Mike on Genius: "Fighting Myself" Official Lyrics & Meaning

[LPLStaff]

We have been waiting for a while for the band to update their verified lyrics for Meteora|20 songs on Genius, and it looks like they have had a plan all along. Genius has just posted a video of Mike talking about the "Fighting Myself" official lyrics and meaning.

 

 

The description reads: "Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda stopped by the GENIUS studio to discuss the band’s latest hit “Fighting Myself." Although it's new to the world, the track is actually 20-years-old. "This is a demo that we barely finished," Shinoda tells GENIUS of the song that includes his signature rapping and Chester Bennington's powerful vocals. "Then it got put on a hard drive and left there."

It was left on that hard drive until the band started piecing together their beloved album "Meteora's" 20th anniversary release. Now, "Fighting Myself" isn't just on a hard drive anymore. On today’s episode of VERIFIED, find out what inspired the cut and why it's representative of the "Hybrid Theory" model that Linkin Park embodies so well."

A little more context from Linkinpedia... the song wasn't fully finished in 2002 - Mike's comments about "barely finished" run contrary to what he has said about the song previously. He indicated the track didn't have a fully completed chorus and in the multitracks his manager found, he picked through vocal takes to build a chorus and to build the ending of the song up.

In one sense, it was "barely finished" because he was able to take what was recorded by Chester to finish the song in 2022, two decades later, but it was not a song that was just wrapped up in 2002 and thrown on a hard drive in a ready-to-release form - a significant amount of work had to be done on it to get it ready for Meteora|20. Mike wanted to re-record the vocals but the band convinced him not to, and to keep the song in its original form. In another sense... it was "barely finished" in 2022 because it was pure luck the session still existed with Chester's vocals on it as Mike only had a version without any Chester vocals / chorus.

 

Maybe we will get a video for "More the Victim"!

[yagamilight207]

good thing both the manager and the band kept the hard drive intact.

[martinez]

9 hours ago, LPLStaff said:

Mike wanted to re-record the vocals but the band convinced him not to, and to keep the song in its original form.

 

I remember him saying that when was asking how much songs were changed from 2002 and he literally said something that they try to keep them original as much they can and that he could always re-record his part. So you are wrong or I am wrong.

 

About "barely finished" - the session/multitracks that management found had vocals by Chester (finished), vocals by Mike (finished) and the whole intrumental that was (finished) so now what you need to do is the process to pick your favorite vocal, guitar, bass takes and do the final mix, that's all. Can we say that the song before that process was barely finished - yep.

[JZLP-Benningstrong]

If Mike really wanted to re record his verses that would be okay for me as long as we had both versions released.

 

But new vocals over an old song would sound really weird.