Mike Q&A Summary 7/1/2020

[LPLStaff]

Mike is back at home from vacation and answering questions, so here are the highlights from July 1st.

 

- "You've mentioned a few times Joe Hahn is actually a good singer, would you have him sing lead vocals on a song?" -> "Joe is not a good singer, he's a must have in a gang vocal. So if we are doing a shouting vocal on The Catalyst or Guilty All The Same, Joe is like... we've gotta have Joe there that day. If he's not there, I kind of won't do the gang vocal because his gang vocal is really that good. It's like a good shouty vocal, you know you want him to come to your futbol match to watch the footy. He's got a good shouting vocal, what do you want from me?"

 

- "If you were able to pick the lineup for a festival, who would you put on it?" -> "Here's who I would want on it. I'd want Run The Jewels on it. I'd want grandson on it. I would want K.Flay on it. Let me look at my Spotify. Jack Garrett, he's a great performer. You know who'd be dope but would be a total curveball? Anderson .Paak. Denzel Curry, I want Denzel Curry on the lineup. MGK is cool live, yeah. Muse would be cool. Avenged, sure. Who else, who is on another level? I'm just thinking of really dope live groups. Babymetal, haha, Babymetal is actually dope live, they are so sick live. I haven't seen them LIVE live, I've just seen videos of them. Fall Out Boy, oh yeah, they're great live. They're a very good live band. Green Day, good live band. Twenty One Pilots, good live band. I'm into Young Blood (Yungblud...?), sure. I am into Smashing Pumpkins as long as it's with James and Jimmy Chamberlain. I don't know about Darcy, I think they can't play with Darcy but to me, Pumpkins is Billy, James, and Jimmy. If you don't have those two other guys, it sounds too different to me, it's missing something. Billy is Billy, Billy sounds like Billy, I like Billy. Oh Nine Inch Nails, yeah Nine Inch Nails would be dope."

 

- "What does LP, the band, mean to you?" -> "The band, it's like any brotherhood. It's awesome and it's complicated and you love them and you don't agree with them over stuff and it's all good. I think the thing over time that helped us keep our heads on straight, I mentioned this before, we'd kind of counterbalance and correct each other in a sense when necessary. So like, "hey you're being weird" type of thing."

 

- "Demos have given fans unique insights into the development of Hybrid Theory except for Pushing Me Away. What was the process of this song and how did it develop over time?" -> "Interesting question. I don't remember how that song like came together in terms of pieces. I know that we made it in the studio while we were making the album. And we wanted another song in the vibe of Crawling and I think Don was pushing that and he was looking to see if we could beat Crawling. I mean that was a high bar. At that point we didn't know Crawling would be Crawling, it was just a song by Linkin Park that we had written, so it was like, "Can we do a song better than this one? Let's try it." And I think we started with the guitars and the sample beeping sounds. And I like the track, I think the track went really well. I think the place where it didn't reach Crawling status for me was in the lyrics and melody. Not that it's bad, it's a good song, but it wasn't like... when we did Crawling, it was like we were channeling something, you know? It was like the emotion was inherent in the process and the other one, I think we were thinking too hard. It was cool, it's a good song."

 

- "What was or is your favorite part of touring?" -> "My favorite part of touring... shows, obviously shows. Also going on like, I like playing tourist. I like walking around. Sometimes I really love seeing super touristy crap, like the most touristy. Like when I go to Paris, even though I've been to Paris a bunch of times, I still go and see the Eiffel Tower. I mean I don't go up in the Eiffel Tower because it's a pain in the butt. But yeah, Paris is cool. I was just talking to somebody about Berlin, I love Berlin, I love Tokyo. Milan is dope, I like Milan. Stockholm, I feel so lucky to have gone to all of these places you guys. And yes, one of the problems for most Americans, the reason the USA has a problem with xenophobia and race issue and loss of perspective on the world is because we're not physically connected to the rest of the world easily. You have to like get on a twelve hour flight to go to Europe and that sucks. Like I wish a lot of the folks who are kind of small minded and stuck in these certain ways would travel. They're scared to travel to Mexico and they won't travel to Canada. It's like, "Why?", which is also stupid. In my experience of talking to people about like, "Why don't you travel?" It's like their version of traveling is like, they live in Michigan and they travel to Florida for a vacation. No comment."

 

- "Do we have a chance to see Dropped Frames as a CD?" -> "Ok that's a good question. So here's the story with Dropped Frames. So Open Door started it and when I started putting everything together and realizing, "oh I've got all of these tracks that I made on the live stream", I realized that I wanted to put these out on streaming services juts for everybody to like enjoy them whenever they want. So I hope to have a volume two of this out a month after this one. So Volume 1 comes out a week from Friday, nine days from now. If you guys want to sing and rap over them, go ahead. I was going to put Open Door on its own and then I decided it should be part of the album and then I was worried since it's all instrumental, to put on a vocal song on it, I was back and forth and back and forth. But we decided at the end of the day with management and everybody to put it all together. And then probably the next release will be just instrumental. Super weird. I went to Warner basically, I looked at the metrics of how... this isn't going to be a number one album. This is a passion project, a fan project, something interesting to do. I don't know how many people are going to stream it. But what I do know is it's not going to be like a Linkin Park thing, even a Fort Minor or my thing, probably it's just a fraction as big as that. I don't know. But with that said, I went to Warner Records, actually my manager did to be totally honest, and asked, "Mike wants to just release this independently, can we just get an exemption and do that?" And when you sign a record deal, you have a commitment to a certain amount of releases. I'm not a free agent. And they said, "yeah, go ahead, this is just an instrumental release, it's fine." So I went and basically did a thing to just do streaming. I did a deal just to streaming. Let me put it this way, if I have some kind of sign from you guys, if Dropped Frames comes out next Friday and it does good enough then I'll think about doing physical CDs, vinyl, stuff like that. I've already done some merch, I love the merch, if you haven't seen that, head over to mikeshinoda.com to check out the new merch. I've got some tie-die shirts and hoodies with the dragon on it, with the mariachi on it. Dude you've gotta go check out the merch. Thank you for buying the merch, you guys are so great. But it came out great, that's one thing that's so cool about our art day but the stuff lends itself to a fun tshirt. It just looks good on a tshirt, that's cool. It's all about support, the more you guys support, the more you guys spread the word, get other people interested... treat me this is my first project, treat it like I've never put out an album before. I've never done an instrumental record, I've never done an independent record, so for all intents and purposes, this is a very different release."

- A fan Dangerous Ant sent Mike a remix mashup of Mozart vs Stranger Things inspired by Mike's recent streams and Mike posted the link in the chat for everyone to check it out. It's actually really good, so here you go:

 

 

- Mike: "Phobias? I don't like snakes, so the Iridescent video was difficult."

 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/667139762

 

 

[martinez]

If he would decide to release a physical copy of the album, he would need to release it via WB, right?

[Soeffingnaive92]

Joe on vocals on the next LP single confirmed 😂love 

[gorast]

7 hours ago, martinez said:

If he would decide to release a physical copy of the album, he would need to release it via WB, right?

It kind of sounded like he was implying that. I think it would be far easier to go through Warner for a physical release anyway, it's a different process from just dropping it onto streaming services. With the label you get into the cost of manufacturing vs. how much money it would make the label, etc., but it seems like the kind of thing that he'd need to get permission to do himself, and if the hassle is too high for too low a reward then it would be a waste of time (for him, anyway, obviously not for us).

 

I think a physical release depends on how many volumes come out. If it's like, eight albums worth of instrumentals, you can't do a vinyl box of that, it'd probably be $200 and sell 40 copies. If it's two or three, though? That might be more doable. Or just go CD-only, though I feel like that's barely a consideration any more.

[LPLStaff]

Don't think he has to go through Warner to do a physical release, he can do it himself but obviously pays for more of the costs himself versus with a label. The label gave him an exception from his record contract (which makes total sense) to do this as it's just an instrumental release. Mike already mixed and sent in Volume 2 of the jams, so he's probably composing the third one right now. He has at least 50+ tracks already and is still making them. This could easily turn into 6-8 releases if he keeps streaming regularly.

 

It wouldn't make sense to do vinyl for that - agreed. We will see what happens. Maybe at the end he will do a vinyl of the "best of" the jams.

[martinez]

26 minutes ago, LPLStaff said:

Don't think he has to go through Warner to do a physical release, he can do it himself but obviously pays for more of the costs himself versus with a label. The label gave him an exception from his record contract (which makes total sense) to do this as it's just an instrumental release. Mike already mixed and sent in Volume 2 of the jams, so he's probably composing the third one right now. He has at least 50+ tracks already and is still making them. This could easily turn into 6-8 releases if he keeps streaming regularly.

I think the same. If he could make enough money from digital sales, maybe he could do a physical release by himself, but i doubt he will make a lot of money from that. At least releasing something digitally doesn't cost a lot and you just pay it once per year.

[Soeffingnaive92]

I think making a physycal release would be a weird move. This is a release for super diehard fans, it's not PT level of spread.

I mean, I consider myself a diehard LP fan but I personally wouldn't buy this on physycal form.

[Cesar656]

3 minutes ago, PurpleFlinstoneVitamins92 said:

I think making a physycal release would be a weird move. This is a release for super diehard fans, it's not PT level of spread.

I mean, I consider myself a diehard LP fan but I personally wouldn't buy this on physycal form.

Same here, i dont think it would be really profitable (and honestly im sure that was not his purpose when this started)

[Soeffingnaive92]

3 minutes ago, Cesar656 said:

Same here, i dont think it would be really profitable (and honestly im sure that was not his purpose when this started)

Yeah absolutely, despite my bad received irony, I absolutely don't think he was thinking about this project as something profitable in some ways

[SFNL14]

One of the biggest bands in Pakistan released an album a few years ago. Thing about here is that no CD's are published anymore because of piracy, so what they did was burned CD's themselves and printed the artwork, and sold those packs. They held meet-and-greets in a few cities which was the only place you could buy them. I hope he does something similar with the artwork.

[Astat]

Idea: Mike should make some CD label art/maybe a back insert in addition to the album cover, and let people print it themselves if they want to have a physical copy. Not like you have to worry much about the bootleg market if there are no real physical copies in the first place.

[Soeffingnaive92]

53 minutes ago, Astat said:

Idea: Mike should make some CD label art/maybe a back insert in addition to the album cover, and let people print it themselves if they want to have a physical copy. Not like you have to worry much about the bootleg market if there are no real physical copies in the first place.

That would be a cool idea, involving fans in the whole project considering it’s a “home made” project and not a “real” album like PT or LP 

[RentEznor]

I'm still (kinda) confused about the whole independent release though. Wouldn't Machine Shop suit perfectly for it?

[Astat]

15 hours ago, KlaytonShinoda said:

I'm still (kinda) confused about the whole independent release though. Wouldn't Machine Shop suit perfectly for it?

Machine Shop isn't a record label anymore.

[Soeffingnaive92]

On 7/4/2020 at 10:27 AM, Astat said:

Machine Shop isn't a record label anymore.

The got everybody so petrified 

[RentEznor]

On 7/4/2020 at 10:27 AM, Astat said:

Machine Shop isn't a record label anymore.

 

Didn't know that until now.