LPLStaff

Or an instrumental.

Linkin Park has posted a new video of Mike unboxing Hybrid Theory 20 for the first time! Mike confirms "Dialate" (Xero Demo), "Reading My Eyes" (Xero Demo), and "Esaul" (Xero Demo) have Mark Wakefield on vocals. "Begrudgingly, Mark agreed to let us release the songs with his vocals, shout out to him for that." These are 1998 very early studio demos (not Xero tape).

Mike hasn't answered questions on every stream lately but he does take a few occasionally. He gets questions about literally everything, so we wanted to post some of the more interesting answers that we are adding to Linkinpedia. There is no real order to any of these - it's a mix of Linkin Park songs, live tracks, other songs, and solo stuff. Enjoy. The Little Things Give You Away: “I remember the moment I wrote it. That song came very quickly. I remember sitting in the corner of the live room in this little studio we were using that I think Korn actually owned the studio, strangely, and that whole chord progression of everything up to the second chorus, everything up to the middle spot where everything changes, it all came together in almost one sitting. It was crazy. One of Rick’s ideas as we were finishing that album, he was a proponent of putting that song first on the album. We were like, “I get it, that’s a huge statement.” Because remember, people were coming off of Meteora, they were like, “This band is about One Step Closer and In The End and Breaking The Habit and From The Inside and whatever, that’s what this band is about”, and then long break and then first song on the album, Little Things Give You Away… people would have been like, “What the fuck are you guys doing? You’re idiots.” Numb, Collision Course to Little Things Give You Away.” Sleepy Time Jam: “Yeah we’re working on it, I don’t have definitive news yet. But Sleepy Jam is on the horizon, I want to get it out as quickly as possible so you guys can start using it for your sleepy time music. Remember if I told you if I put it on streaming services that it’d make royalties when you listen to it? My concept is actually, I have a scholarship at ArtCenter College of Design that I funded forever ago, and I realized, “Ah I’d really love to do something with the income from the Sleepy Time Jam that’s really cool.” I want to try to send those royalties there, I want it to help fund the scholarship. When you are doing something like that, if I donate it from my royalty income, it gets taxed on the way to me and then I can donate my portion to the school. So I’m like, “Is there a way I can do it where just donate the album itself to the school?” So if it makes $1,000, then the thousand dollars is taxed and then a portion of a thousand dollars goes to the scholarship. So I’d rather the whole thing go, if it’s possible. My scholarship at ArtCenter, it’s big enough for a graphics or illustration student based on financial need and merit. So they have to be really good and they have to need the money, and they need help going to school. So we’ll figure it out, that’s why it’s taking an extra second. We aren’t going to just put it up on SoundCloud or let you download the thing, I want to do something like that with it. It’s complicated enough… the government doesn’t want you to use charitable donation as like a tax loophole basically. So you’ve gotta do it the proper, legal way and I’m not super educated on how that works so we’re figuring it out. So that’ll be that with the Sleepy Time Jam.” Melodic Metal Jam: “It’s not on Dropped Frames 3, like I said, I’ve gotta figure out a way to get these all of these other tracks to you guys. I don’t know… some of them I actually like and want to develop them for something and eventually do vocals. I don’t like the idea of doing vocals on stream. That one in particular is not on my list of ones I’d do vocals on. I feel like some of them I could see developing somehow.” About You/Over Again/Papercut (Live): “I liked the idea of mashing a few things up in the live show. I thought especially when I was doing certain Linkin Park songs in the set, I wanted them to sound different than the Linkin Park sets. Like because it was my solo set, I didn’t want to be estimating Linkin Park especially without Chester singing. The songs were already going to sound different so I tried to take them further outside of the norm so they sounded… if I played them too similar I think your brian would have been comparing it right away and it was not going to be able to be compared. My solo version context wasn’t going to be better. I’d rather make it way different and you’re like, “Oh, it’s a totally different take on the song.”” It's Goin' Down (X-Ecutioners / Mike / Joe): “The X-Men, known as The Executioners, got signed as a group to Loud Music, Loud Records. And Sean C who works with Jay-Z, he’s been in the game forever. He’s like a legend. He was their A&R guy and he came to us and said, “Hey, would you be down to work with these guys?” And I already knew… on the East Coast to me, I was trying to think, to me, would there have been a group of DJs who were more legendary. There were radio DJs there were, but in terms of scratching and performance, I think they were the dudes. Because individually they were so dope and then they got together and it was like, “Woah, a super group of DJs.” And Joe and I loved their stuff, we were way into it. I produced and wrote the track myself. Did they send drums? I feel like maybe they sent some drums and I did all of the guitars, and Joe did the scratching and they did some stuff. I don’t know if they sent some drum tracks with some scratching on it or not. But I produced it; I forgot who mixed it actually, I think they might have actually picked the mixer.” Sorry For Now: “The high pitched voice on Sorry For Now, I think it was just a scat version of the chorus. So it may be saying “Sorry For Now” and stuff and I just chopped it up. Or it may be saying gibberish, like some version of that. I think it may be a little bit of “na na na.”” Pop NSync Song: “It is not on Dropped Frames 3 unfortunately. We’ll put the NSYNC one with the Melodic Metal one.” Powerless: “I don’t know why it wasn’t played live. I don’t have a good answer for you. Other songs got picked. It was funny, we basically figured out how to play it… ish, kind of figured out how to play it, in order to do the video for it. Super weird movie.” In Pieces: “Chester did most of the vocals. I did more melody and he did more lyrics. That one was more of a Chester-vocal song and I did more of the music. Brad did something on that one too. I know what Chester was talking about, where he was at. I did the chorus, he did the verses. The music was mostly me and Brad. The steel drums were keyboards.”

Yeah agreed Peppe, this is actually a case where the end result was better than the hypothetical. They could have made a video game collection of songs and music in 2009, then released a heavy studio album in 2010 from those heavy demos. I think ATS in the end was perfect, it's their best work for sure.

On September 14, 2020, "A Thousand Suns" celebrated its 10th anniversary. To celebrate, Mike listened to the album on his stream on September 10 and then on September 14 (the release date in the USA), took a lot of questions about the album. Here's what he had to say: What inspired Linkin Park to go from making a normal album to making a concept album: “It’s funny because it’s a little bit like the current climate. We were writing songs for… we thought we were going to be doing a video game. And then that fell through, it got to the point where things were getting designed and it all fell apart and it didn’t work. We had all this music. The concept of the video game was not about apocalyptic things, it was more about… there was this patient who was stuck in a mental institution for some reason, and he was being unjustly kept there and punished. And they did things to his brain and he developed powers to control things. He could move things with his mind at one point but I think he could like, at one point, shoot electricity and fire and stuff like that. And the concept was still loose, it wasn’t an awesome concept but it was getting there. Right now if you think of the state of America, it’s so fractured culturally. At the time of A Thousand Suns, we were coming out the George W. Bush presidency and troops were still in Iraq. The idea that, “Oh, we’re just going to all blow each other up” was at the very top of the mind. So that influenced the lyrics a lot, that’s why we used the Oppenheimer quote and the Savio quotes about the machine, the pieces of the machine, all of that stuff was ambitious… some people thought it was too ambitious, or thought we were in over our heads. That’s fine, but we were making what we were really feeling at the time. So that’s the reason for the concept album kind of thing.” What Mike was listening to in 2008, 2009, and 2010 when making A Thousand Suns: "I was listening to a lot of Radiohead, everything from MGMT to Pink Floyd. I think there was some Nine Inch Nails and Tool in there. We a bunch of remixes with other people that were based on some of the things I was listening to at the time. But I wasn’t listening to new Nine Inch Nails at the time - it was old Nine Inch Nails, like Broken and Fragile. The first four proper studio albums by Nine Inch Nails are my favorite ones. Also weird instrumental music, I was listening to like Gonjasufi and this group called Fuckbuttons. Those are super crazy, by the way… Flying Lotus too… some really out there stuff which I loved and I still love. Tarot Sport was the album; “Rough Steez”, that was a track. So dope. Gang Gang Dance was another artist I was into that I was listening to a lot. Holy Fuck was another band. O+S, Caribou, Peter Bjorn and John, Naked & Famous. So I was listening to a lot of wild stuff and those influenced it. Those songs are awesome, some of them are super duper sick. Death Grips.” The playing field for artists making an album like ATS in 2010 versus now in 2020: “I feel like the playing field for art and commerce, the distance between “Hey I’m making a jingle that’s supposed to be a pop song” and on the other side, “I’m making an art project that’s so obscure and abstract and wild, nobody’s going to fucking listen to it, I don’t fucking care. It’s not about people listening to it.” Back then, I feel like there were two points of the spectrum and a relatively even scattering of artists who lived in between. We lived in between, a lot of artists lived in between. It’s like, “I want to make art, AND I want to sell records. And some of my songs lean one way or another.” But I don’t think any of our stuff goes all the way to one side or the other. I think now because of how the social media algorithms work and how streaming algorithms work, and YouTube, Spotify, TikTok… now everybody’s either on one side or another and they’ve cleared out the middle. It’s a lot of… either most of them are making shit to sell and then some people are making shit that’s art. And it’s really out there art. Look at like Thundercat; to me the reason he’s so interesting is he can live in the middle. Kendrick can live in the middle. Charlie XCX can live in the middle. But I think even if some of the most poppy artists tried to do something that is more artistic, people would be like, “Why are you doing that?” People would back away from it, the label would be scared to put it out in the first place. The label would be like, “No no no, you need to go back in… we don’t hear a single. So what are we going to promote?”” "Jornada Del Muerto": “I remember making this part and texting and emailing a bunch of people, like, to make sure that I got the words right. Because it’s supposed to be, I wanted it to be “Lift me up, let me go”, but in Japanese. We were doing a bunch of different stuff in different languages on the album.” “The Catalyst”: "The Catalyst" came surprisingly easily. That one was like, “Oh wow! That one is a song, that one is defining part of the record.”" "Blackout": “I think “Blackout” was tough and eluded us for a little bit. The hardest part about “Blackout” was the vocal was a scat vocal that sounded like what the vocal sounds like now. Here’s what we were doing at the time. We were still doing a lot of songs where the lead vocal was a scat lead vocal with no words, a lot of “da da da” and “na na na.” On the original vocal, I kept pushing Chester to get weirder and weirder. We both did this but it was easier for me to go in the booth to do that, but I think it was because he was doing it and I was recording it, he felt self-conscious a little bit. So he’d always fall back into “na na na” and “la la la.” I was like, “No dude, really really pretend you’re making words.” So what we tried to do is the screaming thing with that and he really had to let loose. But once he got there, that whole song… imagine someone singing that whole song in gibberish. And then when it was time to make it into lyrics, it always felt like you were going from something so dope and so visceral, every time we tried to write words to it, it got too logical. And we wanted it to be illogical. So then we started listening to the gibberish and saying, “What words sound like those words?” And that’s why the lyrics on that song are so fucking weird, they are super weird just because that’s what the grunts and gibberish sounded like to us. We were just trying to make sense of the gibberish. That’s a writing technique that Rick Rubin has used on everyone from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Neil Young and Tom Petty. He wasn’t the pioneer of that thing, he was just the one who taught us how to do it.” “When They Come For Me”: ""When They Come For Me" was tough and eluded us for a little bit." "Waiting For The End": "“Waiting For The End” has its issues too… I knew that it was good, and I was intimidated by diving into it and I didn’t want to screw it up. I remember having the beat and most of the sounds and rapping over that, which became the bridge. I kept waiting for certain things, something to pop up that I could stick in the song and jump off of that point. And then Chester brought in the “waiting for the end” vocal line and then I was like, “Yo, now that is the song.” But it wasn’t pulling our hair out trying to get it right, that was really being patient for the right pieces to come together."

Wonder why not "Cattle Symphony" instead of "Goodbye Cow"? Haha

Imogen Heap has covered 'Sharp Edges' in an online stream; she says, ""The Gloves Are On" for my weekly Tuesday live piano and voice improvisation. For you and I to enjoy and while we are at it, raise money for The Creative Passport." Go to around 53:00 minutes to check out the cover! She said, "I just really really love this song. It's so pretty." Thanks to Simon for getting her to cover the song and for sending this over!

Mike Shinoda will be dropping volume 3 of Dropped Frames on Friday, September 18, 2020. He has released 'License to Waltz' to streaming services already for fans to check out. Volume 3 tracklisting & jam ideas: 01. Dream Fragment // Freestyle Track 02. Sound Collector // Linkin Park/Fort Minor Sounds + Nobody Can Save Me/Battle Symphony 03. Dust Code // Freestyle Track 04. No Delete // Freestyle Track 05. Robot Yodel // Country + Folk Alternative Rock + Bavarian Yodeling 06. Vibe Train // Freestyle Track 07. Mike's Gonna Mike // Nirvana + Tools Of The Trade + Giorgio Moroder + Italian Neomelodic 08. Shoreline // Freestyle Track w/ samples requested by fans 09. Goodbye Cow // Freestyle Track 10. Genesis Supernova // Dead Or Alive + Tron Legacy/Daft Punk/M83 + Pokémon Mew 11. Sidechain Gang // Freestyle Track w/ samples requested by fans 12. Overcast // Freestyle Track 13. A Thousand Jams // A Thousand Suns-style Track 14. License To Waltz // Tchaikovsky's Flower Waltz + Beastie Boys + Reggaeton + ASMR

102.9 The Buzz has announced a radio broadcast for Labor Day weekend (September 4-7) to include Linkin Park live audio. They said, "No concerts? No problem. We're bringing the ultimate rock festival to YOU! On Labor Day Weekend, #BuzzFest invades your radio with a 3-day on-air live music festival with the biggest lineup of all time! BUZZFEST AT HOME 2020, driven by @WholesaleInc, Powered By RumbleOn" It is unknown which Linkin Park show they will broadcast audio from - it could be something already released or from a previous Nashville show (2004, 2008, 2015, etc). Source here.

Hybrid is going to have to do really well in order to get a Meteora box set, we'd assume. Like, really well.

That's what Astat is saying, the run time is 10 minutes shorter than a full PR02 show. However, there is a 2-3 minute encore break, a Joe solo (1 minute~), and a cover of the Deftones (3-4 mins) in the set. So, it will be without a few things.

Last week, we discussed Linkin Park's legendary demo "Pictureboard" at length. "Pictureboard" is probably the most highly-anticipated demo from the band's catalogue solely because it's the one that has been talked about the most. Since the existence of the song was discovered in an LPU chat with Mike in 2005, fans have always wanted to hear the song and it has appeared as the #1 on fans' wish lists for LP Underground CDs ever since. There was a rumor that it was once considered for release in 2009, but the sample held the song up, and it only fueled the excitement for the song. Eleven years after LPU 9, the song is confirmed to be on Hybrid Theory 20 (due in October), bringing the 15 year saga finally to an end. While we all know "Pictureboard" is not the BEST song, it will be fantastic to finally have the track after it has been discussed so much in the band's history. So after "Pictureboard", we ask... what's next? What other songs are THE "holy grail" items for fans in the band's catalogue? There are a few, and we'll run through them really quickly. And note, these are in no particular order. #1. "Thoughts That Take Away My Pride" When The Making Of Meteora DVD was released with Meteora, fans immediately noticed a demo that wasn't on the album. In this case, a five second clip of Chester singing "thoughts that take away my pride, trapped in places deep inside" over an instrumental has almost become legendary in the Linkin Park community, especially since Linkin Park has not released any full extra songs (with vocals) for Meteora like they have for Hybrid Theory and Minutes To Midnight. A lyric sheet of the song can be seen during Frat Party At The Pankake Festival, meaning it dates back to 2001. The words were also scribbled on the Meteora art wall at one point. In 2007, the second LPTV series was released and the episode about the Summer Sanitarium Tour features an instrumental clip from the song (2:14 for reference) as one of Mark Fiore's traditional teases. The lyric sheet shows: thoughts that take away my pride trapped in places deep inside memories i've come to fear and it can't make them disappear [thoughts like these return to me] thoughts take away my pride trapped in places deep inside [memories trapped inside of me] memories i've come to fear and i can't make them disappear The band has never talked about the track, but it's probably one of only a few (maybe just one or two) extra songs that exist from the Meteora recording sessions. We don't even know the official title of the track, but this is likely the top song requested from fans after "Pictureboard." 02. "Friendly Fire" "Friendly Fire" was a song that was written for One More Light by Mike, Brad, and Jon Green. The title was first seen on a song board in a picture Joe Hahn posted on September 6, 2016 alongside songs that made the album. In a stream on June 17, 2020, Mike confirmed the song was completely finished and had vocals from Chester on it. He said, "There was a song, a One More Light song, that we mixed. We mixed more than the finished album and we mixed a couple other songs just to see if one of them would make the cut or if we would use it for a b-side. And it was Friendly Fire. A Jon Green co-write. I wrote that with Jon, I think it was me, Jon, and Brad mostly. I still love that song." He went on to say that the song wouldn't be coming out soon, but would likely be released one day. This immediately made rock headlines across the world, as news outlets caught on to just the fact that Mike said "an unreleased song exists with Chester's vocals"... but we all know the band goes through a LOT of music and demos each album. When asked a few days later about more unreleased One More Light songs, Mike said, "Every album we've got so many songs that we make and you know, they're not... some of them are just in really like, half cooked, half baked conditions. So I mean, I think fans tend to be very overly optimistic about those types of things. In their imagination, there's some gem that's the best Linkin Park song that's sitting on a hard drive somewhere. I promise you that's not the case. The best stuff is always the stuff we put on the record. There are some songs where we were like, "oh this is really good", but it's not better than the record. Some of it is like, a verse and chorus copied twice and that's the second verse as well... it's like half done, it's not done." 03. Meteora remixes In an August 2003 LPU chat, Joe Hahn was questioned if the band would be making a remix album for Meteora, his answer was, "No Mike thought it was too much work so no." However, in interviews with MTV in 2003, both Chester and Mike mentioned the band had done some remixes but wouldn't be releasing them on an album like they did with Reanimation, instead, Mike said, they would be released via "various channels in the coming months." When questioned about the remixes during an LPU chat in March 2006, Rob Bourdon said, "There are Meteora remixes? Oh yeah those. Those will make their way to the surface sometime, I don't know when." In 2020, Mike was questioned about them during a live stream. He said, "I don't know if that's true. I don't remember them. If we did. But you know, if they're around somewhere maybe they end up coming out. Since you've said that I'll keep an eye out for any meteora remixes when I'm, you know, in the hard drives looking for stuff." We don't know what songs were remixed by the band for Meteora - if it was just one or two, or a substantial number. If the band was considering releasing them at one point in 2003, they are likely good. 04. "A-Six" with vocals Another demo from The Making Of Meteora with Chester singing "just drag it out, remember" was confirmed by Brad in an LPU chat in 2003 (after Meteora had been released) to have been a part of the song "A6". "A.06" appeared in a short version on the LP Underground 2.0 CD and the original long instrumental demo appeared on the LP Underground 9.0: Demos CD, but no version with vocals has ever been released. Since two versions of the track have already been released, Linkin Park may not release a THIRD version of it with vocals... but you never know. 05. Team Sleep's "My December" Remix Another remix of "My December" was made by DJ Crook of Team Sleep. His remix was rumored to have been "too dark" to make the album. This information was published by fan site LPFuse in 2004. DJ Shadow is also rumored to be featured on the song with his scratching. A post by Astat on LPAssociation in 2006 said, "It's supposed to be a really dark and moody techno/ambience remix of My December done by Team Sleep and featuring scratches by the legendary DJ Shadow, but that's about all anyone knows about it. I don't think being too "dark" for the album is the sole reason though, if Mike saw it as not album-worthy and then never released it but did put out 2 other Reanimation b-sides, chances are it may not have been a very good remix in the first place." When asked through Twitter in September 2013 about the possibility of the remix being released someday, DJ Crook answered "probably never..sorry!" With Hybrid Theory 20 coming and the track not appearing on the release, it is likely we will never hear this song. It may not even be that good, in the end, and may just be a weaker remix. The two extra remixes from Reanimation (Points of Authority by Crystal Method and By Myself by Manson) are really strong, so if My December wasn't included like those were... chances are, it's not the best. 06. Rob's Meteora drum track In the Making of Meteora DVD, a clip of Rob playing drums over a nice instrumental is seen in a brief video clip. This track is frequently talked about in the community, but it's just one of those tiny clips on the DVD that no one knows anything about. Unfortunately no information has ever surfaced about the song. It is actually surprising that it is not in one of the many Meteora instrumentals the band has released, which could mean it was either scrapped entirely early on, or it is actually in one of the few unreleased full songs from the sessions. What do you think? Will some of these tracks eventually make their way out besides "Friendly Fire"?

The audio tracklist is confirmed by LP and Warner. The DVD tracklist is not confirmed from what we've seen. Whatever this Rock Cellar Magazine is saying is full setlists from Fillmore, Rock am Ring, and Projekt Revolution. The run times for the first 2 match but it looks like PR 02 is going to be a little shorter. It's still a "full show", even with a couple of songs cut. As Astat said, it's most likely going to be My Own Summer, Joe solo, and something else, unless the shit really self destructed with tech problems or wild fans stopping a song earlier in the set. For example, Runaway looks like an absolute disaster in San Diego so maybe that song is sacrificed (which no one would complain about because we have 1 billion Runaways). X-Ecutioners are on It's Goin' Down in San Diego. It'd be cool to have. Z-Trip is on it in Vegas and a ton of guests are on One Step Closer. Surely we get something like that. Plus Chester played guitar on that song. My December would be a REALLY nice one to see since it was full band.

We could certainly ask for an interview with Mike. We've never really asked for one but maybe the HT20 is a good time to do it.

What do you think, could this be "Could Have Been"?