LPLStaff

Today, BBC Radio 1's Download After Party featured a new clip sent in by Mike Shinoda talking about Linkin Park's 2011 show at Download Festival. He reminisces on #AThousandSuns, Linkin Park performing at festivals and more. The radio played 'Waiting For The End' from the festival and also included 'Jornada Del Muerto' in the background of Mike's talking. Here's the full clip, which comes in at 7:43. Check it out! Download (.WAV / 78 MB)

Before we get behind on Mike's Q&As, we better start recapping! Here's June 11th. Thanks to PeppePark for all of his help! "I've already delivered the first volume of these jams for distribution to put on streaming services." - "How many jams are you doing on the first volume?" -> "I think I'm doing.... how many am I doing? I'm not going to tell you which ones either. This is part of the artistic decisions that have to be made, this is what makes me happy is choosing the right ones and transitioning them and making a mix from one to the next, making a presentation out of it. You've gotta leave some of it to me. I'm not going to tell you which ones." - "Will there be a Minutes To Midnight 2 if Linkin Park returns?" -> "In the sense that Minutes To Midnight was like a reinvention, yes, we would have to reinvent things in order for that to work. In terms of the sound of that record, we're probably not trying to do the sound again." - "What's the criteria for the band to add an outro or an intro to the songs in the setlist? Do you have a story about the Waiting For The End outro?" -> "You know, the critera was just like - it felt like a good idea. Usually it'd be me making them. And the decision to do them would be me or Brad most of the time. Like different eras had different setlists, like projects. So like around Minutes To Midnight and A Thousand Suns we realized that we could really do more with the interludes and the way we transition and stuff because we had more songs. And then after that, it was like "oh we've got a lot of songs, we've got too many songs to put in the set, and so now how do we do that?" So we started mashing them up, shortening them, blending them into each other. We did that on Living Things a lot. It becomes more of the aesthetic of the record too, almost a DJ set of Linkin Park stuff but more live band. Then we backed off that a little bit because we felt like we were shortening too many songs. Or we had done it for a while and we were ready for a break on it. It was back and forth." He always thought that Jimi Hendrix played really well and he would have liked to have worked with him. "There was something so remarkable about the way he played and the way he sang. I got to hear a multitrack recording of him one time and it was so complicated and it was almost like two different people." - "Please share It's Goin' Down music video making stories." -> "You know, Joe directed it. Joe basically wanted to do a performance video in a really unique environment. It wasn't anything crazy. Brad wasn't available, I played guitar on the song. I wrote and recorded the guitar on the song, so anybody could have played guitar. And we wanted me to be rapping in the video. And Joe reached out to Wayne Static from Static-X about doing it. Part of it was just like bringing in that element of, "oh shit, look at that guy", because his look was so crazy. So that was fun, though. The X-Men were dope, they were so great. All super nice guys and obviously insanely talented with a ton of history behind them. They were like innovators in that space along with like Beat Junkiez.... like dozens of them you can name. That lead into guys like Z-Trip and so many others. But again, I could just go down the rabbit hole forever on that stuff." - "Have you ever thought about doing a stream where do you do a deep dive into the production of a Linkin Park or Post Traumatic song?" -> "I could do that. Let me think about that one." - "Have you ever had your songs in setlists censored in other countries?" -> "Yes, and I shouldn't say what and where. Probably would get me in trouble with that country because it's happened before. So yeah what generally will happen is like, before you come, the country will say "these are our rules." Many times the countries will say, "if you're going to play, you have to send us your setlist. If you don't send it, you can't play. And if you don't play that setlist, you won't come back, you might get arrested." So those are kind of the rules. I can say like, in Malaysia, for example. I can say this is them because to me it isn't a big deal - being a Muslim country and like, relatively conservative, they don't allow cursing. So they just request that like... they want to see setlists, they don't want you to curse, and they want you to self-edit. They also don't want you to spit. One time the request was - no spitting, no taking your shirt off Chester, and no showing the bottoms of your feet. So don't jump. And we were like "woah! what?! why is that?" and they were like, "oh because if your feet are dirty, if the bottoms are dirty and you're showing that, it's disgusting." And we were like, "oh we understand that but no jumping, we really feel like that's going to hold back the show. And it's a lot of rules, are you sure we should play Malaysia?" I'm glad we kind of pushed back and said this sounds weird. You want us to come play and you don't want us to be ourselves and play our show. So figure that out for me. So it turns out the reason they were pushing these rules is because there was going to be royalty in the crowd. Some of their like... royalty and political people and figures and stuff. We went "oh! where are they sitting? don't put them down there, would it help if we put them higher up so they aren't going to see the bottoms of our feet and whatever. And we won't curse and Chester won't take his shirt off.... that's no problem." It came back then as, "Oh yeah no problem, you can jump all you want." They didn't want a photo of us being taken with our feet up in the face of these people. That would be a bad look for both them and us. So you have to realize there's a cultural barrier and once you solve that, it wasn't a big deal. They came to the show and they loved the show. We didn't insult them, they didn't get mad and kick us out of the country and whatever.... it was all good." - "Do you think you'll continue with the streams after quarantine is over?" -> "I think so. We're already starting to come out of quarantine in LA." - "Can you tell us some meaning behind the song What The Words Meant?" -> "Sometimes it's hard to remember. We've made a lot of songs. That song is about - I don't know if I've said who this artist is so I won't. There was an album I liked a lot, I loved almost every song on it and then I talked to the singer. Ah I did say, It was Phantogram. So, Three, the album Three. We talked, and it was after Chester had passed. And I found out she had lost her sister. She had died by suicide and she said something about that record, how it dealt with and expressed that. I was like, "oh shit. no way, I love that record." So I went back and I listened back and I was like, "holy crap, I had no idea this record was about that." I didn't tell her that because we had already talked. But anyway, that was crazy. There's so many records that we listen to that we haven't been through the things they were going through when they were recording the album. We're just listening to it as good music or we're listening to it because we connect to it in a different way. So yeah, that was fucking crazy. Wow." Open Door coming soon -> "So I picked the vocalists for Open Door and we're wrapping up, we're doing some content to release that. So we're doing some stuff with it. More to come." Mike talked about mastering records. "Mastering is the final process in finishing a record. It's these little tweaks, the barely audible tweaks to your songs... so you take all the finished mixes and mastering is where you put them together and sequence the album and decide how they either overlap or how much space goes in between them. The volume levels, the compression and limiting and EQ. Very very subtly. When we first started making records, I could not tell the difference in what those guys were doing. All I knew is that it was louder. Back then, that's the only thing I knew - "ok, that's louder than it was and now it sounds like a record and now let's put the track markers here." Now, I can master a record myself. Bernie Grundman is the company where Brian masters. Brian maybe masters three to six records a day, I'm kind of spitballing. Imagine that many finished albums going across this man's desk, and he just does them, these EQs. It's not super tedious work. He does a pass at it and gets it sounding the way he likes it. Most people are like "cool, we're done." Some people like us say, "hey, will you tweak these things?" and he's like "uh huh", and he'll go back to it." "How did you manage being in school and having the band?" -> "So I started the band, the first songs were at the end of high school, me and Mark Wakefield. After that, we started to get a little interest and encouragement from this guy who worked at the label. So we started recording more in my house and playing some shows once a month or once every couple of months. We were practicing once or twice a week and recording once or twice a week. I didn't have time to do more than that. The further I got through school, towards the end the workload lightens up a bit. I was really good at consolidating my work. If I needed to make an album cover for us, like we had these demo cassettes that we'd hand out. CD burners were really unreliable at that point and we didn't have money to burn a whole bunch of them. But cassettes were cheap, so we'd send it over to the guy and he'd make a bunch of cassettes and they'd look professional. And everybody had cassette players. I was making the art for one of those, and one of my school projects was kind of an open ended design project. We're going to use these techniques, but whatever you make with the techniques... you can make whatever you want to make. So I'd do my project, and that would be the cover of the thing. So I was killing two birds with one stones, trying to be efficient." "Why didn't Prove You Wrong make it to Post Traumatic?" -> "I just needed to choose. I didn't want to put every song on there. So I figured I'd leave a couple off. It didn't make the cut, it sounded different enough from the record enough that I said, "I'll just release this later."" At the end, Mike talks about Brad being a bigger guy when he was a bouncer back in the day, and talks about the jobs they had.

In Mike's live streams over the past few months, fans noticed a remix that he was working on by the artist renforshort. "I Drive Me Mad" was included in Mike's Spotify playlist of recent jams, and Mike follows this artist on Instagram. According to a Napster leak, the remix seems to be coming out sometime this year. Stay tuned for more information! Thanks to PeppePark and martinez for bringing this to our attention!

On June 9th, Chester Bennington was trending on Twitter because of a question posted by a Twitter user the prior night asking, "What celebrity death, in your lifetime, hit you the hardest?" Chester was one of the top answers which lead to an outpouring of stories, memories, and more. We love seeing Chester celebrated!

Yes, it's the Rio+Social track.

Here's the recap from June 8th with the questions Mike answered! - "How do feel about Hands Held High these days?" -> "A lot of you guys have been retweeting links to that song because of the current state of affairs. It's definitely timely, definitely appropriate." - "You recently said that Promises I Can't Keep felt like my own version of a Linkin Park song. Since it wasn't performed on your solo tour, would you consider perform it with the band?" -> "That's a good question. I think it'd be up to the band. You know... usually when it comes to decisions about the set or what to do on stage... we kind of talk it out. I don't just go in... no one of us would just go in and say, 'Here's what we're doing.'" He talks about how he prepares some samples beforehand for the streams because it would be really boring for fans to watch him pick through sounds. He said he also does this when making a track normally, he will pick a bunch of sounds before starting his session. - "Who wrote the lyrics and who wrote the melodies to Roads Untraveled?" -> "I think I wrote most of that one. Maybe not the whole thing. If I'm not mistaken that was one of the ones that I even did most of the drums on that one, which was unusual. I remember that, the drums were a mix of live and... oh you asked about the lyrics and melodies. I'm pretty sure I did most of the lyrics and melodies on that one." Mike says he isn't ever wrapped up in the critical response of an album after it is released, because he is completely satisfied with it when it is out. He does read critical reviews of shows and things like that sometimes, but he doesn't pay much attention to music reviews. He added, "One of my favorite albums we've ever done, if not my favorite one, was A Thousand Suns. The critical reception was generally a little more negative than the fan reception. The fan reception was either one star or five stars. It was either everyones favorite album we made, or they hated it. I think that was the era where someone said "this album is a slap in the face for Linkin Park fans." "It's like ok, really? You take this whole thing too seriously. Second of all, this is our art and our creation, we're not trying to make pop top 20 hits." There are songs on it we thought we would do it. To get into the whole thing and make it about themselves as opposed to we are the guys who have to put on the name of the venue... hearing people talk shit about it was difficult, it's always difficult." - "How did LP decide to do show encores?" -> "It was usually just a part of the show. It's just a part of a headline show. If they don't, they are making a statement about encores which I think is fine. But maybe that is overthinking it." - "Do you guys go for vocal lessons or learn from experience?" -> "Both. Vocal lessons are good for you, not only to get better at singing but usually the techniques you do during a vocal lesson will have you warmed up before a show. And if you're doing a lot of shows, part of the focus is using your voice the right way so you don't wear it out, so you don't lose your voice. It was a big step for me going from shorter shows to longer shows, and then adding singing to the shows. And then on the Post Traumatic Tour it was going from sharing vocal duties with Chester to doing a full set where I was doing it the whole time. I was actually very nervous about that. That's potentially twice as much singing, rapping, and using my voice. I thought, "oh shit, my voice could go out all the time." And it was really worn out but I never lost it. So that's good. I recommend them. And really like one of the main things I learned with vocal lessons is do your warmups. Maybe they'll teach you cooldowns too. Think about it like working out. You would want to do a warmup and a stretch afterwards so that you don't pull a muscle... kind of like that." - "Back in the days when you were driving the tour bus, how many times did you get lost?" -> "We got lost a bit. Back then when we were driving the RV, it was not a bus but an RV, I drove more than the other guys but we all split it. Well I shouldn't say we ALL split it. Joe, Chester and I drove, Brad and Rob did not. Phoenix wasn't with us when we did those tours. I feel like I got pretty good at driving it. Have you ever gotten a new car and you feel like it's too big or you don't know the edges of it are? It felt like an extreme version of that, like getting in an RV and trying to drive it around. I remember we went into DC one time and I managed to drive the RV around a corner. There were cars on every corner and every street, and there was a huge, fat dumpster in our way to get to the venue AND there was a cop car. And I remember there were guys out of the windows on every corner of the vehicle trying to make sure that I didn't hit anything. Like I was inches from every edge. I managed to get the whole thing... we were SCREAMING when I got through the thing when I didn't hit anything."

Check this out! Ken from Humble Bros. has uploaded a seventeen minute video discussing the 1stp Klosr remix on Reanimation, how it came together, and how it was created. This is one of the most interesting uploads we've seen of a song breakdown. Additionally, he has a brand new mix of the song that he did to start the video. This is the first time that we've heard Saki Kaskas played guitar and bass on the remix. "In this session, Ken 'hiwatt' Marshall breaks down The Humble Brothers remix of '1stp Klosr' by Linkin Park, from their 2002 PLATINUM album Reanimation!"

The misunderstanding comes from the fact that, on their schedule with the 17:00: Linkin Park, they linked the Rock n Heim show. Additionally, other linked shows from that exact same list were the exact sets that were aired. It was not an unreasonable assumption. However, these things happen like you said and it's not a big deal. The broadcast was fun, we enjoyed it and the DJ had great things to say about Linkin Park on the stream. He shouted out the fans too. I don't think anyone should be upset it wasn't Rock n Heim, it was a misunderstanding, but not the biggest deal ever. We have plenty of music (+ Montebello 2015 highlights) coming this year too. The LP name was not used as any "false promotion." Agreed 100%.

Audio.

Pooch and Tater answered questions, including ours about ATS, after the Mike stream. Great answers here, highly recommended watch.

Surprise! Following the announcement that Linkin Park's Montebello, Canada 2015 show will be broadcasted in video, it seems other festivals are catching on that there is a demand for archived Linkin Park material. SWR3 Radio in Germany will be broadcasting highlights of many bands this weekend, from Metallica, Green Day, and Pearl Jam to Red Hot Chili Peppers, System Of A Down, and more. Luckily, Linkin Park is featured in their list! While some bands are having sets from Rock am Ring aired, we are happy to see that the show they are highlighting from Linkin Park is Rock 'n' Heim 2015! Rock 'n' Heim 2015 is a completely unreleased show. This was the third show of the band's 2015 European Tour and featured 'Rebellion', 'A Line In The Sand', and 'Final Masquerade' all in the same set... those lucky Europeans. It was a monster 26 song setlist so even with just the highlights broadcasted, we are sure to get something good! Huge set...pretty impressive honestly. The translation from SWR3 Radio reads, "14,000 fans and Linkin Park! The band duly demolished rock'n'heim. What more could you want on a Sunday: great bands, great weather at lunchtime and Linkin Park in the evening!" We'd say that's pretty accurate. WHAT: Linkin Park at Hockenheim, Germany 2015 (Rock 'n' Heim) highlights [potentially up to an hour] WHEN: Sunday, June 7, 2020 TIME: 17:00 Germany / 11:00am EST / 8:00am PST WHERE: List of shows / Online web radio stream We'll be sure to get a download up ASAP as well as have it on the LPLive Archive YouTube channel afterward too. See you tomorrow! Feeling restless? Catch up on a fan video of the show ahead of time. EDIT: The airing was actually several selections from Live In Texas and Road To Revolution. Garo also has a great audience audio recording too which you can listen to.

Mike answered his first questions of the week on the June 4th drawing stream, so here we go with a recap. Mike is a big Lakers fan but likes LAFC too. Sadly he did not get to meet Kareem Abdul-Jabbar during the filming of Good Goodbye because Mike wasn't able to be there. Mike says that Kareem is a very big role model to people in Los Angeles and has a lot of respect for him. When asked what song he is most proud of producing, Mike says Papercut, but a lot of the first and second record. Meteora because they paid attention to every single detail on the entire album. He is very proud of Breaking The Habit because of it being different for the band. He always liked how Leave Out All The Rest came out. In all of those, it was a team effort, he was co producing and making beats, etc. Remember The Name is his top solo one, but he loves a lot of the production and sonic landscape on Post Traumatic. At the end he joked Booty Down was a top one too. Mike's top three Hybrid Theory songs are Papercut, Points Of Authority, and A Place For My Head. Crawling and In The End are in there, One Step Closer is in there. He likes all of the songs on that album a lot. For music he liked in college, he said: Wu-Tang, Nas, Tupac (liked, but wasn't the biggest fan... but loved the production, what he had to say, his delivery... but not the beats), Rage Against The Machine, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin. "Was Stick N Move ever recorded or reworked? Not as Runaway but in original form?" - "There's a song called Stick N Move, it was one of our early songs. Probably one of the first seven songs we made. Somewhere around there. I think, I don't know. But we certainly played Stick N Move at all the early shows with Mark, before Chester. And then when we went into the studio to do Hybrid Theory, Stick N Move was always a popular one at our shows, so we tried to make it work, and then Don just didn't like it. We were like "Yeah I get that. Like it's not as good as some of these other ones that are coming together. So we just broke it down into pieces and it turned into Runaway. Almost 0% of Stick N Move is in Runaway. Like we almost completely rewrote the song. Like it was kinda the tempo and the bounce of it and that was all that remained. We didn't take Stick N Move and re-record it in the studio. It never got that far. It was only its own thing, and then Runaway became its own thing. It was its own separate session and its own separate recording. They're not the same song." "Why didn't you guys make a full song out of Wake?" -> "I wrote it specifically as an album opener, that's why. Because of we were trying to think of an album opener, like what's the right tone to start the record. Rick and I had a bunch of different discussions. I made a bunch of different demos to start the record with. I don't remember which demos or beats I would have used; some of them may have been released as LPU tracks, I have no idea. I know that Wake was written specifically to be an intro though. He gave me these references like, King Crimson was one, and there might have been a Neil Young song, and as we were trying to figure it out, he was like "have you heard this song?" to see if one inspires you to get the right thing." "Can you talk about the lyrics on Last One To Know?" -> "I wrote that from start to finish, I did the demo over piano. I wrote it because, you know when other people are all talking about a thing, and either they're talking about it behind your back or you just don't hear about it and it's important? It's so complex. It's just the feeling of being out of the loop and the feeling of other people having other opinions and making decisions that affect your life, and you are late to the party on it and not included in the conversation. Without listening to the song or reading the lyrics I don't know if I can get deeper than that. Whenever I write songs and lyrics, sometimes I pull from different memories in different lines. One line could be from this year, and the very next line could be something from three or four or five years ago, who knows. Just whatever pops into my head." He is not opposed to a vocal day on a stream coming up, but he's just really into instrumentals right now. He thinks it won't be very interactive and could at times be boring for fans. When asked about his favorite line in a song, he said he doesn't have a favorite line, but added, "These days people keep mentioning Hands Held High. I am proud of that song, I thought that came out pretty good. One of the reasons that song pops to my head is cause of the situation today, but I also remember sitting on the stairs. I was on my computer and I saw an article about American soldiers in Iraq who had seen violence against little kids. Like, being chased down and harmed, and I wrote the second verse about that situation. But it was also I felt like there were so many parallels between both of them. I mean in a conflict like that, for all of the differences the two sides have that they're at war over, there's also similarities in the reasons that they're going to war and the things they feel. People who aren't soldiers feel." He'd like to make more short jams like Booty Down, so he encouraged fans to go to samples.com, find one good sample, and let him know what it is. "Can you talk about my favorite song In Between?" -> "In Between was an apology song, you know. Listen to the lyrics. Let me look at them really quickly, I want to see if there is anything specific that I can point out to you. I love reading interpretations of the lyrics. I think it's really just an apology song. You know when you just do stuff you shouldn't have done. I think the "pride and promise and lies and truth gets in the way", those parts are the core of the song. I also feel like songs like that are not just about one thing. They are open to interpretation for you guys enough, that I wouldn't want to ruin some peoples' relationships with the song by getting too specific. Other song like on One More Light, there are songs that are about VERY specific things and we've talked about those." "How was it working with Chino from Deftones?" -> "Chino's just dope, he's just a dope singer and a really unique artist. I always enjoy working with him in particular. It's funny because when we first started touring together, I don't think those guys really liked us very much. And then later we just kind of got over it, for the most part. Chino in particular, we're really cool." Mike explained that the band has used the bathroom in a trashcan or a bucket behind the stage when the show was 90 minutes long... it is rare but it has happened. "Can you tell us anything about The Wizard Song on LPTV?" -> "I don't remember the LPTV Wizard Song. I know Chester sang like a crazy wizard thing. I don't think I could tell you anything about that, but I know it was hilarious so definitely go watch that one." Most of his doodling/drawing on guitars happens at venues when he is bored before a show. He still does it.

Mike ended the week with a THREE HOUR stream and answered a LOT of questions to head into the weekend. - Is there a way for the MS/LP stores to merge because shipping is so expensive? -> "Yeah I wish there was a way to fix the shipping situation. Believe me, if you're selling tshirts you want everybody to buy your tshirts. If there was anything we could do about it, we would figure it out. But those folks have to make their money too, the shipping people." Mike said sometimes they manufacture exclusive merch in other parts of the world, like Asia, but not always. And it's expensive for them to do that. There might be a few CoronaJams that need more attention, which is very common when he is writing songs and he comes back to them to work on them. Although he does these in like two hours, the process for an actual song can be months for him. He may come back a month in and decide a song needs drums, or guitar, etc. Mike gave an extremely detailed answer about how to record screaming into a microphone in a studio, which shows he has 15+ years of experience with Chester. He'd like to work with Green Day. - Which LP song would you choose to re record or remake with your current knowledge about songs and music? -> "I don't know if I'd do specific songs, but the era where we were really figuring out stuff was Meteora into Minutes To Midnight. We were still figuring out how to bridge the gap between Hybrid Theory and other things. So I feel like we could have figured out how to make some of those songs even more unique. Not that we don't love the songs, they're great as they are and they are snapshots of where we were at the time." - When making A Line In The Sand and The Little Things Give You Away did you always plan on making them long songs or did they just happen? -> "With The Little Things Give You Away, that was just how the song went. With A Line In The Sand, I did kind of want something.... I think I wrote the opening heavy part first, then I went "oh it would be cool to do a long lead up to that thing." And that kind of happened as I was writing the first part of the song. Because I did most of the music on that one. Man... Rob, and the drums were so funny, because I wrote all the parts in the computer and I had to make sure they were POSSIBLE to be played. And I was like "...I KNOW a drummer can play this. And I KNOW it requires double kick, and you usually don't play it. So can you learn double kick in order to play these songs?" And he was like... "probably!" - Can Linkin Park be a new music festival for new bands? For new bands and to promote mental health? -> "That'd be cool. I mean... there are so many things that one could do in the world. I don't know if starting a music festival at this moment in time is my calling, but I am not opposed to it." - Do you have a say in what bands are added as opening acts? -> "Yes, we do. Bands usually do unless you have a manager that is a lunatic. Openers was always a subject we really got into. Because it matters. There's all these things to balance - who are the fans going to like, what region are we in, what do I like, if you're transitioning from Meteora to Minutes To Midnight, and Minutes To Midnight to A Thousand Suns, you can't just go with like a nu metal opener. The fans are going to want a nu metal opener. If the nu metal opener is there... the fans will be like "yay, we saw a band we liked", but did other people buy tickets? It should be a big plus in some column. It shouldn't be like "yeah the fans like it" and you were going to sell 5,000 tickets and then you add that band and now you're still selling 5,000 tickets. It should be 500 more people or a 1,000 more people came to the show because of that band. Or because of the combination. Sometimes those bands are too expensive, sometimes they are not too expensive. It's so complicated. For me, I do care a lot expanding the fans horizons." He talked about a Vans collab, but said he preferred drawing on his own shoes because Vans usually just does one release with someone and stops. - How did you come up with the ideas for music videos? -> "It depends on the video. Joe directed a lot of them, so you can ask him. Some of them, we got involved and suggested things. Joe did not like that, but he dealt with it. My own Post Traumatic videos, I did some on my phone. When we transitioned from the ones on my phone to the ones that were not on my phone, like Make It Up As I Go, I told our video rep at the label that I wanted an animated or motion graphics video. I wanted it be very colorful and kind of represent the album cover and the art. He sent me a link of things, and one of them that I liked was a guy that did a lyric video for somebody else, I think it may have been Green Day actually. And I was like, oh they're good, they're good! Ghosts, that video just popped into my head. I have no idea why, I just wanted to have fun. Part of having good self care is being aware of your state of mind and being like, "today I want to do a very chill track, I don't want to do something really aggressive and stressful, I don't want it to be super stressful today, I've got a really chill energy today." And that's what we did. Hopefully I am doing it right." - What are some difficulties involved with releasing the CoronaJams? -> "You know, it wasn't difficult releasing it. I will tell you what my idea was and why I can't do it. This happens all the time, like I have an idea, then I dive into it and waste a bunch of time and it doesn't happen. I wanted to be able to make one jam, mix it, send it in, and have it show up on all your streaming services as quickly as possible. Wouldn't it be cool, if after I did this one today, I just put it on Spotify and it was there that day? That'd be fucking awesome. That's not possible. They won't do it. Well not they.... the streaming services in general won't do it. There's a one to two, maybe three week lead time on the digital streaming platforms between when you deliver and when it shows up. The thing that I wanted to do that I thought was cool, was a living, breathing album, where I just keep adding songs to it. It's basically an album playlist. You download it as an album, but it just keeps adding and changing because it's actually just a playlist. Nobody does that, nobody will do that for me. The streaming services basically told me they need a UPC, like a barcode for the album and that is associated with the album, like what it is. It's the tracklisting, who wrote what, album art, blah blah blah. The problem is that the system is not set up for my idea. If I wanted to do my idea, I could just upload the stuff to SoundCloud but it doesn't help me because there are only this amount of people that give a shit if it's on SoundCloud. I would rather have it be up on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Amazon, etc. So what I'm going to do is release it a little more traditionally but keep releasing them. So you'll get them. You all listen to music on different things, different places, different ways. I just want you to just go to your favorite thing and type in the name and there it is. So easy. It's just a little bit different than I wanted to do, but no big deal." - Was Robot Boy influenced by Peace by Depeche Mode? -> "No, the chord progression is a 60s/70s progression. You hear it on things by The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix and a host of other bands from that era. And I thought it would be interesting to do that progression. You don't usually hear that progression with modern sounds and sampled beats and things like that. So that was like the chord progression and the music bed. And over the top of that, the lyrics and stuff, I think that was mostly Chester on the lyrics, and I think I came up with the melody or I helped with the melody." He said things he is currently interested in in music (sounds, etc) usually influences the collaborations he does.

That would be CRAZY.

Right from Mike's stream today: he will be releasing the CoronaJams starting in 3-4 weeks from now. It sounds like the releases will continually come out over the next few months in a series of releases instead of just one big release, which makes sense because Mike is still creating new music. He explained there is a lag time between when he creates them, when he gets them cleaned up and properly mixed, and when they can appear on digital streaming services. Mike said, "I am working on mixing and putting out some of these instrumentals from the live streams. It's been kind of going back and forth. I just want to set it up right so I can regularly put them out to you guys. There's like a lag time... I have to make them presentable and we have to deliver them, and then we can put them out. I'm trying to take that time and crunch it as fast we can do it. It's starting to look like around a month, or less... three weeks-ish to a month, maybe shorter. But we'll see how that works out. It's going well, you're going to hear Open Door, like a final version of that, you're going to hear some songs from the streams. And if in the first batch you don't hear one that you really love or whatever, it's gonna come later. I may not put them all out, 'cause they aren't all awesome, but I do want to put out the jams that have been created here on the streams. I'll put them out so you can listen to them on Spotify and Apple and all of that. You can make TikToks to them, or put into them in your Instagram. All that stuff, it'll be in the system. So there's that." Music is on the way!

Yeah. Looking into the festival, they had to declare bankruptcy a few years back. Maybe they will recover some money this way. At this point, it's no problem to pay for some archived footage of Linkin Park with Chester that is totally unreleased, even if it's just a few songs. Maybe they will air the full set, who knows. But worth checking out since no one else has done this with LP, at least yet.

Montebello Rockfest, which Linkin Park headlined in 2015 with a weather-shortened set, has announced that they will be streaming past performers online the weekend of June 19-21, 2020 in partnership with Budweiser, Red Bull, and Rev. "The popular annual music festival which takes place every June in Montebello, Quebec, will transform into a virtual edition, streaming videos from nearly 15 years worth of unreleased footage. The exclusive footage will feature behind the scenes clips from a variety of bands since the festival’s inception in 2005, live music, mosh pitting, and fans." "Unseen footage will feature high-profile bands like System of a Down, Blink-182, Rammstein, Linkin Park, Motley Crue, The Offspring, Deftones, Korn, Limp Bizkit, NOFX, Pennywise, Bad Religion, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, and others, all of whom have played at the concert at least once since 2005." The festival is selling tickets to this virtual event online. "Weekend passport, VIP passport, day ticket and option to add a bracelet from the 2020 edition. Each buyer will receive a unique non-shareable link. Each weekend passport holder will receive a $ 10 discount code on the regular rate for the next edition." At minimum, it looks like we are going to get at least one proshot song from Linkin Park's 2015 set... maybe/hopefully more since they are selling tickets to this event. Stay tuned. Source here. Thanks to our friend Wesley at linkinparkbr for the heads up!

The guy with the hard drive it was on was racially profiled at the airport in Israel during the Post Traumatic Tour and they stole the hard drive after going through all of his stuff. Crazy.

He said LP brought RME back into the setlist because they only had 40 minute time slots so they had to play RME, And One, Step Up, and covers to fill time in the sets. 2001. Lmao.

Mike joined Pooch and Tater on "Wrong End of the Snake" on May 26th. Jim Digby and Shelby Cude also joined in. Here's the recap! Mike said that the band expanded their gear arsenal going into the Minutes To Midnight touring cycle, and he asked the crew how to down size some of the things he had, like the grand piano he used on the Meteora tour. He wanted the band to pick good members for their touring crew, not just friends. But the exception to that was Mark Fiore, who took it seriously and studied hard to become their videographer. At first he was just a friend holding a camera but he wanted to become actually good. Pooch mentioned that Mike asked him to do a "mic shootout" in rehearsals to pull together all of the professional microphones they could find. Mike listens to all of the TV broadcasts, live releases, live mixes, etc and oversees it with the mixer. He wants it all to sound good. So he wanted to make sure that the audio coming into the shows was also good quality. Mike mentioned it's not about how expensive it is, but he is talented at finding out how different gear achieves the sound he wants on stage. The plexiglass that was put up around Rob is because of the drum sound bleeding into the vocal microphones, so the band was changing microphones and trying any way they could to eliminate that bleed. Finally, the band didn't feel obliged to use a certain sponsor company's gear just because they were a sponsor, they'd branch out and use something else to get their desired result. Jim explained that behind the scenes, the crew was testing out different PA systems for the band as well. The band had shows with gear missing but the crew intentionally did not tell them so they didn't want the band to be nervous. The Austria show in 2007 was one of those shows. In Toronto in 2008, there were band members not showing up on time to the show due to their travel, as we know. The playback rig for the crew was also not there so they couldn't do a proper sound check of the PA, and then Dylan had to buy a new computer that day as well. Mike said that Linkin Park had five songs they could do piano style, and thankfully they only had to play two. Mike thought the set was starting to get obscure and thankfully the rest of the band was there because they didn't want the set to have so many obscure songs to start the show. Mike is currently mixing his CoronaJams and about to put them on streaming services, relatively soon. They are all instrumental. Mike said he really enjoys the huge crowds so he isn't very interested in playing socially distanced concerts. The band wanted the barricades as close as possible to the stage and the band, he didn't like them being so far from the stage at some shows. He said the band feeds off of the crowd being so close to the band, but also the crowd being close to each other. About DSPs, Mike said it was so hard recording every show, mixing it, and getting it out to fans in a reasonable amount of time. Towards the end, the crew was turning them out every few days. It was crazy because the crew was kind of getting burnt out on it. At the first, they had to have a shipping container where Pooch and Dylan mixed the shows, but then they finally were able to cut it down to smaller gear after technology improved. At the start, Jim and the band had to review the edits but the band ended up trusting Pooch and Dylan with the mixing. Pooch says the fans still share and talk about the DSPs a lot to him. Mike says the band wanted Ethan involved in the mixing at times too but he already knew that might upset Pooch in a way since Ethan mixed too. Pooch says it made him be a better mixer. Mike explained that the band brought their studio drum tech to help their live drum tech with sound too at that time. Pooch and Ethan still communicated a lot about the non-DSP live releases. Pooch could call Ethan before rehearsals to get all the plugins used in the studio because he'd give them the heads up on that sort of thing before LP would go out touring with a new album. When building LP's live rig and when it came to maintaining it, Mike wanted someone who was smarter than him when it came to the new technological gear. Mike said he'd overload it or break it, or some idiot would knock it over and break it. So LP brought in coding geniuses and put them next to their touring crew. Tater said that when they were promoting Post Traumatic with a TV show in New York and they were playing with The Roots. They went to play the first run through of the song... Tater wasn't allowed to touch anything because he isn't allowed to touch the console at a TV show. Tater immediately told Jim when he heard the click track that he knew things were wrong, but he couldn't touch anything. Mike said the house band (aka The Roots) was two measures off. In Mike's click track, he only heard himself and the click. He said he wanted to just keep going, and the band ended up just playing around Mike. Mike's manager was there and Mike immediately asked him how it was... his manager wanted to do it again. Tater explained the house guy had the wrong program open in the console. Anyway, they played Crossing A Line again and then they were good to go on the second play. Mike closed by talking about the Billboard Music Awards in 2012. An actor was supposed to introduce LP, and they went over it one hundred times, and then told LP, "the skrim in front of you will raise with smoke machines happening, etc"... very scripted. LP is backstage... came to the stage and was waiting, just hanging out. The show was live on TV and another person is talking, and the screens suddenly come up catching LP totally off guard. Brad's guitar tech has his guitar still, Mike has a mouth full of water, and they were supposed to start Burn It Down. Mike threw his water, ran to his keyboard, barely made it in time... Brad was rushing to the stage... and Mike said LP finally calmed down two minutes into the three minute performance. The band went off stage to watch the performance ASAP and saw that the smoke hid all of the chaos the band was going through. Check the full stream out!

Of Mice and Men talked about Linkin Park in their recent Twitch stream on May 18th, where Mike had fans "raid" their channel by sending them all over to OM&M. Due to the influx of fans, OM&M started talking about Linkin Park and their experiences with the band. "We love Mike and we love the LP family. Linkin Park is a huge influence to all of us growing up, so..." "I would say, straight up, Linkin Park is the reason why Of Mice & Men is still a band in 2020. The stuff that they taught us about, like, our finances, about planning, about the way we take our art seriously and not too seriously... shout-out to Linkin Park!" "Shinoda really is like a musical father to us, for sure!" "But he's like the cool dad, he's not like the dad who ground us. He's the dad who'd be like, 'I'm disappointed but you're not grounded!'" "Yeah, good old Shino-dad!" They talked about the memorable show in Zurich, Switzerland to start The Hunting Party Tour in Europe, their first arena that they ever played in Europe (with Five Finger Death Punch, but that was also the first show of the LP tour). "We did do THP Tour with LP in Europe. It was the best tour we've ever been on, no doubt. 100%." When asked about their fondest memories of Mike, "One time when we were on tour, the unfortunate time when Chester broke his ankle on the basketball court. Shinoda got upset, not because Chester broke his ankle, but the fact that he got hurt again. And I guess that like was a thing that always happened. I don't know that was funny or not, but that is like one of my first memories... Shinoda being upset. Yeah, very very sad, I will never forget that time." "I always think back to when he held open the O2 Arena in London. He kept it open so we could hang out with the band and some of their families in the room they had built for Michael Jackson. So it was like this whole disco room. Michael Jackson was going to do his 50 night residency or whatever there, so they built him a special room. So Mike held the venue open until at least 3 or 4 AM... I don't know how they had beer delivery, but we kept getting beers delivered." A fan asked, "Did you guys ever consider making a song with LP at any point?" They answered, "Mike actually helped us write an OM&M song, well a couple of them. He helped me structure the end of "Feels Like Forever", that's entirely Mike, that whole last chorus/triple repeat at the end." "It's funny because when I invented that, and then I showed it to Mike, and then he showed it to you, it was like insane." "Do you remember how he did it too? He was on like a plane to Japan. It was so sick. He was like "I'm going to be on a plane, so I'll listen to your jams and maybe I'll have some ideas" and then he got off the plane and he sent us the ideas. And he was like "what if you do this at the end?" and I was like "OH! DUH!" He also gave us one time an essay he that wrote for UCLA he wrote which was about how he broke down a song which was really, really insightful and cool to see his mind in his early 20s how he looked at a song. He's a legend." "And it's awesome because he's got such a unique perspective when it comes to songwriting and storytelling, and you can see it on his streams, but he's able to explain things that make it less confusing than it needs to be." "If we could get Mike to rap on one of our songs, it would be really, really cool. Get Mike on some heavy music again. Just have him spit... ooooo. We've definitely gotta hit him up about that." And another funny story: "When we did the tour with Linkin Park, we have a song that is called "Another You." It starts off with a really clean guitar part, and me singing a falsetto high note that directly correlates with what he's playing. We were in Germany in what I think is Munich but I looked over and Mike and Chester were both standing side stage. This is one of the first days of tour so we hadn't really gotten to hang out much. So I got really star struck and nervous that I totally fucked up that note. And just fucked up the whole song right at the very start. Aaron had to adjust his note. I just totally biffed the song because Mike and Chester were watching side stage and I got so nervous. And I remember immediately afterwards we were all in the dressing room, and before any of us say anything, Allen is like "he was right there! he was right there and I fucked up!" Not only was the 30,000 people sold out audiences crazy enough, we'd see them watching and we'd be like "OH MY GOD there's Linkin Park right there." And I just put my hand on his shoulder and I said "we fucked it up."

There's just no way he knows what that song is this far from it. Did you see him try to answer the Reading My Eyes question yesterday? lol

Here we go again! Mike answered some cool stuff on the 22nd, and here's the recap. - "How did you start making music when you were young?" -> "I started with classical piano for about ten years. After that I went to basically sequencing and samplers. Back then, keep in mind, we didn't have the technology that we have today. So it was different. So I couldn't make stuff on a laptop, I was literally making stuff with like a cassette tape recorder. And like really shitty samplers and stuff like that. Specifically I did Akai S900 which I loved. I was programming it using a drum machine called the HR16, you'd have to literally... there was a little box and it was supposed to be a drum machine with its own drum sound but you could turn the volume off on that and instead of it playing its own sound, you could have it play triggered sounds off the other thing. So I'd have that, trigger my sampler, run the sampler into the cassette four track, and then rap over the beats. And I was using a $100 microphone. Microphone straight into the four track, nothing else. Sounded like shit." - "You and Chester wrote QWERTY on the plane?" -> "The lyrics were written on the plane, but the music was not. So we did the music beforehand and then Chester and I wrote... like we had already started on the lyrics before we flew, and then we were running and forth in the plane to each other. We weren't far, like we were a few seats from each other. And we'd come over and be like "hey what do you think of this?" He wrote it, I usually write lyrics on my phone and he would write it on paper, he would usually write. He was slow typing and paper was faster and he was writing it and it was back and forth." - "Can you talk about the making of "Promises I Can't Keep?" -> "There isn't anything really unique in terms of that, it wasn't different making that one versus making the other ones. The Post Traumatic record, everything was just capturing what was going on at the time when each song was made. And make the whole song as quickly as possible, at least get all the lyrics and vocal recordings as quickly as possible so I could capture that day and that moment in time. So, the same thing for that one. I think the lyrics are very self explanatory. The music was a track that I already had that I didn't use. And I heard it... I was like picking through folders of things, "oh I really like this one." And I feel like it filled a role on the album, because I wanted something on there that felt a little more like a Linkin Park song, like my version of what that would be if that would be, if that makes sense. It dipped its toes in the water of like a Linkin Park. So I thought that was important to have on the record."

Exactly. Mike Shinoda, literally yesterday on his stream: "Every time we put out an album, in the moment, I was 100% happy with what it was. Because we were in the drivers seat, there wasn't anybody else telling us to put out music or whatever. You hear that sometimes about artists who labels are telling them "now is the time, what's taking so long?" or vice versa like "we don't like this yet, go back to the drawing board, do something else." We never had that relationship with the label, for us, they trusted our instincts and everything. We always got our record to the point where we loved it and then we delivered it and then they helped us put it out. Or they put it out and we helped them get it out there, however you want to look at that."

Mike began his May 20th live stream by telling a fan he doesn't remember the guitar part to "Brooding" but to check online to find out what it is. He says he doesn't know if there is any behind the scenes footage for the "Ghosts" music video that he still has. - "What are some of your favorite moments on tour?" -> "The Post Traumatic Tour was fun and hard. It was just as much for you guys as it was for me. I didn't go out there strictly for my own benefit. Part of it was communal, that a lot of people coming to the shows needed that outlet. They needed to see me and see each other, they needed to hear those songs, they needed closure and other things. There were days when I didn't really want to do the shows but I did the shows because I felt like some people needed the shows. But overall I loved the tour. It was just like anything you choose to do over a long period of time, there are going to be times you don't want to do it anymore and then you get back on your momentum." Mike said his merch company asked him about doing a coloring book, so Mike explained that he has one inside the Post Traumatic art booklet. A selection of the CoronaJams will be released soon, but he won't put them all out. "I will draw a line, there will be an album and there will be like, bonus stuff, as usual." - "What was the idea behind Victimized?" -> "In my head when I just heard the song, I heard the remix. The jungle version, hardcore version. I think the music came first on that one and the music inspired the lyrics. There was a lot on that album about feelings of being taken advantage of and there is some angry stuff on that record. Also, some not angry stuff, but yeah, Victimized was definitely tapping into some of that, I don't know what to call it, anger." Mike has no news on a new Linkin Park album. - "What's your favorite Linkin Park album?" -> "I have favorite songs for sure; overall probably "A Thousand Suns" but that is not to take away from any of the other albums. Every time we put out an album, in the moment, I was 100% happy with what it was. Because we were in the drivers seat, there wasn't anybody else telling us to put out music or whatever. You hear that sometimes about artists who labels are telling them "now is the time, what's taking so long?" or vice versa like "we don't like this yet, go back to the drawing board, do something else." We never had that relationship with the label, for us, they trusted our instincts and everything. We always got our record to the point where we loved it and then we delivered it and then they helped us put it out. Or they put it out and we helped them get it out there, however you want to look at that." He tells a great ghost story about writing music in Rick Rubin's mansion, the Houdini House, when the band was recording Minutes to Midnight.