Interviews

 

LINKIN PARK

 

Words: Rod Yates

 

For a man who’s sold more than 15 million albums, Mike Shinoda is particularly easy company. A 20-minute phone call stretches to 30 minutes without any of his “people” jumping in to bring things to a close, and Shinoda himself is thoughtful, expressive and intelligent throughout. At a pinch you’d say he was unaffected by fame. If you were being unkind, you’d accuse him of being a little dull – if it’s stories of rock star excess or controversial soundbites you seek, Mike Shinoda is not your man. What he will do, though, is happily regale you with stories of how and why Linkin Park came to make their soon-to-be-released third album, Minutes To Midnight. He’ll also tell you about his formative teen years, and how they set the agenda for what’s followed.

 

“Brad [Delson, guitars] and I have known each other since we were 13, and in high school our group of friends would go over to one another’s houses and write songs instead of going to parties,” he begins. “We were more interested in getting together and writing music than we were going to those parties. That’s what was fun for us – to sit down and try and shoot for making an original song, that’s really exhilarating.”

 

Such single-mindedness is one of the reasons why Minutes To Midnight took 15 months to write, during which time the sextet amassed a quality control-free 150 songs. Produced by Rick Rubin and recorded in the infamous Houdini mansion – home to the Chili Peppers during the Blood Sugar Sex Magik sessions, amongst others – Shinoda’s best description of the album is “schizophrenic”.

 

“Since it has 12 songs it goes in 12 different directions,” he starts. “On previous records, let’s say you had 10 songs written, they all sounded consistent, and suddenly you came up with this eleventh idea and it didn’t sound like the tenth. On previous albums we would have taken that song and put it aside. The new way of thinking was, the 10 songs sound like an album but the eleventh doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. We go with the direction of the eleventh song and make it as good as it can be for what it is. And what ended up happening is that the eleventh song sounded different, and the twelfth, and the thirteenth, and so all of a sudden we had 100 songs and they fell into 40 different categories, and it didn’t matter which songs sounded consistent with each other cos we had such a variety at that point that it was just about making good music.”

 

Which is all well and good until you have to whittle those songs down to the dozen that will make the final cut; a process, you’d imagine, fraught with confusion and second-guessing as the weeks stretch to months, the Houdini mansion starts to feel like a prison, and the pressure to follow-up two multi-platinum albums starts to boil.

 

“There are always ups and downs in a record making process,” admits Shinoda. “There were times when certain guys were sick of it and didn’t want to mess with the songs, but surprisingly for the most part everyone stayed relatively focused on the record.”

 

If you want to know what making a Linkin Park album is like, the word is “painstaking”. Shinoda says that the whole band would get so caught up in the detail that they’d agonise over one particular word in a song, to the point where, after much discussion, they had to have a band vote to ascertain whether it was the right word. Similarly, when it came to writing the music, they’d have a band meeting every week, play each other the new ideas they’d come up with, vote on what worked, and then go away and keep writing, only to return and do it all again the following week. Democracy patently rules in Linkin Park, but you can’t help but feel it comes at the expense of spontaneity.

 

“The spontaneity had already happened at that point,” counters Shinoda. “The first lyric we came up with was the spontaneous part, and for the most part you’re talking about the minutiae within a very spontaneous larger picture.”

 

Just what it is those lyrics on Minutes To Midnight are about isn’t open to discussion. All Shinoda will say is that they’re a lot less vague than on previous albums Hybrid Theory and Meteora, and that if he regrets anything about those records, it’s that the lyrics are so abstract. Indeed as he dances around the topic of what he and co-vocalist Chester Bennington are singing about on album number three, the Linkin Park MC resembles a politician carefully navigating the middle ground – for no other reason, you suspect, than to not alienate one of his many millions of fans.

 

“People are smart listeners, especially our fans,” he reasons. “People who dig into our music and come to meet and greets, they tell me ways they’ve connected to the songs in ways I would not have imagined being the case. So we appreciate that and I don’t want to disturb that.”

 

Similarly, he’s not about to commit to the meaning behind the album’s title either.

 

“It came from the same place that Iron Maiden’s title Two Minutes To Midnight came from,” he chuckles, acknowledging what every Maiden fan would already have suspected. “The same place in the sense that they both come from the doomsday clock. The way we approach the album title is similar to the way we approached a lot of things on the record, in that it’s in layers. No single definition is the only definition, and when you look at the title different people read different things on it. I had someone say to me, ‘This is obviously a political album title’, and I said, ‘Really? Is it obviously political? Cos when I look at it it’s more about death and rebirth, it’s an optimistic album title.’ And they said, ‘Well, that’s not true, cos midnight is dark’, and I said, ‘Well, not in all parts of the world, some parts of the world it’s light, so you can’t even say that about it, much less what it’s about.”

 

For any band that’s sold as many records as Linkin Park, the inevitable question is whether or not they can do it again. And no matter how accomplished an album it may be, if Minutes To Midnight fails to match its predecessors sales-wise, will it really have the opportunity to be considered anything but a failure?

 

“Given the performance of the music industry as a whole, it would be highly unlikely for our new album to sell anything similar to what the past records have sold, cos no record is selling like that anymore,” reasons Shinoda. “So with that pressure out of the way, our attitude has been, let’s try and make a new record that we’re proud of, that shows growth, that shows maturity, and we’ll put it out there and see what happens.”

 

Has there ever been any talk of quitting while you’re ahead? What brings you back to Linkin Park to make a new album?

 

“After the last Linkin Park tour, we came off the road and all went our separate directions and took a break. We looked around a little bit, and I think every guy realised in their own way that we’ve achieved success that we would never have dreamed of, and we had done so many things, and if it was all over tomorrow we could kick back and say, ‘We totally did better than anything we would have shot for.’ And because of that, we know that the six guys that are in this band, their hearts are in the right place when it comes to doing this. These guys are not in it just to make money or get famous, it’s not about that at all. Although I think each of the guys enjoys being a rock star in his own right at some times during the month, the reality of the true personalities in this band is that we’re just musicians who like to write songs and when it comes down to it, that’s all we want to do. And getting back into the studio together and trying something brand new is one of the most exciting ideas for this band.”

 

 

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