Mike Q&A Summary 7/29/2020

[LPLStaff]

Here are the highlights from July 29th when Mike answered some questions on the stream.

 

Mike talked about some of his favorite film scores, mentioning Hans Zimmer, John Williams, and more.

 

- "If you could collaborate with any band from the 1990s who would it be?" -> "90s? Smashing Pumpkins comes to mind. Oh, Rage, they did come out in the 90s didn't they? Massive Attack, I did a Massive Attack remix at one point."

 

He explained that because of the way routing and expenses are set up, he can't visit everywhere on tour, giving Ukraine as an example on the Post Traumatic Tour.

 

He doesn't know if "The Waltz" will be on Dropped Frames 3.

 

- "Was the "High Voltage" remix (MS remix) done while writing Hybrid Theory or at a later time? Thought it was interesting the remix featured strings from "Cure for the Itch."" -> "So I had this rack mounted keyboard unit and I forget what it was, it was a Roland keyboard unit with these certain string sounds and I used those on a few songs at the time. I forget which ones I used it on. I used it on those two, I think I used them on "By Myself." I used them a couple of times, so that's why that sound popped up, because I liked that sound and I used it on a few things."

 

- ""The Last Line (Ammosick)" was worked on during Minutes To Midnight and A Thousand Suns, then was released on The Mall soundtrack. What made you keep coming back to this one? It's a good quieter song by the way." -> "I felt like, I liked it and thought that it belong... it should have gone out during the Minutes to Midnight era. And then it just didn't seem to fit the thematic stuff on A Thousand Suns. So that's why. And then we were like putting The Mall thing together and we were like, "Oh we have that song, that song is so good, that will fit here." It just felt like it would fit."

 

- "How did your high school or college classmates react to you becoming famous? Did they contact you after Linkin Park huge?" -> "Now of course, most of them did not reach out. I wasn't in touch with most people from high school. When I went to college, I was in touch a couple dozen people, maybe at most 30-ish. But there were certainly some people from back then that were like... there were some who were like, "Oh man, congratulations, that is so cool." And it was like, "Oh, that's really nice." But you've got to have boundaries. In terms of being in that situation, I've always had limited space for new friends. I love to meet new people and I love to get to know people, for sure, but I'm not the person to meet somebody at a bar and is then like, hanging out with them. I've joked about this with other friends before, like when I meet new people, I'm very social and I love hanging out with people. An introvert gets exhausted from being around people - I am entertained by hanging out with people, but there's a point where I get tired. I'm in the middle, more leaning extrovert. When I meet people and someone presents me with an idea of like, "Here's an idea of something you can do, or work with me on" then I do not warm up to those ideas quickly. It takes me a while."

 

- "What inspired Linkin Park to give each album a different theme/sound?" -> "I have a theory that artists lean towards being either being the kind of artists that feel good about making the same type of thing each time and really establishing that sonic brand and doing it over and over. And that's how necessarily a bad thing, like, look at Japanese sushi chefs. They perfect its craftsmanship, they perfect this very specific and repetitive task. So a band like Metallica when they go outside of that, people like, "What are you doing?" Even when it's not them, it's like the engineering and recording of the thing. They make a similar thing when they make a record. And of course there's tons of variety in that thing. They're for example, not putting keyboard on the next album probably. They're not doing sampled beats. They don't give a shit that trap hi-hats are cool or whatever, that's not happening. And then there's like, us, on the other side of the spectrum. I sometimes wonder if some artists just can't think outside of... their brain like naturally makes a certain thing and they can't even create outside of that thing. I don't know."

 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/694360103