LPLStaff

Yeah agreed. Totally a Taylor thing, but the process was with Aaron Dessner from The National and Jack Antonoff almost from start to finish for folklore. The ideas kept bouncing off the three of them and it went so well... bam there's the album. In particular her writing with Aaron was clicking so well, they kept coming up with more and more ideas so there's evermore, which is almost exclusively Taylor and Aaron. That one was written right around when they did the folklore live album. The stories they've told about evermore are pretty cool. Drinking a ton of wine, waking up, and Taylor has the song ideas lol

@theneedledrop has announced that Mike will be a special guest for a new interview on Friday, February 19th. "A N N O U N C I N G An interview with Mike Shinoda. (@mikeshinoda) Friday, 2/19 1PM EST / 10AM PST" The interview can be viewed on The Needle Drop's Twitch channel here. Mike usually streams on Twitch at the same time (10AM PST) but will be joining The Needle Drop at the same time instead. The Needle Drop, known as Anthony Fantano, "is an American music critic, interviewer, YouTuber and internet personality known for his music-related YouTube channel The Needle Drop and its companion website. His website and YouTube videos discuss and review a variety of music genres." (Wikipedia).

Along with his debut of the new song "Happy Endings", Mike answered questions on Twitch today. Here's the recap. - On if he is making a new album: "I'm not working on a new album, no, but I have music. Does that make sense? I make stuff all the time, I've made some things. And if the song were to do well, I could very easily see organizing some of the things I've been making and putting it out as an album. It sounds like you guys want more rapping. What do you guys want? What kind of album should I make if I did that? More rapping? A lot of people said more rapping. I don't like "making something like a thing", but, I could make a bunch of new songs with the Fort Minor drum pieces and things like that. I don't really WANT to do that but it's a possibility. But I've got stuff, I could do it." - "What have you been doing that has helped you stay sane in lockdown?" -> "I think like doing creative projects helps. And also sometimes just being like, I know that we are supposed to do a thing like the kids are SUPPOSED to be on a Zoom right now, but maybe we should go on a walk. Maybe we should pick up food and go to a park. It doesn't happen often, but once in a while, you've gotta just prioritize." - "Have you ever thought about the possibility of bringing one of the LP members to help with a #ShinodaProduceMe song?" -> "That's possible, but we're not doing in person stuff. No one's doing in person stuff." - 'Happy Endings' physical release: "Some people want to hear 'Happy Endings' on vinyl. A vinyl single? We could do that." - "Are you nervous releasing new stuff? Or are you like, "Whatever, if they like it, they like it"?" -> "I get excited. I don't get nervous, I get excited about it though." - "Favorite Linkin Park demo?" -> "Demo? Does that mean demo that got released or demo that got turned into a song on an album, or a demo that didn't, or it doesn't matter? Favorite demo that turned into a song... I mean dude there were some demos that there was real merit in the actual demo that we ended up going in a different direction with the final. You guys remember 'Primo', that whole situation with 'I'll Be Gone'? 'Primo' was a GOOD demo. And we ended up doing the song called 'I'll Be Gone' out of it, but the demo version of 'Primo' is pretty great. Part of me thinks that maybe we should have gone that direction. But it was a vote, six guys vote and that's what you do with it. And I'll tell you... typical band dynamic: if Joe were to watch this, then he would be like, "The demo was better, I told you so." That's a typical Joe response to that. He wouldn't say it in those words, he'd say it in much more snarky words. But I would agree with that. I think the demo of 'Primo' had better bones than the thing we released, in my opinion. At the time, I would have voted for the 'I'll Be Gone' version, but now I think that was... I think the other version might have been better. But I don't know, we'll never know." - "I can't stop talking about the art for the song ('Happy Endings')." -> "Oh, I haven't talked about this today. Cain Caser is an artist who I've been seeing around. So Cain's really dope, go check him out on Instagram. Frank Maddocks was like, "What if we asked Cain to do it?" And I was like, "Oh I've heard of that guy." We had been thinking about a few different artists and Frank had gone out to a few different artists to ask, "Are you interested?" And Cain came back with images right away, like, "I want to do this, check this out." And one of them was the start of this cover image. And I loved it, I was like, "That's pretty sick, let's do that. Like would he be down to collaborate with me on it?" And he was, so basically he did it in photoshop and then transferred that to a physical painting and started painting them. And from the physical pictures he took of the painting, I took those and then manipulated those. So, the physical painting of this thing he actually finished and went in a slightly different direction. So the physical painting is different than the digital art that's the cover. So he'll probably post his version, which is great, it's so cool, and my version is the version that ended up on the cover. He's in the UK which is the main reason we didn't physically do anything and physically pass it off because it'd be too expensive and too slow too. Because you have to ship a physical painting and the single release was coming up too fast. So the timing and money didn't make any sense. Yeah, but I'm all about that cover, I love that cover. Fun." - "What's the story behind the "come on" at the start of 'Over Again' and why'd you feel like it needed to go in the song?" -> "You can hear when the song starts, you can hear me frustrated yell "Come on!" into the mic and it was because I was so frustrated. I was trying to record the song, it was very serious and I was trying to get it done and then there was like a car alarm going on outside that every once in a while when I'd try and record my part, I'd be just doing it and it'd be like "Beep beep!" And I was just like, so mad. So yeah, it was a stupid car alarm." - "How do you navigate all of your plugins on Ableton?" -> "It's a mess. My plugins are a total mess. I did highlight, like you can categorize in collections and I did put the category "Use More", I tagged them as "Use More" so some of them I put in there so I know that they're good since I don't usually use them."

Mike should have explained that from the start. It was logical to assume it was like iTunes and it was just a preview of the full song. Yes, he only sold 37 seconds.

The good news: Mike can create a poppy, catchy track pretty quickly with a great production sound. Regardless of how anyone feels about the song, this is great news regarding LP (in case anyone had any doubts, which they really shouldn't). The song is fine, it isn't bad, it isn't great. But Mike has put out a pretty consistent repertoire of solo music since 2017 - Post Traumatic EP, Post Traumatic, fine, Open Door, and Happy Endings all sound good and are solid pieces for his solo catalogue. Looking forward to whatever LP is cooking up. If the OML production sound is anything to go by, they are probably making some GREAT sounding music.

But the Post Traumatic mixing by Manny is good. Remember Mike has final say over all mixing - everything he's put out solo has sounded good. The clip of the new song sounds great.

It was on his desktop. Let's ask Peppe when it was lol

He leaked on Twitch that Manny Marroquin mixed the song.

It's almost unbelievable the song was revealed via Shazam on ACCIDENT, surely it was intentional, or no? LP is very familiar with Shazam and released Guilty All the Same via Shazam in 2014.

100%. We'll make sure to reiterate to them about the wrong and right versions. They'll totally understand once we explain it.

Crawling already had a name before March 2000. It's on a January 2000 demo CD under the name Crawling. It is unlikely that Harmonic Song is Crawling. It could be Pushing Me Away since it was the last song (besides maybe Cure for the Itch?) written for Hybrid Theory.

Pods has no relation to any Linkin Park songs or demos. http://linkinpedia.com/index.php?title=Pods

About one Q&A session per month or two now.

The thing about Mike creating 1 NFT, making a digital item a collectable is just so hard for people to grasp. Because it's digital. Something that is truly surprising is that he never mentioned the thing on Zora wasn't a sample of the full song. He literally only sold 30~ seconds with the GIF/video attached to it.... not the full "One Hundredth Stream" song. That's almost unbelievable because 1) it was never mentioned anywhere he wasn't selling a full song, and 2) literally everyone thought the entire song was for sale. So the winner, for $30,000 only got the 30-40 second clip... whatever it was. But maybe the winner actually knew that when they were bidding. Now Mike is showing how wild this can really be because he's now selling some art files but also it looks like he's testing it by just selling his name typed in Times New Roman font. Seems a bit crazy - where is the value in his typed name? The fact that he pressed the buttons on his own keyboard? Will someone even bid on that? If they do then that’s an easy way for him to get some income lol It was an odd comment. He caused the fanbase to have its biggest discussions since HT20 on Twitter when he randomly posted this Zora thing the other day without much information at all for anyone. You'd logically expect that after he had to defend/explain it on Twitter with all of the replies he made + he ended up donating all of the money that he'd spend a good 30-45 minutes discussing it on a stream. A lot of people probably tuned in today to hear about it. $30,000 is no small deal or feat, it made cryptocurrency headlines judging by the Google News emails we get daily about Linkin Park. So what is the deal here, he isn't intending any of this for his core fanbase, but he wants to just make money from cryptocurrency community people? Who even are those people? They must have some knowledge of Mike. But you see the most hardcore fans on Twitch, Twitter, other social media, but the fansites too and you haven't heard of 1 single person that has bid on any of Mike's stuff yet. What a wild thing lol

Untouched could just mean mastering, mixing, etc though.

$21,000+!

There's no way they earned money on the $2 million if it took 6+ years to record with all of the studios, features, time, producers, engineers, staff, travel, etc. Chinese Democracy was like $13 million for a budget, it's easy to see how this would exceed $2 million. Had no idea a film was being released about Once Upon A Time in Shaolin too; they got money from the book rights and movie rights then. This album is really worth its own discussion in here because of how interesting the story is. This COULD be a very dangerous concept (in general for musicians, not talking about Mike here) and should be heavily frowned upon if it's done the "Wu-Tang way" and the music is not made available elsewhere. But Mike says he plans on making it available to fans, just not THE original file. He isn't the type of artist to ever make something so exclusive that only 1 fan would hear it. In fact, he's made his career by doing just the exact opposite. The example of Wu Tang probably made everyone like, "oh shit."

Mike announced on Twitter on February 5th that he was joining Zora, an online platform to sell products via cryptocurrency. In this case, he is selling the Twitch instrumental jam "One Hundredth Stream" from you guessed it, his 100th jam on Twitch. After hitting $3,000 and $5,000, the bidding at the time of this post has reached $10,000 already. The value is in WETH, a form of cryptocurrency, but it appears you can bid in dollars as well. The owner is getting 1 exclusive copy of the song from Mike - they will be the only owner. Since the concept is pretty foreign to many fans, a lengthy discussion in the fanbase has taken place on Twitter on his exactly this will work. Mike said he is interested in doing it for more music as well, but his record contract might prohibit him from doing it for fully completed songs. Mike added on Twitter: "The #NFT I posted will be (must be, by design) 1 of 1. What you own: the file (art?) I uploaded on the http://zora.co platform. I can’t upload that file again. You don’t own the “song” or “master” or “copyright,” but you own the file. For example, if I write an original lyric on a piece of paper, I own that lyric. If you buy that piece of paper, you own that paper. And it is one-of-a-kind. In this case, you get a certificate of authenticity via blockchain that you are the sole owner. (Experts, did i get it right?). Creators who have been commodified by platforms forever. Here, the value of your work/art/idea is defined by the market. This NFT started at $0. Apparently, people think this creation is worth a lot more." Here are some highlights of Mike talking about Zora on his Twitch stream. Check out the auction here. If you would like to contribute information on how this exactly will work and what the details are, please feel free to comment!

Soul Song is the same vocal take IMO. It is a mastered version on Amends... Stripped. The bonus track is not mastered and you can hear the crackling in the vocal track way down in the mix. Everything is mastered professionally on Stripped. The band said they wanted to release acoustic versions of these songs when they were making Amends. What you guys appear to be arguing about is - should they have released all of these different editions and bonus tracks for these many versions of Amends, when they were already planning on releasing the acoustic songs in their own release? Remember the idea did not come *after* Amends, it came *during* it. They didn't say, "oh well we sold a trillion versions of Amends, now let's take the bonus tracks and make our own thing." The band chose to release some of the tracks though on Amends bonus versions... that's really up to you guys to discuss whether you think that's right or wrong. There's really no comparable situation with LP, because LP never released for example all of the MTM b-sides in one EP or vinyl (No Roads Left, Across the Line, What We Don't Know, Blackbirds, Chance of Rain, Pretend to Be, maybe Ammosick). Although we would have gladly eaten that up, lol

From LouderSound: Mike Shinoda has announced a collaboration with Trivium’s Matt Heafy – to be streamed via Twitch later this week "It’s very, like, Matt standing on a mountaintop with a falcon on his wrist who flies away and collects the bones of enemy clans, enemy warriors." The track, otherwise known as Song 1 consists of Shinoda covering production while Matt provides the guitars and vocals. Mike explains, "I got Matt's blessing to get weird with the track too. We're not gonna just make a metal track. We're not gonna make a Trivium track. If you wanted a Trivium track you could just get a Trivium track. You could go to Matt's channel and get that. So I'm gonna take his vocal, and even his guitar, and chop them into little tiny bits and run them through a meat grinder and then we're gonna make a track out of it. I don't even know what we're gonna make. The track he sent is so... it's like, epic!" The session will be streamed via Twitch on February 8, 10am PT / 1pm ET (6pm GMT). Check out the announcement video here.

That entire summer tour stretch in Europe and Asia of 9 shows, Mike did it. Sadly it seems the only two recordings of it are Rock am Ring and Lisbon. It's a shame their full Download 2004 show was not recorded/released. On Projekt Revolution 2004, Jonathan didn't come out at the last show in Mountain View and thankfully there's a tremendous recording of that show. And then Brazil 2004, too. But there isn't a great quality version of it.

LP themselves didn't start archiving a lot of stuff until Meteora, and every single thing ever until ATS (including video of all of the shows).

Up first: Chris Kelly!

It's been quite a while since Mike took questions on Twitch, but he did answer some on January 11th for the first time in 2021! - "Imagine you're going to do a Dropped Frames Tour, what would you play at the beginning and the end of the concert? What would be the biggest hit?" -> "Good question. That'd be crazy, right? How would I even do that? I wouldn't just make beats on stage, I wouldn't just play instrumentals. Right? Would I? Would I DJ? I don't think I'd ever DJ... I've been asked to DJ, like, "We'll give you this much money, come DJ this event." But I don't really DJ. Everybody in the chat says "Please DJ, DJ Spooky." "Booty Down" would be the hit, you're right. "Party Meow" would be a big one, "The Waltz" would go well, "Quarantine Tequila." We've got hits for a very specific audience, it's like if the whole audience got together it'd be like 1,500 people. If I went on tour with it, it'd be like one person in each city. That'd be amazing. "Neon Crickets", man "Party Meow" live? Come see all of the hits. I'd play the "Sleepy Track" from beginning to end in the middle of the show. That's why this thing we're doing here is so specific, you guys are all over the world and all over the place, and this is not something that's conducive to live shows or mainstream. I go down holes and do too much nerdy shit." - "The Hundreds 15th anniversary Hybrid Theory jacket had a wingless soldier for the first time, was there any reason for it?" -> "Once in a while you'd see a wingless Linkin Park soldier. Originally it was because it was a mistake. I generated a couple of soldier designs and then Frank liked them and wanted to stencil them. So he cut them out and sprayed them, and took a picture of that. And then as a second layer, he did the wings separately and then superimposed them in the computer. So they weren't done together. They weren't actually done actually on the same cardboard or piece of paper or whatever. So, at some point he probably just used the soldier without the wings. Specifically, the one to the side, the one looking to the side. It got used without the wings. And then we didn't catch it, but we did catch it later and said, "Oh, I think we should always use the wings", and he's like, "Oh ok." So the idea of just using the soldier was just kind of a nod to that story, I guess. Good question. See what happens when you pay attention?" - "Can you tell us more about the vegetable version of "Remember the Name" that you did for a film?" -> "Vegetable version? I did a vegetable version? I don't even know that I did a vegetable version. I don't remember this. Oh I see what you're saying, the Peter Rabbit version! We've gotta get clear on the actual video, on the actual clip in question here. Can you imagine you're watching Peter Rabbit and right in the middle of it, out of nowhere, absolutely out of nowhere in this CGI children's film? Dude come on. Just hold on, let me point out one part of the lyrics. 'It's not about the salary, it's all about the celery, and maybe some radishes, maybe some cabbages?!' That happened, that is a thing that happened, Peter Rabbit. They called me and they said, 'We want to use your song in our movie' and I'm like, 'How?' As usual, every time anybody's like, 'We want to use your music in a movie', I'm like, 'Maybe...? How?"'And they originally were like, 'Oh, we're going to have this fight scene where we're going to use it.' And I was like, 'That doesn't sound like something I want to do. It sounds like a very cute movie, but I don't know if that sounds like my thing.' And then I started talking with the director and they were like, 'We want to change the words though. Here's the scene.' And I was like, 'Oh, it's funny, it's a funny scene, got it.' So they rewrote the song for the movie, they rewrote that verse, rather, and sent it to me... and it wasn't awesome. The performance was really weird. Then I was like, 'Tell you what, I'll coach you on this, I'll tell you how to make it better, fix it.' Make it just a little more authentic to the song. Like, the pattern was all off, they had a person who doesn't rap do the thing and he missed the pattern of the thing. And then I was like, 'You know, you really have to have someone who can rap, who is also funny, do it.' And I suggested my friend Jensen who is the best, he's super super funny and he's a hardcore student of hip hop. So that's how that all came together, and then me and Jensen. It was a very easy thing to do, but every time I see it, it's the funniest thing ever. It's dumb but the birds are the ones rapping and the rabbits shoot the birds at the end. The thing is, I didn't initiate that and it wasn't like a hard thing to do. By the way for the record, they asked 'Would you do the voice?' and I was like 'No way! I would love to do a voice for a character but I don't want to just show up and rap a scene.' I couldn't imagine doing the 'cabbages, radishes' myself, it needed someone funnier, a funnier voice. If you actually ask me to do the voice of one of the rabbits, I would do it. But nobody is asking. Nobody asked! I don't know what's up!" - "Is there any connection between your artwork for Hybrid Theory 20 and your Meteora cover photo?" -> "I mean, like a loose connection, not like an intentional connection. The original vibes are all stencils and street art like that. Early 2000s street art." - "The "Final Masquerade" video depicts an apocalyptic scenario even though the song came out in 2014. I feel the lyrics can relate to the health emergency in the world. What do you think?" -> "Yeah, that was kind of the point of the video. Kind of... things are a bit of a mess." - "Hey Mike, on the back of the "My December" t-shirt it has the lyrics "These are my snow covered dreams", I thought it was always "These are my snow covered trees."" -> "Um, that's wrong, right? And then I think there are a few lyric screwups around the Hybrid Theory thing because they were moving very quick on the production of those items and we missed some stuff. But it's kind of fun, like those are good collectors items. What was the one that was all fucked up? Was it Crawling? Isn't it trees...? I don't remember what it was, I have to listen to it. How many minutes in is it, I don't remember. I've gotta look it up. The lyrics aren't coming up on Apple. Snow covered bees? 1:40, thank you. Trees, 100% trees, you couldn't tell? Yeah, trees. I think dreams would be too psuedo poetic. We're talking about home, right? Dreams would be a little less... it's painting the picture guys. There you go - trees." - "Do you still trust Brad or Dave throwing a Coke or whatever since Brad threw a Coke and Phoenix almost killed you with his bass?" -> "I know you guys, being on the road is dangerous business." - "My teacher played Kenji in class to teach about World War II. How do you feel when your songs are used to teach in the academic field?" -> "I love that. Please, as much as possible, wherever applicable. All good." - Mike in a longer answer about other collaborating with Slipknot on the "Produce Me" thing (saying it wasn't the point of it to work with bigger bands) talked about Metallica: "We toured with Metallica a bunch. Playing for them... winning over Metallica fans at a concert is one of the hardest things to do. Sounding like Linkin Park sounds and then playing before Metallica was a miracle and a lot of hard work to go into those shows and have Metallica fans leaving and going like, "I like that band, they were cool." It was no small feat. And it didn't work 100% of the time, we had a couple of shows where too many of the fans were like... not having it. Notably, Ireland. We played some show in Ireland opening up for them and we hadn't set up enough introduction to those fans. Those fans didn't really know us too well and we opened for Metallica, they were literally flipping us off, turning their backs against us and throwing stuff at us."