LPLStaff

It was just all around a weird release. Soundcheck Session, so a significant portion of it was not in front of a crowd. The only two songs from the show were In the End and Numb, which were the two piano songs. The entire thing just didn't make any sense, and releasing it as video only with no way to stream the audio. If Crossing A Line and Make It Up As I Go were on there, why couldn't there be a proper release of the PT live songs?

Mike's first Q&A summary in a while, here's the recap and highlights. - "Could you active your phone number in Italy and other countries?" -> "Here's the thing. The number that I have released to you guys, I do it with a company called Community and Community is not yet available in other countries. They are getting there, they are a growing start up. What they have to do, is they do deals with the phone companies basically to acquire numbers and then they assign those numbers to the people that work with them. So they gave me a number. It's very hard for me to keep up with texting people back. But the texts do come through to my app on my phone. I don't get pinged every time somebody texts me because that would be too crazy because the followers are in the five digits so there is a lot of people. But I see more than I respond to. And it does come to me. I should do it more, I don't do it enough." Mike talked about lemon tea and ginger tea helping him with his throat and voice. - "I was wondering if you ever plan to release a live album from the Post Traumatic Tour." -> "I don't think I'll do it. I kind of don't want to do a live... I feel like those shows are very special and I don't think I'm going to release it. I think that people saw it, if you didn't, the stuff is online already. I don't think I need to have an official version." There was a huge explanation on publishing and royalties, how complicated it is, how countries where songs are recorded actually have a say in the publishing, etc. Mike said he is trying to get it so the Dropped Frames music can be used in Twitch streams by other people. He said he is not the one taking down Linkin Park music online, it is extremely complicated. - "Release a vinyl version of Dropped Frames." -> "I will if there's enough demand. That doesn't mean, by the way, that Dropped Frames has to sell a bajillion copies. It just means that there have to be enough people that want vinyl so that the vinyl will pay for itself. In order to make a product, you have to produce a certain quantity so I would have to have enough people who were interested in buying it for it to make sense. I don't know how to quantify that." - "Can you tell us why songs like I'll Be Gone and Promises I Can't Keep were never performed live?" -> "You know, it was just that we only have so much room in the set. The guys have never wanted to play longer than 90-100 minutes or so. We sometimes stretch that a little bit. That was the limit. The more songs that we have to add, the more the band has to know all of those songs and I don't think that, I guess I just didn't have the interest or brain space to add more. We did add a lot, we did play so many. At some points we were rotating three different setlists with maybe a 1/3 of those being unique to that setlist. So it was a lot to remember. I could have probably done more, but I think that's because of what I was responsible for. I don't know how to explain that. It wasn't really me, I would have done longer sets, I would have done a little bit longer." - "Do other members of the band have home studios too? Can you tell us about them?" -> "So everybody is different, everybody has got some stuff. Not as in depth as what I've got going here. Brad doesn't really have anything. Dave has some bass guitars and drums, but no mics or recording equipment really. He's got a laptop with some stuff on it just to throw a couple of things on it, but he doesn't do recording. He'll only do it if I'm asking him to or somebody's trying to send a thing. But he doesn't really mess with it. Joe has stuff, but it's usually in disarray. He gets excited about a thing, buy a piece of gear, play with it, and then move on really quickly. And there aren't that many units that he goes super deep on. He knows the sampler stuff really well and of course turntables and Serato and all of that. In terms of the individual keyboards, he usually relies on an engineer to go deep on those for him, which is normal. A lot of people are that way. A lot of people are that way if they have the means to have that gear. If you're in Joe's situation, it's not crazy. Rob probably has almost the setup I have or getting there. Some of the stuff is a little older, and he can use it. It's like, the focus is usually always on drums for his stuff. He's got some other stuff to play around with, but it's mostly all about drums. And even then, up until now, we've gotten better results at my place or in a professional studio. But I upgraded a bunch of my drum stuff in the last two years so I feel like I get awesome drum sounds now." Mike isn't very interested in doing drive in concerts. He isn't going to do a lyric writing session on a stream. - "How was working with Darren King on Hold It Together? Darren absolutely rips?" -> "I agree. Go do yourself a favor and check out Darren's Instagram page because he puts a lot of his stuff up, his crazy, creative studio studio sessions. We didn't meet in person because he lives in not LA. He said, "Yeah I get a really good sound at my home in my home studio, so let me just send you tracks." And we did it that way and then I chopped those up and used them. I didn't just like, play the drums. I grabbed them and effected them and chose different sampled drum parts for the beat and verse and got to his part in the bridge. Darren's the reason the drum stuff on "Hold My Shit Together" off of the Post Traumatic record was so good. He's so great." https://www.twitch.tv/videos/678532004

On July 12th, KROQ reaired Mike's Sound Space 2018 concert via Twitter broadcast and included a new interview that Mike did with Nicole Alvarez. This show was one of the first Post Traumatic shows of Mike's world tour and featured six songs played to an intimate crowd. Check it out here.

Kind of off topic, but... Chester dancing to bluegrass OSC at DBS Amsterdam is hilarious.

What do you think? Mike didn't play Brooding live for Post Traumatic,, he hasn't really played many instrumentals live over the course of his career honestly. Session and Cure For The Itch were both Joe-only tracks. Mike did do on the 2014-2015 world tour part of his solo medley instrumentally which he played. When he inevitably plays solo again, since he's releasing at least 3 volumes of instrumentals, do you think he slips one in somewhere? Some of the volume 1 tracks are pretty good, he could fit one in to a setlist. But he already has trouble fitting everything in since he has so much material he can play.

Forbes has posted a new interview with Mike. Baltin: At what point did this evolve into an album? Shinoda: When people's tour schedules fell apart and they weren't allowed to continue on as planned I watched a number of artists panic because the things they planned to do they weren't getting to do. And also because the attention they were expecting to have from people was gonna go away. And all of a sudden they were scrambling to grab people's attention in other ways. All of a sudden every single music artist in the universe had to live stream concerts from their bedroom. And I was so bored by that. I don't know why I felt that way. I just didn't like it. And that's not a knock by the way. Baltin: Were there any live streams you enjoyed? Shinoda: Post Malone's Nirvana one was dope. That was one of my favorite ones. I've caught some of the stuff that Questlove and the Roots have done. Quest is always spinning records and stuff, talking about his experience in the studio or bits and pieces of trivia about the artists that he's playing. I love that. My favorite things have been random unknown singers on Instagram who sit down with a guitar and sing a thing. And Instagram's algorithm is so good that it knows now that's what I love. And it just shows me new singers with like 25,000 followers singing a song with a ukulele. That's half my feed (laughs). Baltin: So could these discoveries ever lead to collaborations? Shinoda: When I hear people I think are really dope I reach out. That's how I ended up doing a remix with Ren For Short. I heard her on a playlist and I was like, "What's this girl all about?" She had like no followers. I put it on my playlist, I posted it on Instagram, she DM'ed me, we started talking and then I made a remix for her and we debuted it on my stream on Twitch. Baltin: One of the interesting things about this time is seeing how people evolve and show different sides of themselves. I doubt you would have made an all-instrumental album at another time. Shinoda: I fell into it. These albums, Dropped Frames is gonna be the first of at least three. I've got the second one done and the third one is in progress. And I say in progress, basically it's just tightening up and mixing stuff that I made on the stream. But certainly it's a thing I wouldn't have done unless I was in this situation that I'm in right now. It's also funny cause it's clearly not for everybody. Instrumental music is not your way to the Billboard top five (laughs). But anybody who knows my discography knows I've done instrumentals often, on every record, every couple of records there [are] instrumental tracks. A few different instrumental pieces that have gone to film and TV as well. I feel like there is a poetry to the instrumental that it leaves an openness to interpretation in terms of the content that is a lot of fun. And I haven't ever done that before on a full-length album. Check out the full interview here.

Mike's leak says this is not the case. We'll see what happens. It's leaning towards it being something epic that the band is involved in pretty heavily.

They are just show intros and outros. First one from 2004 could be some type of demo made by Mike and/or Joe. Who knows. No one has ever commented on them.

Listening parties have become a "thing" with Mike, dating back to the LIVING THINGS album in 2012. Ever since then, Mike has fully embraced and participated in listening parties with fans online. So you didn't think he'd skip out on this one, did you? Join Mike on Twitch on July 10th at 10am PST for "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" listening party as he talks about the songs. He will also be debuting the new music video for "Open Door", created by Ana Ginter, on the stream. See you there!

"In My Eyes is a series of lectures through the eyes of brand founders who turned their passionate creative lifestyle into a business. Filmed on location at the University of Southern California Marshall Business School’s Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies by Professor Mike West"

Q&A time from the day before "Dropped Frames" is released! - "Did Chester teach you screaming techniques?" -> "Chester could never have taught anybody to scream how he screams. In fact, I'm of the belief that you either have that or you don't. Coming in the band, he hadn't really SCREAMED screamed on records before. He had sung heavy, he had yelled, he had done things like that that had indicated to me, "Oh he can do these things", but we wanted like, full on metal screams, which he had not really done. He had definitely not done, at least I had not heard it on anything. He said that, he told me he had never done it. So once we started doing it, he was like, "Oh, I can really do this" so there was this unlocking of "How many versions of this can we do?" I can't do it, and there's no amount of practice that's going to make my voice do that. My voice does not do that." - "I was wondering if you'll continue the streams after quarantine." -> "Yeah that's the plan!" - "When Dave left Xero to fulfill it commitment to the Snax? If not, how did Phoenix's return come about? Had Kyle left the band before his return?" -> "This sounds like a soap opera. For those who you don't know, which is probably very few of you, in the beginning of the band, Dave Farrell, Phoenix, was in our band. And then he was also in another band and he promised them that if they ever went on tour that he'd go. So that happened and we started getting ready to record, to do our Hybrid Theory album recording sessions. Dave was gone and so we played his bass parts, me, Brad, our producer Don at one point was putting them in. We were just like... I didn't want Don playing bass on the record, it was our record. He's a good bass player but it's just the premise of it. We tried out of a couple of other people at the time. You mentioned Kyle Christener, he was in the band and we played with for a while. Scott Koziol was in the band for a while, we actually toured with Scott for a little bit. And there was another kid who played... he just like played on a couple of tracks but he wasn't a great fit. Neither of the other two guys played on the record, Kyle and Scott.... Kyle was before, we played a couple of shows with Kyle, but it was like local shows-ish like Arizona and LA. And then Scott we actually went on the road with. And then Dave came back. And I kind of felt like, I wasn't one hundred percent sure Dave was going to come back. But all of us were basically like, let's keep bothering Dave, let's never let up, like giving him reminders him that the door is open and he should come play bass with us again. Because the dynamic changed too much. The other guys were sweet guys but the dynamic felt right when Dave was in the band and we knew the difference, right? So it was like, Dave's not married to The Snax, he's not going to do that forever." - "Iridescent is my favorite LP song, can you tell us the origin and the writing process?" -> "Iridescent just started with that piano bit. It was kind of like when we've done the acapella or piano and vocal versions. It kind of was that. I wrote it just piano and vocal and then built everything on top of the piano and vocal version. So not anything crazy there, it was just a very traditional writing process." https://www.twitch.tv/videos/674672335

This is reairing on July 12th.

The in ear monitors. He said he cannot perform certain songs without Chester in his IEMs because that is the way he has played them for absolute ages. The first song that comes to mind is Papercut. He probably has it for other songs, maybe Castle Of Glass, etc too. They had them at the Hollywood Bowl show with Chester too. Either Gavin Rossdale or Daron talked about it in an interview afterward.

Alt Press posted a new interview with Mike today, right as "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" is being released globally. So I know you had some issues with “Open Door” between you and management, and you didn’t know if you were going to include it on this album at all. How did you reach the decision to go for it and find those six or seven vocalists included on it, too? "I felt like including it was only natural because it was the impetus for this whole thing, right? Streaming the making of that song was the thing that led to the creation of the channel and writing music on that channel. So in the beginning, I was just trying to break up the monotony of quarantine, and “Open Door” was like a key to that. The process of making that made me realize the fans were such an important part of that equation. And not just because like, “If no one’s watching, what’s the point of doing the channel?” It’s more than that. On my channel, it’s not just about, “Hey, look at me! I’m worth watching!” I have a skill set and things I can do, so I take those, and you guys, as a group of viewers, tell me how to use those things in ways that are going to either entertain all of us or challenge me and make me excited to make something that’s going to entertain you." He elaborates with a huge answer about when he brought up Chester on the stream the other day, with at least a three+ paragraph response. Check that out. Check out the full interview here.

Chester is in his IEMs on the PT Tour, FYI.

Album is being released globally today! Let us know what your favorite songs are!

Debris doesn't have any gang vocals, Mike is the only one on vocals on that song. He did write the entire demo by himself.

On Mike's stream today, he mentioned that while volume one of "Dropped Frames" is not even out yet, he has already mixed volume two and submitted it. He's now working on putting volume three together, with an estimated release time of about four weeks between albums. Finally, he confirmed that volume two will have a different cover as well. Mike said about volume one, "I'll tell you the tracklisting, but a lot of it won't make sense to you. Just for those of you who haven't already seen it. The tracklisting is Open Door, Super Galaxtica, which is already out on your streaming services, Duckbot is the one that is kind of started with an electronic..., Cupcake Cake which is also known as the Bollywood Jam, El Rey Domonio which was the Mariachi Jam, Doodle Buzz, Channeling that has Dan Mayo.. this is actually Channeling part 1 because I made two things with Dan Mayo, Osiris which is also out right now, Babble Bobble, Session McSessionface, Neon Crickets, and the final track is gonna be Booty Down." He added, "Very happy about putting that out. I have already mixed and delivered volume 2, so that will be out in a month or so. It will have 12 more songs, no vocals this time on volume 2, so in a month from now. And it will have a new cover, which you haven't seen. And you won't see until it gets released, or leaked, or whatever."

Mike's Q&A recap and highlights from July 7th! Mike took a huge look at the "Open Door" multitracks in ProTools and discussed the song... we highly recommend it if you haven't seen it. The vocal layering is pretty impressive. - "If you had an opportunity to travel back in time to change a moment in your life, would you do it or not?" -> "That's a good question. And I know that you weren't thinking of what I'm thinking of right now when you wrote that question, because now it becomes painfully obvious what the answer to that question is. So we're going to take that and move that, and put that to the side. And other than that, hmm. The joke version of that was - red hair, that's what you guys said in the chat. What else was there? Blue hair. Here's a crazy, like, to go ahead and dive into the real answer to that question though... here's the thing. Here's an existential question - if you know somebody who is super depressed and they are... in the process of the last few years, I've talked to many people who have said they have a friend or relative or know somebody who has attempted suicide many times and they were like, "What should I do?" So the question becomes, if you had the Doc Brown time machine and you could go back in time and be there when the person did it and effectively just be there. In your imagination, you'd just be there and you'd stop them. But if they are going to keep trying, then being there doesn't fix it, right? Mmm. So then... what do you do? I don't know what you do, I don't have the answer to that question, Doc Brown." - "The Meeting of the ATS documentary suggests the sessions became somewhat stressful at the end. Could you talk about what was going on at that time? Were there fears of missing deadlines?" -> "The ATS sessions got stressful at the end because they we were trying to get the record wrapped up and we had committed to a deadline and then the deadline was starting to approach and then we realized, it was like, "Oh, we've got a real deadline." And that's really the only reason. We were just trying to keep ourselves on track to do like, do the things we said we were going to do and finish the record. It wasn't stressful the way Hybrid Theory was stressful or the way Minutes To Midnight was stressful. Hybrid Theory was stressful because the guy from the label was being horrible and trying to change everything. The Minutes To Midnight sessions were getting stressful because it felt like we were never going to put a record out, it was just like going around in circles over and over and making more demos and making more demos." - Mike was asked if the tabs you can buy for guitarists are officially done by the band or done by someone else just listening to the music. Mike: "I don't remember. I have personally never done those, I have never sat down and said, "This is what I wrote." At the same time, I know that our stuff is not super complex so you can hear the notes. So you wouldn't need to be some virtuoso to figure out what the guitar part on "What I've Done" is, for example. But I haven't been asked, so that's my answer. But probably, the artist is not asked." - Asked if he has any weird traditions: "Not really. We celebrate Japanese Children's Day, we do Halloween, we do all of the normal ones." - "Why wasn't Debris released? It was a lit demo." -> "I always liked Debris. It is a good demo. I tried to play with it, I got as far as the demo that you've heard that's on the LPU release. I got that far with it, and I submitted it to the band. We had our Monday Meetings, like here are demos, here are demos. I submitted it to the band a few times and I was like, "I like this track" and nobody else liked it. And I just didn't finish it, because nobody was into it. It is what it is. And that's sometimes how it works guys" - Mike said you are allowed to cover the new songs and post them online as long as you are not making money from them. He specifically said he instructed his management to whitelist them to allow them to be played on Twitch in streams. If it's on YouTube or somewhere else, give Mike credit. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/672688792

A new Mike interview with SPIN ahead of the "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" release on Friday has been released. Here are the highlights: Besides the obvious, how did the collaborative process change for you on this record? "I’ve been letting a current of chance and curiosity guide me for the past few years. Those things were important to me forever, but even more so right now. And that plays into the interconnectedness of creating things on the fly. For example, on my channel, I let fans submit song style suggestions into a bowl, and I’ll pick a few of them to mash up together. Often times, they’ll submit things I don’t know anything about or things I actually don’t like. On the stream, I’ve mashed up Kpop, melodic metal, horrorcore rap, video game music, country, and “a song in the style of the Pokemon Mew.” Keeping an open mind to the styles and finding a way to make them sound cool to my ear is often a challenge, but it’s almost always entertaining. And I learn a lot." Did you find this to be a stopgap measure that could be a way to do things in the future or is it literally a stopgap measure? "I think, if a vaccine was released tomorrow and everything went back to the way it was, I’d still be streaming. I definitely enjoy it and I think there’s a way for it to evolve into future creative projects." Will there be a second volume of Dropped Frames? How do you envision it happening? "I’m already working on Vol. 3, actually! I make so much music on the channel, there’s a lot of material to get out there. I feel like, when I get bored of doing it this way, it’ll force me to adapt." Are you working any new material? "Yep. The first question is always, “Linkin Park?” The answer to that is, no. I’m playing with a bunch of ideas, and when something feels ready for the world, I’ll make it known." What about Fort Minor? "You never know! We’ll see if the wind blows in that direction." Check out the full interview here.

Ahead of the release of "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1", NME has posted a new interview with Mike. How would you describe the overall vibe and feel of music you made together? “It’s spontaneous. A lot of the time with music I feel like I channel what’s happening in the moment. This stuff sonically comes from when it’s being created. We archived all of the Twitch episodes on Youtube so you can go back and see where it came from. I know that when the Black Lives Matter protests were starting, the track we made that day was sombre and soulful. It was sonically appropriate for the kind of day that it was. That track didn’t make it onto this album, but it will be on a future volume." Were you working on the follow-up to ‘Post Traumatic’ before this project took hold? “I was working on really random stuff. I still am, because I’m a little slower in quarantine. There’s a song for myself here, a song for someone else there. I’m still experimenting and trying to figure out what I’m trying to do next. I feel like I’m going down 20 different roads at once. If there’s ever anything to talk about, I’ll talk about it on my stream.” It was recently revealed that Linkin Park had unheard tracks featuring Chester. Have you spent much time in recent years going through the vaults? “No, I haven’t. For every record I’ve done, there are tracks in varying degrees of completion with vocals on them. Releasing them isn’t on the schedule.” You also recently shared unseen gig footage from 2001. Can fans expect from archive gig stuff? “We’re all aware that this year is the 20th anniversary of ‘Hybrid Theory’, so we’re planning to do something for that. I don’t want to give anything away, so I’ll just leave it there.” Chester’s former Grey Daze recently released the album ‘Amends‘ featuring his vocals. Was that a surreal experience, being outside of the project? “I haven’t heard it. They did it on their own. I can’t listen to it. I don’t want to hear his voice. It’s hard enough for me to listen to Linkin Park albums. It has to be on the right day. I did watch some of his son Jaime’s video, though. I got through two minutes of it before it became a little too much for me.” Check out the full interview here.

Mike's Q&A highlights from Monday, June 6th! - "Does it feel any different between playing a stadium where everybody paid to see only you versus a festival where the crowd is mixed?" -> "Size of the venue aside, let's just say those two things are the same size, who knows... bands generally look at festivals as either: festivals generally are a place where you mix between other bands in front of other fans and all that in order to spread awareness of your band. And on the other side of that, if you're on the headline side of things, then festivals pay really well. So like the reason the festivals go for the big headliners is because that's a big draw. If you don't have a big headliner for your festival then.... your festival is only going to be as big as your headliner. Having lots of little acts, it's ok, but the second you get Beyonce.... I personally enjoy the festivals because they are a mix of fans and I know that some people are new my stuff no matter what. And then a headline show is great because you're bringing your vision to the stage. When you see somebody's proper show, their headline show, they have put that together in terms of how they'd like to be presented. Any band that does the exact same thing on both of those shows, I think that's a little weird. We did that at some points, tried to bring the exact same show. But I still feel like the headline shows end up being more authentic to the brand or the band or whatever." - "What are your thoughts on doing a remix contest for one of the jams?" -> "I love remixes and I love remix contests. Maybe if you stay tuned, I might have a remix contest for you to participate in. That might happen. Mike... was that foreshadowing? Were you hinting at something right there?" - "Were your parents supported of your decision of wanting to be in the arts?" -> "My parents were supportive. I've been drawing since I was like three. My parents knew that's what I wanted to do. So it was not much of a surprise to them. The surprise was that when I got to the end of art school which was very expensive, I was like, "hey I want to go be in this band, I want to do this band thing" and they were like, "what?!" They were supportive." - "What do you think of the Grey Daze album?" -> "I haven't heard the Grey Daze album and I kind of don't... I watched... his son Jaime did a video, he was on a song and did a video for them. And I gave them a shoutout on Twitter because Jaime, you know, because you know... Talinda said he wanted to do that record and she supported it so I was like, "well ok if they're supporting it and he really wanted to do it, fine." And then Jaime did a video, and so I tried to watch that video and listen to that song but I didn't really make it through it. It was weird to hear him that way and I guess they were just using vocals that, he had, I don't know, he had went in and cut some vocals and they were just working with those. And I just, I don't know, simultaneously I didn't connect with it and then it made me sad so it was just, "I can't listen to this." So, it is what it is, but good luck to those guys. But by the way, Jaime is a talented guy, he writes and he does film scoring and he's getting more into directing and stuff like that. I hope he gets more film and video jobs. He's really passionate about it." - "What synthesizers did you use on Post Traumatic?" -> "The synthesizers I use. So the VSTs, most of the stuff I show you here, I mean this is the stuff, you know? So if you watch this channel. Massive, the Prophet, Moog, Roland SH-01, Virus, Cwejman, Juno, OP-1, Serum. I use a lot of different stuff, the Nord is one of my go tos and I basically use that mostly as a sampler keyboard. I put my own sounds in it and then I mix and match those with some of the ones that are in there already. But I use lots of keyboards because that's my primary instrument, so I just mess around with whatever sounds good." - "Could you do a more complete tour of the track, show us how you mixed it, how you layered the vocals, the voices, especially with the vocals that were just from the phone?" -> "Oh you mean Open Door! Oh! Ok so I didn't use any vocals that were from the phone. I selected vocalists... from the ones who sang on their phone and stuff, I sent them a DM and I said, "Can you send me a high quality vocal of that, of your performance? And send me what you sang." And most of them, they were singing into a microphone and it was a phone recording or whatever, so I knew they either had a recording of it or had a capability to do a recording of it. I didn't use any phone vocals. And most people when they sent that, most people sent lead vocals and some background vocals, some harmonies and all this shit man. It was so many vocals. I could show you that a different day. Do you want to do that tomorrow? I could do that tomorrow. It was so many vocals you guys, holy crap, oh my god, it was so many. Alright, tomorrow we'll do it, we'll look at the Open Door vocals." - "How many drawings did you get while on tour?" -> "I don't know. And obviously I can't even keep them all, because we get drawings every day. But all of the stuff... if you handed it to us, we saw it. Even if you handed it to the crew, even most of that stuff came to us. I mean generally Jim Digby knew, he would tell people, "yeah the band wants to see this stuff." Unless we can't, unless we don't have time while we are there or whatever." - "You must have a ton of musical ideas on your hard drive. How do you manage the files, ideas and samples to find them later on?" -> "My samples are on my hard drive, my projects are on an external drive, my samples I organize by... I have a specific folder for stuff that I've collected and made. Like I just try and keep it organized as I go. The same with the sessions. You've just gotta try, you know, you do your best. Don't just save files wherever." - "Did you ever think of releasing vocals and acapellas for demos like "I Have Not Begun"? -> "Acapellas or whatever, I feel like... instrumentals are one thing, acapellas are like, I think that's good if that's like a single. For like random b-sides and stuff like that, I don't feel like the demand is that high." https://www.twitch.tv/videos/671736552

Mike: "I haven't listened to it. It's weird to hear Chester that way, I think they used some vocals he had cut. I tried to watch Soul Song. I didn't connect with it, and it also made me sad so I can't listen to it"

Kerrang is taking questions from fans for an upcoming interview with Mike via Zoom. "His new album, Dropped Frames, Vol. 1, is out on July 10. And on Monday, July 13 at 4:30pm (BST) @mikeshinoda will be joining us for an exclusive Zoom interview! Join the call by emailing your question for Mike and your name to feedback@kerrang.com. Best questions win a slot" Good luck!

A new interview with Mike, done from his home studio via video call, has been posted by Rock Sound. Mike described how "Dropped Frames" came about, "Open Door", and more. - "Open Door": "After I had shut that down for the day, I realized that I really want some vocals on that song. And I thought "I just spent the last little while l with the fans, why don't I just see if there is a fan who could sing the song?" So I did a little contest for the song "Open Door", had all the lyrics and everything done so all they had to do was sing it. So I posted it, I literally texted it to fans. I texted the high res file to like 10,000 people... so somebody's got it, just track down somebody who's got the song, and you can sing over it. Put it online, use the hashtag, and I'll find it." The failed P!ATD jam: "I remember they wanted me to do a song in the style of Panic! At The Disco. And I just couldn't do it. I tried, and it just didn't sound good. So I just gave up and we did something silly. So I was going for modern and I told them before I even started, "Their music right now is all Brendon Urie's voice. So the second you don't have his voice, like what genre are you really even in? I don't even know what to call it. The new record is kind of like, pop/rock music." This was the day that "Booty Down" was created at the end of the stream. Picking "Open Door" vocalists: "There were hundreds of submissions. I feel like I could tell very quickly who was a professional vocalist and who wasn't. The hobbyists... there were a lot of people who can sing, and they sing well, and then there were people who were like, they do it for a living. So it was very quickly I could tell from the quality of the singing who I would consider putting on the song. And it was a short list. Originally I was thinking I'd pick just one person, but I liked so many of them that I ended up putting seven of these people on the song because they were all so different. There's a couple of girls from Russia, one of which is a little more R&B, one is a little more rock. One is a guy who goes by Phantom who has like face tattoos and his music is very modern but trap and rock and electronic and whatever. There's a guy Pershard, in the video his hair is all crazy, he's the only one who submitted anything that sounded like that. And he's great, he's so so talented, so good. There were seven different people, all different styles and different ways of approaching the track. Like they sent in lead vocals, they sent in harmonies, I probably did have somewhere between fifty and seventy five vocal tracks to sort through in order to really listen to and find what I wanted to put on the song. Mixing it was a bitch but it ended up being cool." - "Open Door" being on "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1": "I decided to put that on the front end of all of it because it kind of happened in the same moment. But the rest of the stuff I'm releasing for right now is going to be instrumental." - Releasing an instrumental album: "I've never released an instrumental album. There's a poetry to instrumental music that I've always enjoyed listening to. I grew up drawing and painting and a lot of times I'd paint and draw to instrumental music. It lets your mind kind of wander and go wherever it takes you. A song like that could mean one thing to one person and another thing to another. It leaves it open for like, thought and creativity. It's perfect music for studying and drawing and waking up/laying down, putting on in the background, etc... it's almost useful music in a sense. Like use it for whatever your thing is. In the beginning, fans asked a bunch of times, "Are you going to put vocals on it? Let's put vocals on it." And the truth is, number one, vocals are... it's a tedious process especially for me. I don't do vocals quickly and I wouldn't watch anybody to watch me sitting on a stream with a beat looping for six hours while I type on a computer, delete, type, delete, and then mumble to myself and leave the room. That's not fun for anybody. The other thing is, I feel as an artist, there's something in the stress of the world... with the news, and the pandemic, all of the things that are going on, so stressful, I feel like there's a poetry to the instrumental track that is appropriate for this moment in time. We are being talked at so much, like our whole experience on our phones is just people shouting. And you turn on the news and people are shouting. Everywhere I go, people are shouting. So I feel like this is a way to take a break, in a sense." - "Open Door" lyrics applying to current times even though it was written before the pandemic: "That was a surprising thing for me as well. At first I was like, "I don't know if I should attach Open Door to these other songs because they're not the same thing." But the reason I think we decided to do it is because it's a good launching point in terms of the context of everything and the fact that yeah, it was written originally about looking for opportunity, looking for something good in the midst of whatever else, all the noise that's going on. And it's also like, there are moments where I'm talking to myself but moments where I'm not... I'm like, thematically I'm going back and forth with like a pep talk for myself and encouraging, almost like challenge, to somebody who might be listening." - "Hybrid Theory" anniversary, why "In the End" is still so popular: "I think that when we wrote it, I remember being in... we were rehearsing in this little room in Hollywood. And when I say Hollywood, it was the grossest part of Hollywood. At the time, Hollywood & Vine had like prostitutes and drug dealers. There was a taco shop on the corner, an all black hair salon next door, like a grocery story with a Korean couple who ran that on the corner, and a bunch of like Scientologists. There was a place that was a reading center that was teaching you how to read but all of the books were Scientology books which is really kind of dark. And that was the place where we found a rehearsal room that we could afford. And we were working on our show and our songs there. And I decided to stay overnight in that building and I wrote "In the End." And I think Rob Bourdon was the first one to show up the next day for rehearsal and I played it for him and he was freaking out. There was something about that, there's a weird battle with hopelessness that, in our nature and our times, that the song is really about. What's odd about the song is it's almost talking about these things and saying like, "I don't have any answers." Because usually a song isn't about having no answers, right? It just kind of runs itself around in a circle lyrically. Especially as a young person, that's how I felt, that's how we all felt. I didn't know what to make of things and I think in a sense, that's still what goes on today. Time is a very universal thing. The fact is, yeah, it's been one of our biggest songs, it's been our biggest song for a long time." - "Hybrid Theory" at Download Festival 2014: "We played it in order. In the early days, we played every song off the album, but we just didn't play it in order. Download would have been the only one where we played it in order. I felt like it was a matter of time before we did that, before we played that album front-to-back just because people were starting to do it. People were starting to play their biggest albums front-to-back and we were slowly pulling some of those songs out of the set, so they were more in demand. Not that we were doing it so there WOULD be demand, it was because we were trying to make room for our other songs and then obviously it's like, "Aw! They actually didn't play Crawling tonight!" We always played In the End, sometimes we wouldn't play other songs off of that record. So it was like, "Oh ok, there's already this feeling of fans who want to come see that at that show.""