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‪Mike Shinoda will be a guest on “Wrong End of the Snake” with Ken "Pooch" Van Druten and Kevin "Tater" McCarthy on May 26th. "Wrong End of the Snake" is a new series by Pooch and Tater, a part of Jim Digby's Show Maker Symposium. The show will go live on YouTube on May 26th at 3:00pm EST here: https://youtu.be/i2CqQf7-JSs ‪“Pooch and Tater team up to host a webinar exploring the sometimes irrational, always spirited relationship between Front of House & Monitor Engineers.”‬ Linkin Park fans know Pooch for his long time, great work with Linkin Park and Dead By Sunrise, having Linkin Park sound incredible on stage for eight years (2007-2015). Pooch has given tours at the LPU Summits to fans, met and signed items for fans post-show, and interacted with fans online for years. Fans know Tater as being Mike's Hollywood Bowl show MVP and being the band's on stage monitor engineer since 2007... working with LP, Stone Temple Pilots with Chester, and Mike Shinoda's Post Traumatic Tour. Mike said about Tater, "For all the things you saw onstage, there were a plethora of complexities at work to make them happen. Our crew is incredible, and when I say "Linkin Park Family," they are some of the people I'm talking about. Our production manager Jim and I were saying that the linchpin in the show--the guy who helped hold everything together on the stage that night--was our monitor engineer, Kevin (aka Tater). He's the guy that made sure each artist could hear themselves and each other, that every mic on every drum, every guitar, every voice was there when you needed it, that each artist could just focus on what they needed to do. With three dozen artists coming on and off stage, that is no easy feat. We love you, Tater! MVP!" We're looking forward to the stream, particularly the technical discussion about interesting times in Linkin Park's career, particularly the "A Thousand Suns" Tour stage in the V shape.

That's a great point. LP has had full creative control of all of their music for quite a long time. Really, all of it always, besides the label wanting a single for MTM and stuff like that.

Here we go with Mike's Q&A highlights from May 14th! We are just highlighting his musical / Linkin Park / interesting answers... he always answers some random stuff. - "Share some info about the track on the Dust Brothers album." -> "We didn't really... we started something and then we sent it to them. And then they got really nasty about it, to be honest, back in the day. And then they were not cool about it. So we had a bit of a falling out. But they did work on "With You" and that was cool. They did a great job on that." - "Did you expect Recharged to be as popular as Reanimation? And what about the Meteora remixes?" -> "No, I don't have expectations of that. Reanimation was remixing Hybrid Theory so I don't think anybody expected another remix album to be as popular as that. And I don't know if we expected Reanimation to be as popular as it was, so there's that." - "What's your initial reactions to like old demos and stuff surfacing?" -> "Like most people, you can't stop stuff that's out in the world from being out in the world. So, it doesn't bother me. It didn't even occur to me that it was like, an issue or whatever. It's just out there. And there's stuff you guys haven't heard, you know. I don't know what it is, but it exists. It certainly exists in here (my computer." - "Could we get instrumentals and acapellas for albums on Spotify?" -> "Some of them are out there. I don't know which ones aren't." - "Who played the guitar solo on The Last Line from The Mall soundtrack?" -> "The guitar solo? I don't remember. If it's a shreddy solo, it was Brad. If it wasn't, it was either Brad or me. It's unlikely it was anyone else in the band. That's my guess." - "Who makes LP's on stage keyboard and DJ stands?" -> "My setup has changed a lot over the years. Our stands and whatever have changed over the years. Lately it's been just basics, stuff you can find online that are available to whoever. The keyboard itself... for years I used a Nord. This one's a stage two. But yeah I was using Open Labs one for a while. It ran on PC and carrying around a PC-based keyboard... it was just getting beat up a lot. It felt like it was having a lot of problems. Knock on wood, the Nord has not crashed on me because of software bugs or whatever. In terms of the Post Traumatic stuff, I was using a Mac with Ableton and Native Instruments stuff on it in addition to the Nord. So like the Nord is controlling... I programmed all of this stuff inside Albeton to switch between sounds coming out of the keyboard itself and sounds coming out of the computer, so it was controlling the computer. And other times it was doing both. And other times it was adding the sample pads. It was a fun project. Get into that though, there's a setting up here, if you do use Albeton, there's a setting in the top right corner that says Midi. If you press that, all of these things turn blue or purple and you click on any of those and you push a button or key, and it will map that button to that key."

On May 13th, Mike answered some questions again on his stream so we have a few of the highlights below that deal with Linkin Park. One story that we didn't highlight is him talking about being on MTV's show Punk'd, so you'll have to check out the video if you want to see that one! - "What is your favorite LP music video?" -> "I love Waiting For The End. I love The Catalyst. I thought Leave Out All The Rest came out really good too. I liked the video for Faint a lot and I liked the video for Castle Of Glass a lot. I don't think I have a favorite. Oh, Heavy, Heavy came out really good too, I thought that was really dope." - "What are the things in your jeep?" -> "If you guys didn't hear that, that was a Lonely Island comedy song that we participated in. It was pretty funny. Did they ever make a video for that? I wonder if they made... did like a visual, that shit was so funny. We were doing One More Light album when the request for that came in. It was so easy to do, it was so great." - "Do your kids listen to LP? Do they like it?" -> "Yeah! They do, they like it. It's funny because we've got so much music that like often times something will come up and the kids will be like, "what song is that? which one is that?" There's always a song they haven't heard. My son is learning to play drums, and he's working on "Numb" right now which is really funny to hear him play it. His groove is so much different than Rob's." Mike talked about The Edge from U2 being someone he has met once who left a lasting impression on him, when he talked to Linkin Park at a party around the Grammy's. He said one of his favorite guitars is the Ibanez that he painted the green girl on, which you probably know from him using on stage over the years. The guitar is currently in storage with the rest of Linkin Park's live gear. - "Usually people ask which LP album is your favorite, but I want to know which album are you least satisfied with, and why?" -> "Ah shit. Dear Mike, could you please be a hater? Could you please talk trash about your own work? I don't know. I am definitely fully, like, satisfied with all of them. I don't know. Why are you guys talking trash in the chat? Like you're thinking I'm going to say Reanimation and Hybrid Theory. Na. I don't know if I have one. I don't think I can answer that one, it's an unanswerable question."

Mike mentioned a few interesting things on his Q&A on May 12th, so here we are with a recap of a few select questions! - "What was the most difficult LP song to play on the Post Traumatic Tour considering you only had two people on stage backing you?" -> "I chose Matt and Dan... with Dan, I wanted somebody who had a lot of unique style and groove, who played differently from Rob. I wanted that because I thought it would be more conducive to that and the Fort Minor stuff. Every drummer plays differently like there are subtle differences, and especially based on what kind of music they listen to and play to. Dan has a jazz background and he loves old breakbeats and stuff. He really filled that stuff in. I told our manager I wanted somebody who could play as many instruments as I could or more, and hopefully could do back up singing as well. And Matt can do that, so we covered a lot of ground. I don't think any of them were tough for us. Couldn't really do ones with dual guitars plus bass very well, that was a little a tough. The answer is none of them were really hard. It was just getting creative about how to approach things." Mike talked about bridges of songs being a lost art in modern music. "What's a good example? Rage, "fuck you I won't do what you tell me." Woah. It's the same mode of thinking as the bridge in "One Step Closer." If not for the "shut up" part in "One Step Closer", the song would have been like... that's a good metal song / nu metal song / rock song, whatever. We finished that song, we were ready to send it out to mix. The guy who was A&R'ing us at the label, who you guys know we had a difficult relationship with... he didn't send it to the mixer that we wanted. Before we got there, he basically sent it to his boss to get mixed, his boss was a mixer, he was a good mixer, he was just not the mixer we wanted. And then they sent back the song, completely changed around. He had edited out the bridge, the "shut up" part, and put it at the start of the song. And then it happened again in the bridge. Na man. No. That is not how that works. That's like watching the movie "The Sixth Sense" and at the beginning of the movie they go - hey FYI, the main character is already dead. That's a three minute movie." - "How is The Catalyst a positive song?" -> "In the playoff bracket, they had pitted the song "The Catalyst" against "Breaking The Habit." Without getting into the personal backdrop stories of each of those songs, I will tell you that the personal stories related to each of those songs. The "Breaking The Habit" one was very negative. "The Catalyst" one was more aspirational, like it's about more adversity and overcoming it. Like we are the oppressed and we are tired of it, we are tired of being scapegoated and oppressed. So for me, those two things beside each other... I also have more positive memories of how it related to life."

Mercedes AMG has uploaded a new video from Mike, Joe, and Phoenix showing their home studios and explaining what they are doing on quarantine right now. Phoenix, who is learning how to play drums right now, jams a little bit of "In the End" with his kids. Check out the video here.

As if Mike didn't have enough music being released already in 2020, he is now also collaborating with blackbear on another new track, tentatively called "I'm Still Fucking Here". You might have noticed that blackbear tagged Mike on his Instagram story earlier this month saying that he wanted to send Mike a new track to work on. blackbear and Aaron Harmon (who also worked on "About You" and "What The Words Meant" by Mike) sent Mike a guitar hook and vocal to play with, and then Mike went live via streaming yesterday, May 11th, to show fans his work on the track. Mike had blackbear call in via FaceTime to explain the track and his upcoming album before fans were able to watch Mike work on the track for several hours. When Mike finished his part of the track, he sent it back over to blackbear and his team so that they could continue work on it. Mike said he wasn't sure if the track was going to be released or not at first, but once he talked to blackbear on FaceTime, blackbear explained that he thinks it could be an intro or an outro to his upcoming album. He said, "I have a new album this summer. It's coming out in two parts. I'm trying to squeeze this in somewhere, either it's like the intro or the outro or something like that of the sorts. It's a two part album - it's called "Everything Means Nothing". I think it's twelve songs. The first seven or eight are coming out in the next several months, we don't have a date yet but it's in the next several months." Fans may remember blackbear for his previous collaborations, including "Sorry For Now" off of One More Light in 2017 as well as featuring on "About You" from Post Traumatic in 2018. Stay tuned for more information on this track, which looks like it is slated for a release sometime this year. Mike has his upcoming CoronaJams record coming soon to streaming services, as well as his "Open Door" single. Additionally, Linkin Park will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hybrid Theory with a release this fall.

Time for some chat recaps with Mike! He mentioned Xero after seeing a question in the stream when he was playing Animal Crossing online on May 7, so we'll start with that. - "Will there ever be a Xero reunion?" -> "No. Mark is the best guy ever, for the record. And also, he is like a music manager, like he manages bands. He's with the company, he spends time managing System of a Down, Alice in Chains, Deftones, Korn. He's not trying to like, sing in like a throwback.... thing. It wouldn't be good for his... he is like a professional person. And by the way, I just texted him tonight, we're still super good friends." Next, Mike took questions when making his 2000s pop song on May 8th, so here are those. - "Will you have a lyric writing session?" -> "I probably won't because lyrics take a long time for me. It's long and tedious. And it's just a looping beat. Here's what a lyric session is like for me. Usually looping music, unless we are writing a song with like chords, then it's like sitting at a piano or guitar probably and going back forth between that. And there's an element of like privacy and an element of concentration that I have to have. If there's a live stream going on, I will probably be too self conscious to do it. Number two though, if it's rap lyrics or even some singing lyrics, I will have one section of music looping for hours. If I were to have four hours of looping music with me mumbling to myself and occasionally coming up with a line. That would be mind numbing, I know you think that sounds fun, but that would not be fun for you guys. At least the way it comes to me, it is not fun to sit and do. Our engineers just basically just go sit in the other room on their computers and wait, and you know, make their own music or whatever." - "Would you ever dye your hair a crazy color again?" -> "I haven't thought about it. It hasn't occurred to me to do it. You know, you never know. I'll say probably not." - "What is your favorite song to perform live?" -> "It depends on the day." - "What is the toughest song to play live?" -> "Those are obvious because we don't play them or I don't play them. I love the song Breaking the Habit, but I don't want to play the song Breaking the Habit because it is a little tough to go there." - "The demo lyrics for In the End were less straightforward and more abstract than the album version. What inspired the decision to start over?" -> "I don't remember who suggested who suggested we write new lyrics. At that point, we were operating on intuition. We didn't know what we were doing. We just had feelings about like what to try. I think it was probably like, "hey this is going to be an important song on the record. It's probably going to be a single, so we should probably try to beat the verses." And when I did the final version, I knew that like, I felt that they were better. And everybody kind of agreed. It was that interplay between me and Chester. It kind of the simplicity of it. The original version was a lot more abstract and a lot more rappy. It might be out there on the Internet somewhere I guess. I will say that I remember our A&R guy from the label coming in and trying to like, tell me what to do and produce it. And that was one of those moments when we knew the whole recording process might fall apart. And we were in full-on fight then with him and a couple people at the label for our souls, for our identity. Because that was THE song he kept coming in and saying he played it for like, whoever, that rapper, and he didn't like it, so we should change it. And I was like, we like it though and this is us. I respect that rapper but I don't care what he thinks of my stuff. He doesn't talk about the things we talk about. He raps about rappy things. I talk about real life and emotions, of course he doesn't like it. That couple of weeks was when he started going to Chester and was like "You could have the whole band to yourself, you could be the star, and you could ditch these guys." He went to me and told me I could play keyboard - that was that moment. We were getting verses to In the End right. Very tense time." - "When you listen to new music for fun, do you listen to words or the overall sound to the song and the words later, or what?" -> "It depends on the thing. I think usually I do listen to the whole thing together. I can't have a good song without good lyrics and I can't have a lyrically exciting song without a good track. Or at least a track that compliments it. It kinds of comes together, both things at once to me." - "In The Meeting Of A Thousand Suns DVD, you mentioned you were considering three other producers besides Rick Rubin, who were they?" -> "I don't remember who they were. But I think I remember we talked to Flood (British producer) and I think we talked to Atticus Ross. I don't think we talked to Brian Eno although he would have been on my list. I feel like there was somebody else who was more of a producer... who was more "of that moment." That wasn't a moment when they were like, the hot producer. I feel like there was somebody in conversation who was hot at the time. I just can't remember who it was. But I know we were serious about Flood and Atticus at the time. I think we even asked if they would work together. Trent was not doing anything like that at that time - I would have loved to have worked at Trent. But also the issue there is that although he is a producer, he is very much an artist. And he would have very particular opinions about things. I find that artist producers when they have a "sound", there is consciously or unconsciously an awareness about what their fans will come to the project wanting to hear. And therefore that artist's sound needs to be in the stuff somehow. I don't do that as much. If one if my sounds is in a thing that I make for somebody else, it's usually an accident, or because they say "hey, I want something like this." - "I would like to know if you'd release the instrumental you made for the documentary This Is Life with Lisa Ling." -> "I probably won't release that, no, it is not something that is on my radar to release. You can just enjoy it in the context it's in." - "What do you think about oriental scales? Persian, Egyptian, etc. Is it something that would inspire you while creating new things?" -> "Yeah sure. We could try that at some point. Maybe you redeem a theme suggestion and we do it. Throw Persian scales at me or something." - "How did the Transformers remix of Iridescent come about? The version used for the movie was shortened and had additional percussion that wasn't on the album version." -> "Actually I think almost every sound used in the remix of Iridescent was in the song. We just turned them up or EQed them or compressed them. The reason for the remix was I think that the radio department at the label said, "hey, if you're going to go out with this song and the movie and whatever, we'd like to hear it pick up energy, like get to the point faster with a shorter version. And for it to have more energy earlier." That was a cool idea. To me it didn't ruin the song, I felt like it was a cool version of a song - kind of a subtle remix so we did it. Kind of a pain in the ass though because we were on tour working on it. I remember just having to go back and forth about mix notes and adding and subtracting things a lot. It was just tedious, it was fine though." - "Why have you never done a song with Eminem?" -> "I think Eminem doesn't want to do a song, I think he has his own thing going on. So you can ask him. I don't know. It's no bad blood. I don't have any hurt feelings about when an artist doesn't want to collaborate or whatever. Even if I reach out to someone and say "do you want to a song?" and they don't answer... usually they don't come back and say "no", they usually just don't answer, that's just how it works. If you're an artist listening and you reach out to someone and they kind of ghost you because they don't want to do a thing, then just accept that as like that's where they are at that moment. And give them space to let them change their mind so just leave the door open because they may come back later. I think some people take it very personally, I think I did at some points but I don't anymore." - "Can you play a classical piece on the piano for us?" -> "That was actually one of the song requests so if we get... if that one comes out of the bowl then we'll do it." - "I really love the mashups you did during the Post Traumatic Tour. Are there some songs you tried to mash up that didn't work out?" -> "Yeah. Most of them worked out. The way I heard them happening, usually that would pan out and be good. I think I tried to do something with Castle of Glass and it didn't work. Blending it into another song. Then I thought "why would I do that? I want to play that whole song." But it's very intuitive." - "I love your studio. I was wondering what's the most prized or favorite tech equipment you have. And if you could add any other items what would that be?" -> "You've seen the stuff I use as core gear. I'm thinking of adding... I've got a drum kit. I'm thinking of adding another camera so we can show the other room. We'll probably have to jump into ProTools and there will have to be some technical considerations to go through there. But yeah, the core of the studio, one of the core things that you can't see, there's hardware compressors and preamps and things like that. The kind of nerdier stuff. A lot of recording studios have like a mixing console in the middle and a computer connected to that. I decided to not do that because I don't really mix here. I wanted the keyboards and controllers to be the centerpiece. I do have some hardware mixing stuff, I use Ex-Logic SSL units and they're rack units. What that means is that faders and stuff that you usually see in the front of the room, I have the same quality gear but it's compacted and in a rack down there. And some other compressors and stuff over there. It's all real nerdy shit. Too much nerdiness." - "How can you combine different genres in a harmonic way?" -> "I always told people like from the beginning, when we were doing Hybrid Theory, I feel like my best combinations happen when it's stuff that I really like. While I can make a song in the style of "whatever", with varying results.... I'm no expert... but I think if I really loved this (2000s pop) style of music and wanted to dive in and be great at it then I'd spend time listening to it, picking it apart, finding out what they use. So this is just an estimation of doing something in the style. When it comes to something I love, that's where you really go deep. Do the homework. It's one thing to be wandering around in the dark making stuff by ear and making stuff sound a certain way. You've got all the opportunity of actually researching and getting the actual gear. But back to the original point, mashing stuff up works the best when you actually like the stuff you're mashing up." Phew! Huge Q&A!

Linkin Park Peru has posted a sort of "March Madness" bracket of Linkin Park songs on Twitter and it is taking the LP community by storm over the past day. Linkin Park joined in the fun and retweeted it last night as well. Take a look here and see what song comes out number one for you!

Mike Shinoda was a guest on the AWOLNATION Instagram Live on May 6th. He mentioned that Linkin Park will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Hybrid Theory with a release this year. He said, "This year is the 20 year anniversary of Hybrid Theory. And we are doing a release for it and a celebration for it with the band and the fans. All of us have had to go back and watch stuff from that era. It is the cringiest stuff... I can't believe the things we were saying between songs. I was like "who is this guy?" Chester was talking like a wrestler, it was insane. I remember talking to Chester four or five years ago and we would argue about who was the most embarrassing person. But at the time, that was the shit. That's what we did." Mike told a great story about the band starting as Xero. He said, "I loved the drums so much growing up, just listening to them. The reason that I got to know the Linkin Park guys because in high school I was really good friends... I started it with my friend Mark and we were both in art class together every day, we hung out outside of school all the time. I always gave him rap recommendations. He was in a band with these other guys from school (Relative Degree) that I didn't really know, and the drummer was from another school. And I would literally go watch them practice just to watch the drummer play. And then that ended up being Rob and our guitarist Brad. Eventually it was Mark on vocals but that didn't work out and we parted ways and found Chester. People always think "wouldn't suck to be the guy that didn't make it Linkin Park?" but he's a successful music manager and a good friend of mine." The chat was full of a lot of interesting material and is worth a watch even though it's an hour. Mike talked about when Minutes to Midnight came out, the band wasn't too keen on playing the songs from Hybrid Theory and Meteora live anymore since they had been played a million times, but they didn't actually hate the songs so they did play them, but they just focused on all of the MTM material in the setlists instead. He said when Linkin Park toured with Deftones in March 2001, Hybrid Theory was selling extremely well and it made the Deftones mad because White Pony wasn't selling as well. White Pony at the time was supposed to be a huge album. The Deftones guys were pretty rude to Linkin Park for years because LP took off so successfully commercially and Deftones had come well before Linkin Park time-wise, but Chino later apologized to Mike years down the road... now they are good friends as we know. In between stories, Mike talked about scheduling a daily routine for him on quarantine, making plans to do stuff at different times of the day. And he is teaching his kids about cyber bullying as well. Another good story is about Projekt Revolution 2007. Mike says the band felt rusty from not doing much touring in 2005-2006, even by the time Projekt Revolution 2007 came around since it was their first U.S. headlining tour in three years. They picked My Chemical Romance as direct support and Mike watched their first show from the side of the stage. He was completely blown away at how good they were and immediately told Chester to go watch their show the second night and that Linkin Park needed to step it up immediately or they "were going to be the second best band on their own bill." Mike thought Linkin Park's first show of that tour in Auburn, WA was like a "B" average but not great. So at the second show in Wheatland, CA, Chester watched part of MCR on the side of the stage then went backstage to see Mike and was pretty mad about how good MCR was, saying "I want to fucking destroy those guys." Mike says that Linkin Park played an amazing second show ("we were nails that night, we were the best band we could be that night") and put a lot of effort and energy into the show. After the show, Gerard from MCR told Mike after watching the LP set that night and said, "I was scared of you guys, you showed me what a real career, veteran band looks like on stage." We'll link those shows below from Projekt Revolution! There are no details yet about Hybrid Theory but stay tuned as this is shaping up to be a good year for the fanbase! Mike will be releasing his "Open Door" single featuring fans very soon, and releasing a CoronaJams record on digital streaming services. Buckle up, because we're in for a ride the rest of 2020. Here is night one from Projekt Revolution 2007 when Mike said Linkin Park was a "B" average but fans have come to regard this show as a pretty epic performance: And here is night two when Mike said Linkin Park was absolutely epic: Enjoy!

Something similar to Wake, Given Up, No More Sorrow, Bleed It Out, What I've Done into the slower songs. Maybe Shadow then the slow stuff. Pretty interesting. The way it turned out was better because everything was spread out across the album.

Some of them have titles already: http://linkinpedia.com/index.php?title=CoronaJams

In Mike's Q&A on his stream today (May 5th), he mentioned a few things of interest: He has chosen the winners for "Open Door" and the single will be released soon. He said, "The "Open Door" single is on the way. I chose a bunch of vocalists and wanted to put them all on the track, so it has to all be approved... the approval process is happening now. I'll have an update shortly." Also, Mike confirmed that he will be releasing the CoronaJams that he has been working on, hinting at a digital-only release on streaming platforms. "I think I will make a record with all of the CoronaJams. It's not going to be a big release. It has been fun and I figured you guys would want to hear them on streaming services. I will clean them up and stuff, it'll take me a minute to clean them up." Stay tuned as we will have two new music releases from Mike coming shortly. Other interesting tidbits from his chat include highlighting what members play other instruments really well from Linkin Park - Phoenix knows cello and violin, but is really good at playing guitar and bass...and he is taking drum lessons right now so he is the person who plays the most instruments besides Mike. He also mentioned that Rob plays piano quite well.

Hey, need a favor from you guys. Can someone help us out and compile a list of the bad quality videos on the LP YouTube channel? For example Bleed It Out is in 360p and looks pretty rough.

We're back with another Mike Q&A summary from April 30th where he took questions again at the end of his chat. - "What's the process like when you work with a mixing engineer?" -> "Usually when I make a song I would hand that over to a mixing engineer. All of the individual tracks that you see here that have audio on them, those would get bounced out individually. So one track would be just that kick. All of those tracks would go with my effects to the mix engineer. Sometimes I leave the effects separate from the audio so that the engineer can mess with the sound of the effects or choose a better effect. Like maybe my delay is cool but they have a better delay that works better. For me, I do love mixing and I am very particular of the sound of the things that I make. Because if you change the sounds it changes the shape of the songs. Generally, I will go in with the mixer or I will get on the phone with them and I'll have them change things. There will be a lot of changes and revisions in the mix." - "What was the craziest or most unexpected source of inspiration for a music video?" -> "With more than half of the videos Linkin Park has put out, Joe Hahn directed those or had a hand in conceiving those. Once in a while I'd pitch in some content or some ideas or whatever. But Joe usually likes to be the boss of the video. If he's going to run it... he always talks about how it makes things difficult or hinders the process if there are too many cooks in the kitchen. So he prefers to have fewer people in the mix. And sometimes that's tough for different guys in the band, myself included. He's open to and will listen to suggestions but if he feels the opposite way, it'll be an argument or it'll be a conversation. That can be fine, that can be easy, that can be tough. We've worked with other people - sometimes we get really great results out of working with someone else. Other times it's not as good as what Joe could have made and we feel bad for working with someone else. I feel like inspiration usually comes from the song. If you're a freelance person working with the artist, I'd say defer to the artist because it's their content, it's their creation, it's their brand." - "What was the most difficult song to make in my catalogue?" -> "I'm going to say the most difficult one might have been... for me... Bleed It Out was really hard. That's why I started the lyric with "here we go for the hundredth time" because I rewrote the verse to that dozens and dozens of time. And a lot of those were completely starting from scratch and I just didn't like them and I ended up on that one... because when I started with that it was like embracing the fact that the frustration of making the song was actually informing the content of the song. It took like, months. That was a tough one." - Mike gives an explanation of writing major chords over a minor progression and does a tutorial of it on his computer for that question - He isn't familiar with any Brazilian rappers, he doesn't speak Portuguese so he doesn't listen to that - "How did you decide on the order of the songs on Minutes to Midnight?" -> "Yeah. There is a version of Minutes to Midnight where you can arrange the songs in a way where they blend into each other sonically so like one song to another is like, more similar. So you put like Given Up and No More Sorrow near each other, then you might transition to Bleed It Out, then you transition from that into What I've Done. It's like stepping stones so it's not jarring. So we decided to do the opposite and putting the ones that sound the least like each other, putting those together it made the album more striking we thought."

Talinda Bennington-Friedman has announced that this year's inaugural 320 Festival will be moved online due to COVID-19. "Join us May 8 - 10 for the @320Festival Online ft mental health educational sessions, performances & more all day long. Stream it on Facebook Live, Youtube Live & @KNEKTtv Network on Roku, AppleTV. More info & daily schedules coming soon http://320festival.com" The festival has announced the list of performers and you will see some familiar names - Kiiara, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Frank Zummo of Sum 41, Lauren Dair, and more. Julien-K was set to perform as well but with Ryan announcing on May 3rd that he will be going to rehab, it is unlikely they will be playing. Mike Shinoda is set to be a special guest instead of a performer, so it seems like he will just be speaking instead of playing. Other special guests include Dan Estrin from Hoobastank, Duff McKagan, Frank Turner, and more.

On Wednesday, May 6th, AWOLNATION will be on Instagram Live at 12pm PST, featuring Mike Shinoda. Other guests for the week include Duff McKagan on Monday, Hannah Hooper on Tuesday, Judah Akers on Thursday, and Andrew McMahon on Friday. It is unclear yet what Mike will be doing with AWOLNATION - if it is simply a discussion, a songwriting session, or what.

Instagram has begun the process of memorializing Chester's Instagram page. The new layout includes "Remembering" above Chester's name and upon clicking it, users will see a note that says: "Remembering Chester Bennington / This account has been memorialized. Memorialized accounts are a place to remember and celebrate someone's life after they've passed away." The process is being rolled out in waves and some fans will already see the updated profile page.

Following the news from Phoenix that Linkin Park is working on new music, Linkin Park is trending on Twitter today (April 29th) for the first time since 2017.

At least one member of Linkin Park will join Papa Roach's celebration of their "Infest" album that turns 20 this year. This afternoon at 1pm PST, Papa Roach will go live on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and VK for an album celebration. They have hinted on social media over the past week that Linkin Park will be joining in some capacity and it seems that is confirmed now with a retweet of the celebration by Phoenix. Check it out here. Linkin Park and Papa Roach toured together in 2000 - Linkin Park's fourth tour ever was opening for Papa Roach on their "Master Bay" Tour in December 2000.

Live Nation Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (Live Nation GSA) posted an interview with Mike and Chester from 2017 that was previously unreleased. Check it out below as the band talks about their first shows as musicians, their favorite live acts, and more!

Yesterday Phoenix was on Dan Nicholl's show about wine, via Facebook Live where he sampled wine and talked about the different wines he likes, how he was introduced to wine, and more. He also mentions Linkin Park's shows in South Africa when they performed there. You can watch the full stream here: "From LA to the Hemel en Aarde Valley: live tasting with Linkin Park’s Dave "Phoenix" Farrell" Phoenix again mentioned Linkin Park when he talked about the coronavirus, saying: "So at this point, globally, we are all doing a version of the same thing. For us with the band, we have been writing before this all started. Casually at this point we are doing Zoom meetings to eat lunch together and say hi. But we are not able to get together and write or do that whole bit. We're working at home a little bit, working up ideas. I've been playing a lot of drums just to do something new. I've been doing that for the last year, year and a half, and I've been purposely making as much noise as possible to create my own space in the house." Exciting!

And here we are again in yet a new week during quarantine, with yet another Mike Q&A summary from his live stream. - "Did you used to skateboard?" -> "I did, I was always so terrible man. I was probably one of the worst skaters in my whole group of friends. It didn't last for me because it was too discouraging. Believe me, I tried, I was out there every two to three days. And I couldn't do it, I was just terrible. If you ever saw the beginning of Back to Future when he like was skating around town and grabbed the back of the car, we did that with an ice cream truck one time up in the valley and that was the coolest thing I ever did on a skateboard. That was the only time I ever felt like - this was fun!" - "For any venture to be successful, everyone on the team has to be equally as passionate. When you were building the band what did you do to..." -> "I mean, there's no version of making other people be passionate. You can pep talk people but there are definitely times in everything that I've ever done where there are other people who are not coming to the table. And times when everybody is more excited than I am. I think that is why a lot of music artists are 1 person or 2 people, there are not as many bands anymore, because it's hard to get that many people on the same page." - "Will the 2004 Brazil concert which was professionally filmed be released someday?" -> "That is a probably not. But, I don't know. Was it amazing? I don't know if that particular one was worth releasing over other ones." - "Are there LP or Post Traumatic songs you listen to on your own to jam out?" -> "Not really, I don't really listen to my own stuff that much. Please don't wake up to my songs. Because my experience has been that waking up a song, you eventually just hate it. I always hate every song that I use as alarm clock." - "Will there be a painting/drawing stream in the future?" -> "Yeah, we'll do a painting or drawing stream coming up. I also have some other ideas. I spent some time going through some of the other CoronaJams from previous days and we might revisit a couple of those. Especially the early ones because I found a few of those that were pretty cool. They never got arranged or organized so maybe we'll come back to those and add some stuff and arrange them and stuff like that. Especially the ones I started on Instagram." - "In the last 22 years, how has connecting with the fans changed?" -> "I was thinking that this whole thing with chats and streaming is actually more similar to the early days of the band than most other things like Twitter. In the beginning of the band when people are on message boards and chatrooms, it was more like this. And things have moved away from that to Twitter and Instagram and Twitch and TikTok and whatever. And this is more, real-time... it was more like that back in the day."

On April 19th, Phoenix made a last minute appearance on the LAFC Instagram Live for half an hour to discuss soccer, touring, and more. Phoenix explained that he didn't understand the geography of England, but more specifically, didn't know the rivalries of soccer there until he started touring Europe with Linkin Park. He had some funny stories about playing in London, growing up recording soccer games on his VCR, etc. Phoenix's wife makes a quick appearance and Phoenix explains how he first got into LAFC. Of course everyone wants to know what is going on with Linkin Park. Phoenix says "band wise, we are always kind of writing, we are always working on new music. Right now, with what's going on in the international situation, we're a little bit on pause with all that. In addition, me and Mark and a good friend of ours Brendan Steele have got our own podcast called Member Guest which anyone can check out. It's loosely music and golf-based. But it covers a lot of other things as well, it covers a lot of soccer. So that's what we've got going on."

This is one of those things that is surprising to hear three years later... we'd assume the band would have mentioned this at some time previously BUT it was June 2017 and things changed dramatically in July 2017 so there wasn't much time to mention it publicly.