Astat

At no point in the past 20 years has anyone come to the conclusion that Thoughts That Take Away My Pride and Wizard Song are the same song. Because they're not.

Source: A non-English speaker who clearly thought someone was asking about it being on the "Lost Demos" disc. The AltWire review confirmed it's The Wizard Song. So much for "YoU wOn'T hAvE yOuR tRuTh."

Don was allegedly contacted about being part of HT20 and refused.

I dig this. Feels like an actual music video rather than being in the vein of Guilty All the Same or Lost in the Echo where it's like "hey here's a thing we did for the sake of experimenting with an extremely specific tech idea."

Yeah, I do wish we had a better-quality shot of that board though. Maybe we'll get one on the new Fiore documentary with the box set.

Nah, that's one character too short to be Shortcut. 7 characters, and the second letter doesn't look anything like the H in Shifter right above it. I still think it says "Serpent."

It's in Drop C, the progression is D-F-C-G, the C powerchord isn't inverted, and there are no sliding noises between the chords that would indicate it's in B. Plenty of experimentation with tunings during the Meteora era, this must have just been another one that they used at some point. Also not unprecedented, as it wouldn't have been that long after Meteora that Mike did Catharsis for the VMAs, and that was in Drop C.

It's seeming like that was a demo chorus that they ended up not using.

Kyle was at the SIR showcase on August 9th, so he would've been at this show as well. The only 1999 show I'm not totally sure about him being at is the Fullerton show in November. He was already in the band shortly before Chester auditioned, and said he played with them for about 10 months.

At this rate, we'll have a full album of HT:20 remixes by 2040 lol.

Yeah, no. It takes about 30 seconds of going through his tweet replies to find LONGTIME members of the community who are vocally against this. Mike's always been my favorite member of the band, and I've stopped listening to all Linkin Park-adjacent projects for the first time in over 20 years solely because him turning into an NFT grifter has left such a bad taste in my mouth.

The voice on High Voltage is some kind of vocoder effect on Mike's voice (the dry vocal is still partially audible in the mix as well). It's probably a MAM VF-11 or something similar to it.

Shadow of the Day: Guitar that enters in the first chorus (absent from the previous "wrong" mix) is a different take, the tone is completely different and there are no sliding noises between the notes like there are on the original CD version. I'm not totally convinced it isn't a VST guitar sim replacing the original track. Other differences seem to be fixed. *Edit* Haha, wow, this is 100% a re-recorded guitar part, it even plays a wrong note. On the "and the shadow of the day" lines in the choruses, it's supposed to follow the bass and go down to a G instead of going up to a D like it does on every other time through the progression, but it goes up to a D in that spot on this recording. I bet Mike re-recorded this recently because they couldn't find the original guitar track for whatever reason. No Roads Left: Fixed! Yay! Across the Line: Not fixed! Boo! The synth bass line that's supposed to come in at 0:21 is still absent. As far as I can tell nothing changed on this one whatsoever.

I think people tend to forget about this absolute gem: https://youtu.be/LyPsJNX6YT8

Which includes MGK, Blackbear, and iann dior, who have six top 40 singles between them in the last five years. iann dior was just on a song that spent eight weeks at #1 and is still in the Billboard top 10 seven months after it was released. And that's assuming you exclusively mean mainstream pop culture relevance, without factoring in the success K.Flay and grandson have had in the indie/alt rock scene.

Ditto. Call me pessimistic, but this seems like the kind of thing that ends up killing the concept of the album AND touring. If you're Mike, what's the point of investing a bunch of time and money into recording an album or going on tour when you can make one song at a time and sell it to people with massive amounts of disposable income for $10,000+? This is Mike going the route of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, and considering the definitely near-zero, possibly actually-zero number of people in this community who can afford to drop $10k on something as insignificant as a song, we're clearly not the target market. Somebody call Martin Shkreli.

So I was actually wrong about this, that sample isn't in Reading My Eyes OR Stick N Move, and I don't think it's used in any of the Xero tracks at all. The "101strg" samples are from Madama Butterfly, but I can't find anywhere that they were actually used. The Reading My Eyes intro sample I was thinking of is actually from "Why You Treat Me So Bad" by Club Nouveau, which is credited on WhoSampled. Somebody asked Mike about it in a chat once and he completely misinterpreted the question (in typical Mike style) and said that it wasn't a Xero track. Nobody asked if it was a Xero track, lol. I still think it sounds like Mark (a bit less so now that there's a lot more material with Mark on it around than there used to be), but every couple years since I first found that track like 16 years ago I go on a crazy search to try and find more information about it, and I've always come up empty. Every resource that references the song either thinks it's the band Wakefield, Mark Wakefield, or they erroneously match the lyrics to an unrelated song called Ground Zero by a different band. If it's not Mark, I have a feeling it's a track from some completely unknown band that uploaded it on Myspace or Purevolume back in the early 2000's and it just ended up on filesharing networks. Maybe it was another band that used the name Wakefield that's completely disappeared from the Internet.

This is a mistake we need to fix - the song that samples that piece is Reading My Eyes, not Stick and Move. The intro to Reading My Eyes is one of the "101strg" samples from Mike's MPC library pitched up and sped up a bunch. Different guy.

Guys, what? Mike did this for most of the Meteora touring cycle. He did it at all the LPU tour and PR03 shows, and was still doing it at the start of Summer Sanitarium (Pontiac 7/4, Toronto 7/5). He didn't do it from East Rutherford on 7/8 onwards, so either that show or Foxboro on 7/6 was when he stopped. He didn't do it anymore through the end of the year, then he started doing it again pretty early into the U.S. Meteora World Tour in 2004. The first recording of him doing it that year was at Rosemont on 1/29, and then at the next show in Madison (1/30) he started doing a mix of it where he'd hype the crowd up for the first half of the bridge and then sing the "blood is pouring" line the second half (so he only sang it 3 times instead of 6). He also did this version at Colorado Spring on 2/2, Sunrise on 3/4, and Inglewood on 3/15, while he did the full version at Long Beach on 2/5 and Portland on 2/14. There were also still some shows where he didn't do it at all (Nashville 2/29), so it seemed to be kind of hit and miss depending on what he felt like doing on a given night during that period. Then on the June Europe/Southeast Asia tour he seemed to start doing the "half" version regularly at every show. Then he did the full version again at Mountain View and Sao Paolo at the end of the tour in September. The only periods where he wasn't doing some variation of it were the second half of 2003, the first few shows of 2004 (then intermittently from late January through March), and Projekt Revolution 2004 when Jonathan Davis was doing it. It's on a bunch of proshot/SBD recordings (Nottingham, CD:UK, $2 Bill, the One Step Closer live track on the Faint single, Rock Am Ring).

The phrase "panic attack" being in there led me to think part of this came from Petrified, as it's the only time Mike's used that phrase in a song. There are two problems with this though: 1. There isn't a Petrified acapella in circulation. 2. The rhythm of the phrase "panic attack" is different than it is on Petrified (the first syllable of "panic" is held longer on Petrified). This still doesn't sound like anything real to me, but I'm convinced that it's Mike's voice at least, and I'm honestly stumped as to where it would have come from.

Just checked and no problems with mine.

That was just me mixing up Stick N Move with Fuse lol.

Cure for the Itch was never "The Cure," and Pushing Me Away was never "The Cure for Mr. Hahn's Itch." That was just a misprint on the Studio Finals CD.

Username checks out. 😂

Platinum Lotus Foundation has been a known name they considered for many years, and was typically mentioned in the same breath as names like Ten P.M. Stocker (referring to the band practicing at Mike's old apartment at 10 PM), Probing Lagers, and "Clear," which was obviously just a case of someone mishearing "Plear." I dug around for a few minutes and found references to those names online going back at least as far as 2006.