Mike Q&A Summary 6/12/2020

[LPLStaff]

June 12th, here we go! Another recap of Mike's Q&As.

 

- "When are you going to release the Open Door track?" -> "As soon as I can. I wanted to release it on the 19th, that is apparently not happening because Spotify is featuring only black artists on that day which is cool. So I don't want to release it on that day, that would strategically be a stupid thing to do. And so we're going to release it a different day. It's coming! It's coming soon."

- "In Stereo is my favorite hip hop song of all time. Did the beat come first and inspire the lyrics?" -> "Yes, that one was definitely a beat first. Because the song is about the beat in a sense. In Stereo is a Fort Minor track. It's about having a new track that you love and listening to it in your car and getting the love of making the beats... stuff like that."

- "Hey Mike, can you break down The Summoning? I hear snippets of old LP songs in it, is that the case?" -> "I don't think there are snippets of old Linkin Park things in it, we just made things that sounded very LP. You know what's fun about that song and about that album? If you really listen to it, there's elements of it that sound like... it's almost like taking like A Thousand Suns sounds and adding metal. I loved that after the fact, it was like a little dirtier with the samples and stuff. The non-guitar based drums, it was darker and dirtier. Darker meaning EQ, it wasn't as bright."

- "Hey Mike can you talk about the long scream in Given Up? Who got the idea to put it in?" -> "Ah man, it was just a thing. He was just on it. He was just pissed off or had all this crazy energy. He was doing the scream for that bridge part and he didn't know the structure of the song that well yet, so he did the scream... he did a couple of takes and we were like, "oh that's too short, that doesn't fit in the spot it needs to fit in, it just needs to be longer." And he did it again, and it was still kind of short, so I said "oh it needs to be a lot longer than that." So he just did THAT - he kept going and he knew he was just doing it over the chorus, then he finished it and I was just SCREAMING myself, like "that was the most epic thing I've ever heard!" He was just laughing... sweating and laughing. That was for sure "no shirt on, freaking out in the vocal booth day." I was like, "I'm just going to work around it, I'm going to work the song around the scream."

 

- "In the song Hands Held High, there's the quote "when the rich wage war, the poor will die." -> "It's a very good quote by Jean-Paul Sartre, I found it to be true and I found it to be appropriate to the song topic that I was thinking about, that I was writing about, so I included it in the song. I was quoting it." 

 

- "Hey Mike what happened to the mural that you painted in the music video for Welcome?" -> "It was painted on a backdrop of 12 inch record sleeves. How did you not get the memo on this guys? Fuck! Hold on, I'm looking at my own web store because I want to see. They're sold out? They're gone? Are you sure? Who was collecting information on all the positions of the squares? Like they broke down, you got this one, this is the square you got. LPCatalog. You guys bought the vinyl from the thing and then you didn't tell them where it was, poor LPCatalog, I felt so bad, they didn't get the info from you and it's your fault."

 

Mike says there is an Indian population in LA and he loves Indian food. So when he goes to India, he wants to eat more of the food. 

 

- "One of my favorite Fort Minor songs is Spraypaint and Inkpens. Any story you want to tell about the We Major mixtape?" -> "The We Major mixtape, I made that with all the people involved after I finished the Fort Minor album. I had a couple of those tracks that I wasn't going to include on the album and then we did them for the mixtape, and then I did a bunch of other stuff. I made all the tracks except for I think Scoop DeVille did two. Yeah we just sent it to Green Lantern and he blended it, he mixed it. I put all of the songs together, we put all of the raps together like in a few weeks. It was pretty fast, I feel like that's the point of a mixtape."

 

 

[lpplus]

Funny story about GU

Thanks guys

[leftshoe18]

Cool that Mike also sees The Hunting Party as A Thousand Suns with metal on top of it. That's how I've always viewed that album.

[AdamArtz]

People should ask him more about The Hunting Party

[Somebodyangry]

I’ve always seen “Mark the Graves” as a heavy/guitar driven sister of “Blackout”, so yeah to a certain extent I can see the parallelism Between ATS and THP, even tho the former is one of my fav LP albums (and all time albums) and the latter is far weaker IMO. 
Oh gosh, When he talks about Chester 💔