When I wrote that one,
the course of that is basically the World's on fire,
But all I need is you. It's the first time
(21:47):
I've really written that kind of like it's like almost
like just a love song. I was specifically thinking of
my family It occurred to me because it was one
of those days when I was like really like up
to my eyeballs in my social media feed and it
seems like everything was just a mess. You know, you're
reading it's like the political tweets are firing and everybody's
(22:08):
like freaked out about the state of the country, in
the state of the world, and then environmental tweets and
like net neutrality tweets, and then on top of it,
like there's like five wildfires going on in Los Angeles
at the same time, so all of this is happening
at once, and all of that without the crap that
(22:29):
I had been through in the six months proceeding, that
would have been enough as it was, but all put
together was just like everything is just falling apart of
the seems what a mess. And then I can go
like sit down and play with my kids, and it
all kind of evaporates. And what's so interesting is receiving
it now. I connected to some comments you've made about
(22:53):
lost being like a wildfire. You know, things are destroyed
in a clear space for something new. But also there's
that image. The image of the wildfire is actually in
the Nothing makes Sense video. Keep in mind. I grew
up thinking I was going to be a painter. I
grew up in art. I went to school for illustration.
I've had three gallery shows now. The only reason I
(23:14):
haven't had more is because I'm busy with the playing music.
You know, there's that minor distraction in the world. Doing that,
I would do what I really want to do in
all seriousness. I grew up painting, And one of the
things I get out of doing an art show, creating
a body of work that way is that when you
walk in, if it's done right, like, you have a
(23:36):
sense of this thread of intention that just weaves its
way through everything that you're experiencing. Because some shows there's
painting and installation and sound and all of these different
ways that you can communicate the concept of the thing.
And so this record, in a sense, I wanted to
bring a little bit of that gallery experience, with that
gallery intention to the thing. So something we mentioned, like
(23:58):
the fires or or other symbolism on the record, it
occurs in various media in the whole effort, And still
I'm still weaving it in even as we're starting to
do live shows and and look at the production to
the show. But it's funny to me as a listener,
(24:19):
how conflicting some of the emotions on this record are.
There are moments of real rising above, like I think
of can't hear You Now, which is almost like a
battle rap if you're a hater, I can't hear you now.
But because that's really one way of looking at that
song and hearing that song, really, I think that was
the intention of the song for sure, And yet I
(24:40):
hear it now and I come to that line woke
up knowing I don't have to be numb again, and
I think, oh, yeah, maybe that's a reference back to
this other thing I've been thinking about on this record. Well,
that's the reality of the record and of going through
something like this is you know, most of us know
it's that it's messy and the references going to blend
(25:00):
into one another. And even I listened to it and
I go, oh, yeah, I was definitely thinking about a
But subconsciously there's a little bit of be in there.
You know. It's funny with a tragedy like this, Sometimes
difficult days are the good days. Sometimes you have a
good day. Everything's fine, you're with your kids, you're with
your family, you don't think about the other thing, and
(25:22):
you catch yourself feeling good and that feels strange. I
thought that I would get taken off guard by that
more than I did. A lot of people that I
I've talked to had real difficult battles with feeling guilty
for feeling good. One person described it as like I
(25:46):
made it all the way to lunch without thinking of
the horrible thing that had happened. In their case, it
was it was similar with somebody passing away. Oh I
made it all the way to lunch without thinking of them.
Oh my god, I'm so horrble that I didn't think
about them until lunch, And it's like no, no, no
for me, I'm like grateful on days when I can
get back to more of a sense of normal, there's
(26:08):
no disrespect or guilt that should come with that. Maybe
I don't feel like elty because I did feel like
when things kind of fell apart and the dust settled,
that I was able to take a step back and
look at my life and say, Okay, am I doing
(26:29):
things that I'm proud of? Am I doing good things?
Like what I do with the music and my professional life.
Is that in a good balance with my family and like,
am I taking care of my wife and my kids
and that type of stuff. I do feel like I
looked at that and said, yeah, I'm doing I'm doing
good fine, And this isn't just about like sell records
(26:49):
and make money. This is about getting out with the
people that have been hard. My Lincoln Park and individual
musical community we have like a family. There are people
with my drawings and signatures and banned artwork tattooed on
their bodies. This is a a moment in time when
(27:12):
they have been there for me when I'm feeling like
I don't know what the hell is going on, and
when I have been there for them to reassure them
that things are going to be okay. I'm not responsible
for them, they're not responsible for me. But we can
be support for one another, and they can be support
for one another without me even being in the picture.
(27:34):
It's really reassuring to see that. I wish there was
a way for me to like share that with more people,
because when I look in my mentions and I see
them talking to one another and saying such wonderful things,
like I mean, the end of the thought was just
that that's really reassuring the other day, when I did
that show at l A City Hall, some of the
(27:54):
fans had gotten there super early in the morning, six
in the morning or something, and it was an unusually
cold day and l a kind of rainy. I saw
them tweeting like san tacos and pickets, send blankets and tacos, right,
believe it or not. One of the folks on our side,
like who works at Warner Brothers. His name's Adam and
he ran our Lincoln Park fan club first before he
(28:15):
moved over. He got poached by the label. But he's
a friend of the community of Lincoln Park and of
my music. He went and need to made sure they
were okay, Like are you warmed? You guys need some
merchandise in a sweatshirt? Can I get you some water?
That's what I'm talking about. Like you'll even see it
in in Chester's wife Tlenda's feet. She'll retweet people who
are just being kind to one another. Let me ask
(28:37):
you about Chester, those of us that knew him through
the songs. Yeah, and in the songs, there's a lot
of pain, there's a lot of struggle, there's a lot
of moving beyond that. But tell me a little bit
about the Chester we didn't know well. The one thing
that I like to remind people is that he was
naturally gifted with the way he performed in his voice,
in particular, like he had a world class, one of
(28:59):
a kind voice. Obviously if you didn't know, he could
sing basically any genre, any type of song that you
threw at him, barring hip hop, maybe a little bit
like it wasn't the best rapper. You give him a
singing part, and the dude could do anything. It didn't
matter if it was like quiet female singer songwriter. In fact,
he'd be singing something like one of our songs, like
(29:21):
tracking it in the studio, and I'd say, do it
with five more, Dave, gone, do it with twenty five more, Adele.
I'd throw out these references of other singers that I
wanted him to imitate or at a flavor of, and
he knew we had a vocabulary of that type of
(29:41):
stuff that I could say to him, and he knew
what I meant. Nobody else had that with him, So
that was a thing personally, you know, studio and all
that stuff aside. I think when we wrote, we wrote
about these difficult topics, but in general, especially in the
past few years. He was so much more together then
(30:04):
he had been in years prior. Like he joked that
the band was his most stable and together relationship. I
think he was saying that in a joking way, because
I think with his wife and his kids, I think
that was probably number one and we were probably number two.
But but just to be clear, there aren't a lot
of bands that have a run this long. Just last year,
you have a number one album, right, Usually when you
(30:29):
have that situation, you have your couple of classic albums
and then it's just you play the old stuff. We
were fortunate enough to for most of the records that
we put out, we got a number one or two
on the rock charts and alternative charts, and a number
one release and in many countries. So still very relevant,
is the point. I guess. I think with each album
(30:52):
I've ever been involved with, each step of the way,
I'm trying to see what have I not done that
seems exciting and fun, that will keep it fresh and
like in the in a sense of like they to
go back to, like that body of work, like this
is the art show, like curate your experience, what is
the experience you're curating for the fans this time, and
how is that different than the other things that you've done.
(31:14):
You've worked with a remarkable range of rappers across the
career of Lincoln Park common of course jay Z. Have
you given thought to Lincoln Park's impact on hip hop? Oh? Sure,
absolutely that I grew up a hip hop kid first
and foremost, Like, that's the first type of music I
ever got into and fell in love with it and
(31:36):
most of what I listened to it. It's the legend
that your first show ever was a Public Enemy Anthrax show.
Is that truth? That is my first The first concept
I ever went to it was you went in the
black young black teenagers primus Public Enemy Anthrax. So you
go to that and you're like, we get some depeche
Mode keyboards in here, we might have something. It's like,
it's almost comedic. How like it sounds like I would
(31:56):
just be I'd be making that up right, that that
would be the first show. But if you think about it,
at that time, those types of music were being put
together for the first time, and it was clumsy, like
in a way, there was a simplicity in the way
they would just like mash the stuff up together. There
were moments when it was really seamless, like walk this
way absolutely, like that is an album, Whereas when I
(32:20):
listened to it, I go, Okay, that's that's like a
very seamless blend. There's a lot of food analogies in
our band, so that would be like a soup where
you take the ingredients and you blend them together and
you can't tell one ingredient from the other. The Anthrax
Public Enemy thing is like a salad. You've got all
the ingredients, but you can see them all. They're all
separate ingredients, right. So sometimes we take one approach, sometimes
(32:42):
we take another, and it's the gray area in the
middle when it becomes really interesting. Whenever I've approached the stuff,
just the awareness of how blended do you want this
thing to be? The hybrid theory brand of it was
like kind of blended, but like you can kind of
still see the arts from one another. But if you
fast forward a few albums in you start getting songs
(33:05):
like on Um. For example, our fourth record was called
A Thousand Sons. There's a song on there called when
They Come for Me. When They Come for Me is
just this like I don't know what genre that song is.
There isn't a name for that thing. This is a
long way of saying we were growing up in a
time where music was very separate, and I know that
(33:26):
we played a role in making it less separate. When
I grew up, kids were metal kids, rock kids, rap kids,
pop kids. You weren't like just fans of music. People
didn't really do that. I mean, I think early late nineties,
early two thousands, you ask somebody what do you listen
to and they go, oh, everything, And that was the
beginning of oh everything. When I first heard Little Loozy
(33:48):
for Exo Tour Life, I was like, you know, this
is a rap song that would not exist without you guys.
You know I mean that that sense of like those
big keyboards, that keyboard drama, being open to that that
was a turning point. I think it's it's something different.
Uh Well, also lyrically, if you think about that song,
(34:10):
like there's a darkness and and an openness to just
saying like, well, this is how I feel I'm going
to write about in a depression and whatever. Right, that
emo side of current rap, some of those rappers are
kind of running from that a little bit and playing
that down and saying no, it's not emo or whatever.
I get why they're doing that. I would probably feel
the same way. You didn't want to be called a
(34:31):
rap rock band in the year two thousand and one
only because of the associations. We just wanted it to
be clear that they were such a big difference between
what a lot of those bands were doing. One of
your songs from the fort minor Days deal specifically with identity,
and I'm talking about Kenji. Yeah. Yeah. For those who
(34:52):
don't know, it's the story of Japanese immigrants held in
internment camps during World War Two, it's a personal story
for you. Well, they weren't just immigrants, they were American
citizens of Japanese descent. Basically, what happened is when Pearl
Harbor was bombed, there was a high that, you know,
the highest level of wartime paranoia going on. The American
(35:12):
government decided, oh no, like, we don't know who could
be a spy, We don't know, you know, what bad
things can be happening. I mean, this sounds like it
could happen today. Let's just make clear that that there
is a personal dimension here. Yeah. Yeah, my dad's Japanese.
My dad's side of the family is all Japanese. I'm half.
I grew up understanding that my family had unjustly been
(35:34):
put in these camps. Basically, what happened is short version
of the story Pearl Harbor happens. The government says, we're
putting all the Japanese on the West coast in prison camps.
They tell everybody to get out of their homes. They
let them pack two bags of stuff, and you have
to leave the rest of your earthly belongings in your
house alone. And you say, oh, well, when are we
coming back, And there's like, whenever we tell you you can,
(35:54):
you get thrown in horse stalls to sleep, sometimes just tents,
sometimes busses whatever. Once the camps are built, they are
built in the desert. You get shipped off to the
desert and you stay there for years until the end
of the war. And then when you go home, your
home has been vandalized and some cases burned. Some cases
people's stuff was okay, my family's was not. The place
(36:16):
was vandalized and everything was stolen um and they had
to start their lives over. When I was listening back
to the Fort Minor record, I was really struck by
the creeping sense of this feels like it should have
been impossible, and there are things happening now that feel
like they should be in part. Oh. Yeah, the Japanese
American community has been one of the most vocal communities
(36:38):
in the past couple of years, especially as it relates
to Muslim and immigrants. For example, um, when the whole
thing was going on about shutting the borders to to
folks who are coming in living in l A, the
Japanese American community in in l A was really vocal
about that subject. All of a sudden, they want to
start rounding people up again. So of course the Japanese
(36:59):
Americans like my family are saying, no, guys, we already
made this mistake, and the US government said we can't
make it again. You know, you mentioned that that you
recently played your first solo shows, and just to be clear,
these were really solo shows that we you on stage,
nobody else. You've got some dates coming up, I do.
(37:19):
I'm headed to Asia and Europe. You're going to play
the Reading Festival. Yes, is it just going to be you?
I thinks so I want to try that first and
uh see how that feels, and after that we'll see
what happens. I mean, I'm curious about what the show
would look like if I start adding a couple of people,
(37:39):
but I don't also don't want it to be confusing
in terms of, like, you know, the fans wondering if
it is or is not Lincoln Park, or you know,
anything like that. What was the feeling going into these
two shows? Were you nervous? Did you know how it
would feel to do those Lincoln Park songs by yourself?
I felt ready to do of them. I did feel anxious,
(38:02):
quite a bit more anxious before the first show, and
I was glad that I did the two on the
same day because the first show was almost like a
nice warm up, and I then I felt really relaxed
going to the second one. To your point, like, I
don't know, maybe I'm just really good at compartmentalizing. I felt, Okay.
(38:22):
It's impossible to get through, for example, like Lincoln Park
songs without thinking about Chester, you know. You I look
out and I see one person like just raging, like
screaming and having the best time, and then like I
look over the other side and like somebody crying. Right,
that's a little tricky, Like that's new that's not something
(38:42):
I normally would see. How did it compare to last
October when you were at the Hollywood Bowl you did
this what was a memorial car? That was yeah, completely different.
In October we had done that show because we realized
that we had a private memorial and that the fans
didn't have a public one. They didn't have one that
(39:03):
they could go to. They didn't get to say goodbye,
they didn't get to experience that closure that comes with it.
We set that show up, we scheduled it to play
that role for the fans. Really don't get it twisted.
It was like very hard for us to do. You know.
Sometimes we'd be rehearsing stuff and the guys are just like,
can we like, let's take a break. It's like too much.
(39:25):
There are a few like realizations that were really necessary
about doing it. Number One, the warmth and the connected
energy of the whole Lincoln Park fan community of all
of the world like really came together around that show
and around the band during that time, and I'm super
grateful for that. I mean, everybody was so supportive. It
(39:47):
was incredible, and they've continued to be artist community, people
jumping in, sending in videos like I wish we could
be there coming on stage and singing with us and
doing all that really really special we had. I don't
know how the artist twenty something artists, I think. And
then in in retrospect, after having done those rehearsals and
played the show, you know, even watching it back and stuff,
(40:10):
I was like, these people who came on stage with
us all have awesome, awesome voices, and they're really really
wonderful and talented people, and not a single one of
them is chest her like that. There's no one's who
even if I'm imagining, like who could we sing these
songs with in the future. Is listening back to those
It's like those are all great moments, but that's none
(40:30):
of them are sustainable things. There isn't a version of
the band that exists with any of those types of people,
as wonderful as they are, right, So that just puts
more of a I doesn't doesn't add more of a
question mark, maybe, but it just checks things off the
list that are not. Really we just know what things
are not the option, Well, then what are the options?
(40:53):
I don't know. That's the million dollar question, right, And unfortunately,
you know I've said it before, but unfortunately there aren't
any answers to that at this point. It would be
awesome if there were. That would be really easy. Um,
I wish we were in in a Brian Johnson Bond
Scott situation where it's like, no, the guy, like our
best friend who sang for the band who passed away.
He literally said, this is the guy, and we listen
(41:15):
to the guy, and the guy is definitely the guy,
and we all love hanging out with him and we
want to play with him. That's not a normal that
that didn't happen to anybody else. Really, that hasn't happened
to us. Somebody comes and says, Hay Lincoln Park, do
you want to play a show in Germany? Then you
have to have a discussion with all the guys, and
you have one guy who's like, I definitely don't want
to do any one guy who says, I don't know,
maybe I agree, maybe we shouldn't do it, and two
(41:36):
guys to say we definitely need to do it. And
then there's concerns and all that noise, like that is
not something I can deal with right now, and it's
not a knock on anybody else, any one of us
could be the outlier opinion though, like minority voice on something.
But I definitely need some more simplicity in terms of
(42:00):
like decision making, Like oh my gut says that the
right thing to do is to shoot a video on
the crappy camera on my phone. I chewed it, I
look at it, I go I like that, and I
can put it on the internet and it's done. I
don't need to call anybody else. And that for me,
that power and that and that control has been part
of my like recovery process. When you miss Chester, what
(42:22):
do you miss most about him? In the beginning, I'll
tell you the thing that whenever I saw it, it
just made me like so it just like oh' just
so painful. Is at the end of every show we
put our arm around each other and always say a
good show. And that was always such a special moment.
It was always that like really satisfying, like hey, good job,
we did it. If the show is really good, then
(42:45):
it's like, hey man, that was a good show. It
was bad. I was like we made it through that show.
Good job. Also, like we always traveled together, we'd have
a lot of the same conversations and a lot of
inside jokes, and we played a lot of poker. Those
are things, especially on the road, that like other people
around us would have mentioned a lot of times, like, man,
(43:07):
it's always so funny hearing you guys like post show
in the van, like just rambling on about nonsense the
way we do. We do that goofy voices. And they
had like these characters and he he had like a
Russian character that always showed up like in this weird
Russian accent. Yeah, that was all really great stuff. I'm
(43:27):
shout to thank you for being here. Good show. Join
Inside the Studio for more in depth conversations with the
biggest names in music. Search and follow Inside the Studio
on I Heart Radio or subscribe wherever you listen to
podcasts so that you never missed an episode. Inside the
(43:51):
Studio is an I Heart Radio original podcast created by
Chris Peterson. This episode was written and hosted by me
Joe Levy, our executive producer Sandy Smallens for audiation and
of course special thanks to Mike Shinodah and Warner Brothers Records.
I Heart Radio Presents Inside the Studio. I'm your host
Joe Leaving. My guest today is Mike Shinoda, the rapper, producer,
songwriter of Lincoln Park. Although he's here to talk about
what's essentially his first solo album, it's called Post Traumatic,
and although Mike has released music under the name Fort
(00:22):
Minor before, this is the first album he's released under
his own name now. Last year, on Lincoln Park released
their seventh studio album, One More Light. It became their
fifth album to debut at number one on the Billboard
Album Chart, and in fact, all the two of their
(00:43):
albums have debuted at number one, which is a pretty
remarkable run over an eighteen year stretch. But what should
have been a moment of celebration was marked by tragedy.
On May eighth, the day before the release of One
More Light It, Chris Cornell of Sound Garden took his
own life. Cornell and Lincoln Park's Chester Bennington were close,
(01:06):
and at a memorial service in Los Angeles ten days later,
Bennington saying Hallelujah, accompanied by bandmate Brad Delson on guitar.
Here's how Bennington paid tribute to Cornell on Twitter. Your
voice was joy and pain, anger and forgiveness, love and
heartache all wrapped up into one. I suppose that's what
(01:27):
we all are. You helped me understand that thing week. Indeed,
Bennington had a lot of pain and heartache of his own,
more than a share who cares it for more like
goes out in the sky of fa millions, and two
(01:50):
months later, on July, he took his own life, as
some people immediately noted that day was Chris Cornell's birthday.
Kind of thing that can make you think you understand
an action that at its core resists easy explanations or understanding.
As Mike Shinoda explains, he himself grew up a visual
artist and a musician, and he's always used his art
(02:13):
as a way of processing his experience of making sense
of things. But immediately after Chester's death, he really wasn't
sure what to do. It was weird because when I
look back at it, I don't think there's ever been
a time when I've not been able to go write,
(02:34):
Like when I felt like weird about writing a song.
It's always like, if I have something going on, that's
like the best time to go write a song. You
know you're dealing with stuff. I use my visual art
and my music as therapy, so it's always like a thing.
If I'm going through something difficult, oftentimes I'll go straight
to the songwriting stuff. But with this, there was a
(02:58):
time where I was really like scared to be in
the studio a little bit. Let'm like scared, but just
like anxious. What was going on? Well, yeah, so after
Chester passed, it was hard for me to go in
the studio for a while. And then at a certain point,
I remember speaking to Dave Phoenix from the band and um,
(03:19):
actually all of us got together at Dave's house and
he had said, oh, have you guys listened to any
of our music yet? And everyone was like, no way,
but he had, and he was like, you know, it
was hard. It seemed scarier than it was, you know,
And now that I've listened to it, I know I
can listen to it. Well. The same thing happened to
me with getting in the studio. It's like, at first
(03:39):
it seemed like, oh man, it's gonna feel really weird
to go in and write about anything. And I did
a few I just kind of, you know, bit the
bullet and went in and did some stuff and some
of it was really just screwing around and just playing whatever,
like play guitar for a couple of hours, or just
doodle around on the piano, or make some sounds, make
a little like beat. Eventually I was making songs every day.
(04:03):
It seemed like all the ones that were about stuff
that was actually going on, songs that were actually serious songs,
most of those just kind of turned in this record,
I Don't have a Leg to Stand, spinning like a
(04:27):
whirl and in the Land. The solo music Shinoda began
to release starting in January, talked about loss in ways
that we're both deeply personal and universal. In a song
called Place to Start, he sang about feeling like he
was in a whirlwind, sometimes scared that everything he'd built
might fall apart, sometimes feeling like he was so focused
on endings that he'd run out of the will to
(04:49):
find a beginning. But it felt less like a song
and more like a page out of his journal. And
that feeling was reinforced by a video he put out
of him simply singing this ang into his phone, which
was more like a skype call than a video from
a musician who's been selling out arenas for almost two decades,
and that immediacy was the whole point. Shonota was figuring
(05:11):
out things as he went and sharing the process. And
when I say figuring out things as he went, I
mean it very literally. The first verse of over Again
was written and recorded on October, the day Lincoln Park
played a memorial concert at the Hollywood Bowl, with friends
from Blink, No Doubt, Korn, and many others stepping in
(05:31):
to help honor Chester Bennington. Shinodah is describing the feelings
he had beforehand, right down to wanting to puke his
guts out rather than get on stage. But at the
same time, anyone who's experienced the death of a friend
or a loved one is wrestled with what's expressed in
the chorus of this song. That's saying goodbye isn't confined
(05:53):
to a single moment or even a series of moments.
It happens over and over and over again. And anyone
who's experience loss also knows the moment when someone comes
up to you and expresses his or her condolences, and
it is more to do with them than it does
with you. Shinodah talks about this and hold it together,
(06:25):
they say that they sympathize. I'm grateful they take the
time for bringing it up. But to six year old,
what I really wanted to do with a lot of
those things, and it happens in the show too, is
to take you and put you in my shoes, you like,
and make sure that when you're hearing it, it's like,
oh shit, like I haven't thought of what it must
(06:48):
be like, right. And there were a few moments like
like that on the record where you know, somebody's asking
about you know, oh, it must be so hard, are
you okay? And whatever, and it's like, you know what, motherfucker,
I was doing really good until you started bringing it up,
Like I haven't even thought about that all day. Now
I'm thinking about it and we're at a birthday party.
(07:10):
Maybe you could have stopped yourself like thirty seconds ago
and said, wait, it's now the appropriate time to ask
this or to say this, like maybe we wait till
later to understand the magnitude of the loss that charges
post traumatic and you have to understand how Chester Bennington
(07:31):
in My Shinoda each served as the engine of one
another's dreams. When Lincoln Park first released their debut album,
hybrid theory. In two thousand, they were lumped in with
a lot of other bands that had grown up on
both heavy guitars and hip hop, and some of them
shared a pensiont for the gratuitous use of the letter
K when spelling their names. I'm thinking here of Corn
(07:51):
and Limp Biscuit. But Lincoln Park were bigger and have
lasted longer in part because they did more, not just
made me USI with a broader range, more open to
other sounds and feelings than pure rage. It's also as
they were coming up, they cared about nothing but playing
shows and meeting fans afterwards. We're shooting for the title
(08:14):
of hardest working band in America. Bennington boasted to Rolling
Stone in two thousand and one, and that is the
year that they did three hundred and twenty four live performances,
which is not exactly one a day for a full year.
It's one every one point one seven days. I did
the math. They also had something that other bands with
the K didn't too, vocalists Mike Shinodah and Chester Bennington.
(08:37):
Shinodah was the rapper, Bennington was the singer and also
the screamer and also everything in between. On breakthrough songs
like In the End, Bennington could sound delicate like the
piano and raw like the guitars. It was like a
whole band in one throat. It starts with I don't
(08:57):
know why it doesn't need no matter how hard to
keep that in mind, I protect to was playing to
do one thing. I don't know why it doesn't need to.
(09:27):
It took more than a year for Hybrid Theory to
climb to number two on the album chart. Don't let
that number to fool you. It was a dominator. Hybrid
Theory would become the best selling album of two thousand
and one, beating out records from jay Z and Sinc.
And Britney Spears, and it stayed on the Billboard chart
for two hundred and nine weeks. A little more than
(09:48):
four years gets sold better than ten million copies. Lincoln
(10:14):
Park went added hard when they were on stage and
hard when they weren't, but not the way most bands did.
We'd rather go to somebody's house and write a song
than go to a party, Shinoda told Rolling Stone in
two thousand and three. At parties, you knew what was
going to happen, you knew who was going to get drunk.
But when we got together to write songs, we never
knew what was going to happen. It was much more exciting.
(10:38):
Lincoln Park became the biggest new rock band of the
two thousand's for years. They had their own touring festival
project Revolution that in two thousand and four featured both
Corn and Snoop Dogg. Thank You, Thank You, Thank you
kind And that's the same year they get a special friend,
TV jay Z that became the Collision Core CP, the
(10:59):
rare man ship project that works for more than a
few minutes at the time. It's amazing how well Numb
and Encore go together and how much each side gets
from the other. Lincoln Park is a whole new kind
of swagger. Jay Z has a new kind of thunder.
It shouldn't work, but it totally does, you know. After that,
(11:19):
it was natural that Lincoln Park hook up with producer
Rick Rubin, who had masterminded some of the first fusions
of rock, guitar and hip hop with Run DMC and
The Beastie Boys. They recorded three albums with Ruben, who
pushed them to write songs rather than make tracks, and
on songs like Shadow of the Day from two thousand
and sevens Minutes to Midnight, they sounded more like a
(11:40):
band than ever. In fact, they sounded like they were
ready to be the next you Tube. At the beginning
for Lincoln Park, everybody played two roles, one in the band,
one behind the scenes. Shinoda and keyboardist turntablist John handled
the visuals, with Han directing the videos. Guitarist Delson and
(12:00):
drummer Rob Borden handled some marketing and finance duties. Bassist
Dave Farrell was the tour correspondent, doing updates for their website,
but Bennington's job was more like being the heart of
the band. He and Shinoda wrote the lyrics, and in
interviews he embodied the pain, the angst, and the positivity
expressed in the songs. He talked about his past, his
(12:22):
struggles with addiction and childhood abuse, and he talked about
being a regular guy, about working hard, and about life
being good. The band had existed before Chester Bennington joined.
They'd written songs, they'd played together, they had recorded, but
it only really came together once he was there to
add a voice and a face and a heart to
the music. It's no surprise that you notice says, now,
(12:45):
the future of the band is an open question. It's
tempting to hear all of post Traumatic as a reaction
to Bennington's death. Some songs aren't so sometimes even those
have a way of coming back to the subject. But
there's a post in post Traumatic for a reason. Mike
Shinoda is struggling to find the way to move forward,
(13:07):
and in one of his first in depth sit downs
since Chester Bennington's death, we talked about whether or not
there's a future for Lincoln Park, what it's going to
be like to go on tour playing his own music
and some Lincoln Park songs by himself on stage in
massive festivals, and how much Chester Bennington meant him. Let's
(13:27):
hear what Mike Shinoda has to say. So, how are you.
I'm good, Yeah, I'm good. Yeah. Tell me about putting
this record together. First, Let's start at the beginning. Now,
the songs that we heard on the post Traumatic EP
seemed to very directly address Chester's death and your feelings afterwards.
(13:50):
But are you saying that there were other songs you
were making during that period that we're about something else
or or didn't fit into this project but had a
different direction. It was mostly that I was writing about
whatever was on my mind, so usually that would fit
under the umbrella of this album. I did a couple
of things that were a little more like stylistically like
(14:13):
way different, Like I've joked around. It was like the
sounded like like a bad Smashing Pumpkin song or like
a Nine Inch Nails song or something. Yeah, those just
didn't pan out like I did them for fun, just
to do it. But the vast majority of the stuff
I made became post traumatic. And there's sixteen songs on
the record, which is the longest album I've ever done
(14:34):
or been involved with. I should say, you know, it's autobiographical.
It had this live journal feel to it. I mean
it's journalistic in some sense, particularly once those videos started
coming out. Tell me about the process of putting together
those videos. There's place to start over again. I had
done the first few songs. I didn't know where it
was going to go, but I knew I had some songs,
(14:56):
and the first ones it seemed to me that it
should be in some chronological order or something that resembled that.
So the first few songs I had were the ones
you just named, and I decided At one point I
was listening back to them in my studio on the sofa,
and I pulled out my phone and I I had
this idea of what a video for that song could
look like, and I just pulled out my phone and
did a selfie video of it. I just saw the
(15:21):
look of the thing, and I thought that would actually
make a kind of cool video, so I just shot it,
and then later, having done that, I did another one,
and I did some more little shots and it became
stylistically that again, like autobiographical kind of depiction of what
I was doing felt like the right way to visually
represent the songs. What it did is it removed any
(15:44):
kind of like intermediary in the conversation. It was just
me talking to you right as opposed to like it's
being shot by a director. Here's Mike talking about this
really personal stuff, and we storyboarded out this really cool narrative.
All of that was removed, the feelings happening in time
and the songs being documented that way. Yes, And once
I did them, it became part of the visual aesthetic
(16:07):
of the whole thing. Part of the idea was from
the paintings that I was doing at the time, those
became the packaging, they became the merchandise. The videos and
the autobiographical nature. Just like the communication style is there
on the record, it's there in the visuals. In one sense,
it just blurs the line between real time social media
(16:29):
and videos and things that you don't usually think of
as a real time Like the most recent when I
did was for a song about you, which we just
put out a couple of weeks ago. Decided to put
it out. The week that we were putting it out,
I decided to shoot the video while I was out
promoting the record, and I flew to China. I was
already going to be out there to do some record
(16:51):
promo and shoot some stuff for tour announcements in Asia,
And while I was there, we shot the video and
then a few days later it was on the internet.
Like everything is in real time. And just to be
clear for people who haven't heard it, about you, like
a lot of songs on this record is addressing loss,
so about you. The idea of the song is even
(17:12):
when I don't think the song is about this, even
when I don't think the moment is about this, it
comes back to this, right or there's two versions of it.
Sometimes when I'm writing about something, it does come back
to the context of having lost Chester or the uncertainty
of the band's current situation. The other thing is, though,
(17:34):
that even when I actually don't write a song having
anything to do with those things, people see it through
that lens. So, in other words, just to put it
into somebody else's context entirely, so that you can see
where I'm coming from. Joe, if you have a public
breakup with a woman, let's say you get both super
celebrities and you're dating, this is going to be really imaginary.
(17:55):
But okay, Scarlett Johansson, right, good for me. And then
you broke up and everyone's like, oh man, they broke up.
It's on the front page of all the things and
all that, and people are talking about it. And then
you go and you get coffee in your sweats and
they take pictures of you and it's like, oh see,
he's super depressed, Like didn't put on jeans in the
(18:17):
shirt today today it was sweats, Like he must be
super depressed. It's all about her. And then you get
a slice of pizza. You see he got the like
five different toppings could have been. Yeah, he's really hurting
right now. They see everything through this lens of like
what they think you're going through, and even if you're
like no, I literally just felt comfortable in my pj's
and I went and got a slice of pizza because
(18:39):
I like pizza. Guys, Like, that's all there is to it.
There's no reason to read further into it. But that's
just how our world works. They're gonna start seeing things
through that lens. In fact, just this weekend I had
my first show. Two shows. Actually, I did a double
header and did a radio show in the afternoon and
did a longer headline set in the evening. It was
(18:59):
in front of City Hall in l A. It was
part of an Asian festival. Really special way to like
kick things off. Perfect for me. I just loved it.
A couple of the journalists who came and wrote about
the events called it a tribute show. So I asked
online just today, I tweeted, did you guys think that
(19:19):
these were tribute shows? And if so, like, do you
feel like that means it was sad? Did it feel
like sad overall? Not that it didn't feel bitter sweet
at certain moments. There was definitely a tribute moment I
played in the end and we sang it together, just
piano and me and the crowd. You mentioned that you
were working these tracks chronologically, and I'm curious to know
(19:40):
is the album sequenced that way. For the most part,
it's not exact chronology. It doesn't follow exactly in the
order in which they were written or have happened, because
I did, as a listener have this sensation of getting
too not exactly the more upbeat songs, but definitely the
sense of as the tracks go on, I'm getting this
(20:03):
feeling of you're going on, You're moving on right, And
I think that one thing that's different about this album
than most albums I've put out, from all the Lincoln
Park albums to the fourth Minor album. Usually, when you
put out an album, it's hey, I finished a thing,
check out the thing I made. It's finished. And this
(20:23):
is almost like I started a thing, like this is
an album that captures a moment in time for the
last six to nine months, and it is what it is,
and now I'm going to continue to evolve and move
on from here. Because we get deeper into the album,
we come to these tracks like make it Up As
(20:43):
I go World's on Fire. These are songs that seemed
to me we're addressing the same sorts of problems or feelings.
Make it up as I go? How do I go? On?
Worlds on fire? This is a bad time. But they
were also had another side to them. They had this
side of like, here's how I get past this? Yeah,
(21:03):
so like make it up as I go. Actually started
the hook of that we wrote towards the end of
One More Light. It was Brad and I and k Flay.
That song is more about in its inception of having
that feeling of like not knowing what the next steps are,
but you just kind of power through it and figure
it out as you go. And I thought, you know,
(21:26):
I came back to that song because I just always
loved it, And then I wrote the verses more recently.
I think that one relates a little more closely this
stuff of this last year. But the other one you
mentioned the World's on fire. When I wrote that one,
the course of that is basically the World's on fire,
But all I need is you. It's the first time
(21:47):
I've really written that kind of like it's like almost
like just a love song. I was specifically thinking of
my family It occurred to me because it was one
of those days when I was like really like up
to my eyeballs in my social media feed and it
seems like everything was just a mess. You know, you're
reading it's like the political tweets are firing and everybody's
(22:08):
like freaked out about the state of the country, in
the state of the world, and then environmental tweets and
like net neutrality tweets, and then on top of it,
like there's like five wildfires going on in Los Angeles
at the same time, so all of this is happening
at once, and all of that without the crap that
(22:29):
I had been through in the six months proceeding, that
would have been enough as it was, but all put
together was just like everything is just falling apart of
the seems what a mess. And then I can go
like sit down and play with my kids, and it
all kind of evaporates. And what's so interesting is receiving
it now. I connected to some comments you've made about
(22:53):
lost being like a wildfire. You know, things are destroyed
in a clear space for something new. But also there's
that image. The image of the wildfire is actually in
the Nothing makes Sense video. Keep in mind. I grew
up thinking I was going to be a painter. I
grew up in art. I went to school for illustration.
I've had three gallery shows now. The only reason I
(23:14):
haven't had more is because I'm busy with the playing music.
You know, there's that minor distraction in the world. Doing that,
I would do what I really want to do in
all seriousness. I grew up painting, And one of the
things I get out of doing an art show, creating
a body of work that way is that when you
walk in, if it's done right, like, you have a
(23:36):
sense of this thread of intention that just weaves its
way through everything that you're experiencing. Because some shows there's
painting and installation and sound and all of these different
ways that you can communicate the concept of the thing.
And so this record, in a sense, I wanted to
bring a little bit of that gallery experience, with that
gallery intention to the thing. So something we mentioned, like
(23:58):
the fires or or other symbolism on the record, it
occurs in various media in the whole effort, And still
I'm still weaving it in even as we're starting to
do live shows and and look at the production to
the show. But it's funny to me as a listener,
(24:19):
how conflicting some of the emotions on this record are.
There are moments of real rising above, like I think
of can't hear You Now, which is almost like a
battle rap if you're a hater, I can't hear you now.
But because that's really one way of looking at that
song and hearing that song, really, I think that was
the intention of the song for sure, And yet I
(24:40):
hear it now and I come to that line woke
up knowing I don't have to be numb again, and
I think, oh, yeah, maybe that's a reference back to
this other thing I've been thinking about on this record. Well,
that's the reality of the record and of going through
something like this is you know, most of us know
it's that it's messy and the references going to blend
(25:00):
into one another. And even I listened to it and
I go, oh, yeah, I was definitely thinking about a
But subconsciously there's a little bit of be in there.
You know. It's funny with a tragedy like this, Sometimes
difficult days are the good days. Sometimes you have a
good day. Everything's fine, you're with your kids, you're with
your family, you don't think about the other thing, and
(25:22):
you catch yourself feeling good and that feels strange. I
thought that I would get taken off guard by that
more than I did. A lot of people that I
I've talked to had real difficult battles with feeling guilty
for feeling good. One person described it as like I
(25:46):
made it all the way to lunch without thinking of
the horrible thing that had happened. In their case, it
was it was similar with somebody passing away. Oh I
made it all the way to lunch without thinking of them.
Oh my god, I'm so horrble that I didn't think
about them until lunch, And it's like no, no, no
for me, I'm like grateful on days when I can
get back to more of a sense of normal, there's
(26:08):
no disrespect or guilt that should come with that. Maybe
I don't feel like elty because I did feel like
when things kind of fell apart and the dust settled,
that I was able to take a step back and
look at my life and say, Okay, am I doing
(26:29):
things that I'm proud of? Am I doing good things?
Like what I do with the music and my professional life.
Is that in a good balance with my family and like,
am I taking care of my wife and my kids
and that type of stuff. I do feel like I
looked at that and said, yeah, I'm doing I'm doing
good fine, And this isn't just about like sell records
(26:49):
and make money. This is about getting out with the
people that have been hard. My Lincoln Park and individual
musical community we have like a family. There are people
with my drawings and signatures and banned artwork tattooed on
their bodies. This is a a moment in time when
(27:12):
they have been there for me when I'm feeling like
I don't know what the hell is going on, and
when I have been there for them to reassure them
that things are going to be okay. I'm not responsible
for them, they're not responsible for me. But we can
be support for one another, and they can be support
for one another without me even being in the picture.
(27:34):
It's really reassuring to see that. I wish there was
a way for me to like share that with more people,
because when I look in my mentions and I see
them talking to one another and saying such wonderful things,
like I mean, the end of the thought was just
that that's really reassuring the other day, when I did
that show at l A City Hall, some of the
(27:54):
fans had gotten there super early in the morning, six
in the morning or something, and it was an unusually
cold day and l a kind of rainy. I saw
them tweeting like san tacos and pickets, send blankets and tacos, right,
believe it or not. One of the folks on our side,
like who works at Warner Brothers. His name's Adam and
he ran our Lincoln Park fan club first before he
(28:15):
moved over. He got poached by the label. But he's
a friend of the community of Lincoln Park and of
my music. He went and need to made sure they
were okay, Like are you warmed? You guys need some
merchandise in a sweatshirt? Can I get you some water?
That's what I'm talking about. Like you'll even see it
in in Chester's wife Tlenda's feet. She'll retweet people who
are just being kind to one another. Let me ask
(28:37):
you about Chester, those of us that knew him through
the songs. Yeah, and in the songs, there's a lot
of pain, there's a lot of struggle, there's a lot
of moving beyond that. But tell me a little bit
about the Chester we didn't know well. The one thing
that I like to remind people is that he was
naturally gifted with the way he performed in his voice,
in particular, like he had a world class, one of
(28:59):
a kind voice. Obviously if you didn't know, he could
sing basically any genre, any type of song that you
threw at him, barring hip hop, maybe a little bit
like it wasn't the best rapper. You give him a
singing part, and the dude could do anything. It didn't
matter if it was like quiet female singer songwriter. In fact,
he'd be singing something like one of our songs, like
(29:21):
tracking it in the studio, and I'd say, do it
with five more, Dave, gone, do it with twenty five more, Adele.
I'd throw out these references of other singers that I
wanted him to imitate or at a flavor of, and
he knew we had a vocabulary of that type of
(29:41):
stuff that I could say to him, and he knew
what I meant. Nobody else had that with him, So
that was a thing personally, you know, studio and all
that stuff aside. I think when we wrote, we wrote
about these difficult topics, but in general, especially in the
past few years. He was so much more together then
(30:04):
he had been in years prior. Like he joked that
the band was his most stable and together relationship. I
think he was saying that in a joking way, because
I think with his wife and his kids, I think
that was probably number one and we were probably number two.
But but just to be clear, there aren't a lot
of bands that have a run this long. Just last year,
you have a number one album, right, Usually when you
(30:29):
have that situation, you have your couple of classic albums
and then it's just you play the old stuff. We
were fortunate enough to for most of the records that
we put out, we got a number one or two
on the rock charts and alternative charts, and a number
one release and in many countries. So still very relevant,
is the point. I guess. I think with each album
(30:52):
I've ever been involved with, each step of the way,
I'm trying to see what have I not done that
seems exciting and fun, that will keep it fresh and
like in the in a sense of like they to
go back to, like that body of work, like this
is the art show, like curate your experience, what is
the experience you're curating for the fans this time, and
how is that different than the other things that you've done.
(31:14):
You've worked with a remarkable range of rappers across the
career of Lincoln Park common of course jay Z. Have
you given thought to Lincoln Park's impact on hip hop? Oh? Sure,
absolutely that I grew up a hip hop kid first
and foremost, Like, that's the first type of music I
ever got into and fell in love with it and
(31:36):
most of what I listened to it. It's the legend
that your first show ever was a Public Enemy Anthrax show.
Is that truth? That is my first The first concept
I ever went to it was you went in the
black young black teenagers primus Public Enemy Anthrax. So you
go to that and you're like, we get some depeche
Mode keyboards in here, we might have something. It's like,
it's almost comedic. How like it sounds like I would
(31:56):
just be I'd be making that up right, that that
would be the first show. But if you think about it,
at that time, those types of music were being put
together for the first time, and it was clumsy, like
in a way, there was a simplicity in the way
they would just like mash the stuff up together. There
were moments when it was really seamless, like walk this
way absolutely, like that is an album, Whereas when I
(32:20):
listened to it, I go, Okay, that's that's like a
very seamless blend. There's a lot of food analogies in
our band, so that would be like a soup where
you take the ingredients and you blend them together and
you can't tell one ingredient from the other. The Anthrax
Public Enemy thing is like a salad. You've got all
the ingredients, but you can see them all. They're all
separate ingredients, right. So sometimes we take one approach, sometimes
(32:42):
we take another, and it's the gray area in the
middle when it becomes really interesting. Whenever I've approached the stuff,
just the awareness of how blended do you want this
thing to be? The hybrid theory brand of it was
like kind of blended, but like you can kind of
still see the arts from one another. But if you
fast forward a few albums in you start getting songs
(33:05):
like on Um. For example, our fourth record was called
A Thousand Sons. There's a song on there called when
They Come for Me. When They Come for Me is
just this like I don't know what genre that song is.
There isn't a name for that thing. This is a
long way of saying we were growing up in a
time where music was very separate, and I know that
(33:26):
we played a role in making it less separate. When
I grew up, kids were metal kids, rock kids, rap kids,
pop kids. You weren't like just fans of music. People
didn't really do that. I mean, I think early late nineties,
early two thousands, you ask somebody what do you listen
to and they go, oh, everything, And that was the
beginning of oh everything. When I first heard Little Loozy
(33:48):
for Exo Tour Life, I was like, you know, this
is a rap song that would not exist without you guys.
You know I mean that that sense of like those
big keyboards, that keyboard drama, being open to that that
was a turning point. I think it's it's something different.
Uh Well, also lyrically, if you think about that song,
(34:10):
like there's a darkness and and an openness to just
saying like, well, this is how I feel I'm going
to write about in a depression and whatever. Right, that
emo side of current rap, some of those rappers are
kind of running from that a little bit and playing
that down and saying no, it's not emo or whatever.
I get why they're doing that. I would probably feel
the same way. You didn't want to be called a
(34:31):
rap rock band in the year two thousand and one
only because of the associations. We just wanted it to
be clear that they were such a big difference between
what a lot of those bands were doing. One of
your songs from the fort minor Days deal specifically with identity,
and I'm talking about Kenji. Yeah. Yeah. For those who
(34:52):
don't know, it's the story of Japanese immigrants held in
internment camps during World War Two, it's a personal story
for you. Well, they weren't just immigrants, they were American
citizens of Japanese descent. Basically, what happened is when Pearl
Harbor was bombed, there was a high that, you know,
the highest level of wartime paranoia going on. The American
(35:12):
government decided, oh no, like, we don't know who could
be a spy, We don't know, you know, what bad
things can be happening. I mean, this sounds like it
could happen today. Let's just make clear that that there
is a personal dimension here. Yeah. Yeah, my dad's Japanese.
My dad's side of the family is all Japanese. I'm half.
I grew up understanding that my family had unjustly been
(35:34):
put in these camps. Basically, what happened is short version
of the story Pearl Harbor happens. The government says, we're
putting all the Japanese on the West coast in prison camps.
They tell everybody to get out of their homes. They
let them pack two bags of stuff, and you have
to leave the rest of your earthly belongings in your
house alone. And you say, oh, well, when are we
coming back, And there's like, whenever we tell you you can,
(35:54):
you get thrown in horse stalls to sleep, sometimes just tents,
sometimes busses whatever. Once the camps are built, they are
built in the desert. You get shipped off to the
desert and you stay there for years until the end
of the war. And then when you go home, your
home has been vandalized and some cases burned. Some cases
people's stuff was okay, my family's was not. The place
(36:16):
was vandalized and everything was stolen um and they had
to start their lives over. When I was listening back
to the Fort Minor record, I was really struck by
the creeping sense of this feels like it should have
been impossible, and there are things happening now that feel
like they should be in part. Oh. Yeah, the Japanese
American community has been one of the most vocal communities
(36:38):
in the past couple of years, especially as it relates
to Muslim and immigrants. For example, um, when the whole
thing was going on about shutting the borders to to
folks who are coming in living in l A, the
Japanese American community in in l A was really vocal
about that subject. All of a sudden, they want to
start rounding people up again. So of course the Japanese
(36:59):
Americans like my family are saying, no, guys, we already
made this mistake, and the US government said we can't
make it again. You know, you mentioned that that you
recently played your first solo shows, and just to be clear,
these were really solo shows that we you on stage,
nobody else. You've got some dates coming up, I do.
(37:19):
I'm headed to Asia and Europe. You're going to play
the Reading Festival. Yes, is it just going to be you?
I thinks so I want to try that first and
uh see how that feels, and after that we'll see
what happens. I mean, I'm curious about what the show
would look like if I start adding a couple of people,
(37:39):
but I don't also don't want it to be confusing
in terms of, like, you know, the fans wondering if
it is or is not Lincoln Park, or you know,
anything like that. What was the feeling going into these
two shows? Were you nervous? Did you know how it
would feel to do those Lincoln Park songs by yourself?
I felt ready to do of them. I did feel anxious,
(38:02):
quite a bit more anxious before the first show, and
I was glad that I did the two on the
same day because the first show was almost like a
nice warm up, and I then I felt really relaxed
going to the second one. To your point, like, I
don't know, maybe I'm just really good at compartmentalizing. I felt, Okay.
(38:22):
It's impossible to get through, for example, like Lincoln Park
songs without thinking about Chester, you know. You I look
out and I see one person like just raging, like
screaming and having the best time, and then like I
look over the other side and like somebody crying. Right,
that's a little tricky, Like that's new that's not something
(38:42):
I normally would see. How did it compare to last
October when you were at the Hollywood Bowl you did
this what was a memorial car? That was yeah, completely different.
In October we had done that show because we realized
that we had a private memorial and that the fans
didn't have a public one. They didn't have one that
(39:03):
they could go to. They didn't get to say goodbye,
they didn't get to experience that closure that comes with it.
We set that show up, we scheduled it to play
that role for the fans. Really don't get it twisted.
It was like very hard for us to do. You know.
Sometimes we'd be rehearsing stuff and the guys are just like,
can we like, let's take a break. It's like too much.
(39:25):
There are a few like realizations that were really necessary
about doing it. Number One, the warmth and the connected
energy of the whole Lincoln Park fan community of all
of the world like really came together around that show
and around the band during that time, and I'm super
grateful for that. I mean, everybody was so supportive. It
(39:47):
was incredible, and they've continued to be artist community, people
jumping in, sending in videos like I wish we could
be there coming on stage and singing with us and
doing all that really really special we had. I don't
know how the artist twenty something artists, I think. And
then in in retrospect, after having done those rehearsals and
played the show, you know, even watching it back and stuff,
(40:10):
I was like, these people who came on stage with
us all have awesome, awesome voices, and they're really really
wonderful and talented people, and not a single one of
them is chest her like that. There's no one's who
even if I'm imagining, like who could we sing these
songs with in the future. Is listening back to those
It's like those are all great moments, but that's none
(40:30):
of them are sustainable things. There isn't a version of
the band that exists with any of those types of people,
as wonderful as they are, right, So that just puts
more of a I doesn't doesn't add more of a
question mark, maybe, but it just checks things off the
list that are not. Really we just know what things
are not the option, Well, then what are the options?
(40:53):
I don't know. That's the million dollar question, right, And unfortunately,
you know I've said it before, but unfortunately there aren't
any answers to that at this point. It would be
awesome if there were. That would be really easy. Um,
I wish we were in in a Brian Johnson Bond
Scott situation where it's like, no, the guy, like our
best friend who sang for the band who passed away.
He literally said, this is the guy, and we listen
(41:15):
to the guy, and the guy is definitely the guy,
and we all love hanging out with him and we
want to play with him. That's not a normal that
that didn't happen to anybody else. Really, that hasn't happened
to us. Somebody comes and says, Hay Lincoln Park, do
you want to play a show in Germany? Then you
have to have a discussion with all the guys, and
you have one guy who's like, I definitely don't want
to do any one guy who says, I don't know,
maybe I agree, maybe we shouldn't do it, and two
(41:36):
guys to say we definitely need to do it. And
then there's concerns and all that noise, like that is
not something I can deal with right now, and it's
not a knock on anybody else, any one of us
could be the outlier opinion though, like minority voice on something.
But I definitely need some more simplicity in terms of
(42:00):
like decision making, Like oh my gut says that the
right thing to do is to shoot a video on
the crappy camera on my phone. I chewed it, I
look at it, I go I like that, and I
can put it on the internet and it's done. I
don't need to call anybody else. And that for me,
that power and that and that control has been part
of my like recovery process. When you miss Chester, what
(42:22):
do you miss most about him? In the beginning, I'll
tell you the thing that whenever I saw it, it
just made me like so it just like oh' just
so painful. Is at the end of every show we
put our arm around each other and always say a
good show. And that was always such a special moment.
It was always that like really satisfying, like hey, good job,
we did it. If the show is really good, then
(42:45):
it's like, hey man, that was a good show. It
was bad. I was like we made it through that show.
Good job. Also, like we always traveled together, we'd have
a lot of the same conversations and a lot of
inside jokes, and we played a lot of poker. Those
are things, especially on the road, that like other people
around us would have mentioned a lot of times, like, man,
(43:07):
it's always so funny hearing you guys like post show
in the van, like just rambling on about nonsense the
way we do. We do that goofy voices. And they
had like these characters and he he had like a
Russian character that always showed up like in this weird
Russian accent. Yeah, that was all really great stuff. I'm
(43:27):
shout to thank you for being here. Good show. Join
Inside the Studio for more in depth conversations with the
biggest names in music. Search and follow Inside the Studio
on I Heart Radio or subscribe wherever you listen to
podcasts so that you never missed an episode. Inside the
(43:51):
Studio is an I Heart Radio original podcast created by
Chris Peterson. This episode was written and hosted by me
Joe Levy, our executive producer Sandy Smallens for audiation and
of course special thanks to Mike Shinodah and Warner Brothers Records.
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