{"id":3210,"date":"2011-08-09T02:25:37","date_gmt":"2011-08-09T09:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=3210"},"modified":"2011-08-09T02:25:37","modified_gmt":"2011-08-09T09:25:37","slug":"linkin-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/08\/linkin-park\/","title":{"rendered":"LINKIN PARK"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

LINKIN PARK<\/h1>\n

Making noise about n\u00fc-metal, new directions and nuclear war<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Linkin Park will not be rushed: A Thousand Suns<\/em>, the California hard-rock group\u2019s latest, is just the fourth studio album the band has released since forming in 1996. It\u2019s something of a departure for the band, with less emphasis on heavy metal guitar riffs and volatile vocals than on electronic musical textures, elements of hip-hop\u00a0and driving rhythms.<\/p>\n

Why the change? Rapper and guitarist Mike Shinoda credits Linkin Park\u2019s desire to move further away from the n\u00fc-metal sound that became an unintentional trademark on its first two albums. \u201cWhen we started the band, we weren\u2019t part of a scene, and we weren\u2019t trying to be part of a scene,\u201d says Shinoda. \u201cWe never intended to carry the flag of that whole rock movement of the early 2000s. That flag was thrust into our hands, and to be honest, we were uncomfortable with it. We never intended to be\u00a0part of a club.\u201d<\/p>\n

Linkin Park started honing its experimental side on 2007\u2019s Minutes to Midnight<\/em>. The process included unwinding preconceptions about the band\u2014including those held by the members themselves. \u201cOther people had created these notions of what Linkin Park was, based on what they had heard and what they thought that sounded like, and we fell for that to a degree,\u201d Shinoda admits. \u201cMinutes to Midnight<\/em> was our first experience outside that comfort zone. A Thousand Suns<\/em> started with the premise that we already knew what it was like to be outside our comfort zone.\u201d We spoke with Shinoda about the changing sound of Linkin Park.<\/p>\n

What prompted the new direction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The stuff that you\u2019re hearing on this record has always been in our music. On past records, you\u2019d get vocal and guitar way up front and electronic stuff and hip-hop in the background. On this album, you\u2019ve got vocal and hip-hop stuff up front, and guitar playing more of a supporting role. But there has been a big change in approach for us. Although we appreciate the success the band has had and all the support the band has gotten, we wanted to avoid repeating ourselves. It wouldn\u2019t have been challenging. It would have been lazy of us to replicate something we had already done.<\/p>\n

How difficult was the process?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was surprisingly loose. We tend to be very organized and controlled, and this record left room for experimentation. The best way I can describe it is that it was more right-brained. We kind of forced our left brain to take a backseat during key moments. There needs to be balance between the two. We get logical with the sequencing or song structure, but the music, the vocals and the lyrics on some of the initial demos benefited from letting the right brain run things. Some really cool ideas came out by doing that.<\/p>\n

Did you record more than you used?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There were a lot of demos. I don\u2019t know how many. Could be 150, but we don\u2019t pay a lot of attention to that, because those demos could be anything: looping an electronic beat, or a vocal with a guitar that reminded us of something else. We got to the meat of this record early on, and it benefited from the fact that we narrowed it down and worked on developing these songs earlier than we had in recent years. We knew we wanted to make something that felt like a journey, that was more of an album<\/em> album.<\/p>\n

At a time when singles are king?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We talked about that. Because everybody\u2019s buying songs 99 cents at a time, we had initially thought about doing three four-song EPs, then putting them all together on one album. But the more we thought about that, the more we wanted to go against it. Though everything is moving toward that small-serving-size music format, we loved listening to albums when we were younger. There was nothing more exciting than putting on a record and hearing what one of your favorite artists wanted to do over the course of the whole 45 minutes. So we decided to make a case for the album, that just putting 12 songs together in a nice order wasn\u2019t enough. We even built in time toward the end of the process where we edited our existing songs and wrote material that connected the dots, so this record was more like a movie.<\/p>\n

Is Suns<\/em> a concept album?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I think of concept records, I think of Tommy<\/em> and rock operas, which this record is not. Those are about a narrative, about one concept; this record is about many concepts. It\u2019s like an inkblot test where people hear it and think it\u2019s about something in particular, and that idea is strictly a representation of their experience. Somebody else can listen and hear something completely different. We\u2019ve had people tell us, \u201cThis is the darkest Linkin Park record I\u2019ve ever heard,\u201d while others have said, \u201cThis is the most hopeful Linkin Park record.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is it for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the most three-dimensional, which is what I like about it. It feels like there are a lot of layers to it, and I expect that people are going to get different stuff out of it.<\/p>\n

Do the titles Minutes to Midnight<\/em> and A Thousand Suns<\/em> both refer to <\/strong>nuclear war?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the subconscious talking. Everyone in the band, and our entire generation, is scared that we\u2019re going to destroy ourselves\u2014whether ruining the environment or blowing ourselves up or anything else you see on the news. It\u2019s an overwhelming feeling to be living in this time when there are so many things going on and it\u2019s noise constantly buzzing in the background. We\u2019re all connected to it, but there\u2019s so little you can do that people are afraid of it. We are. To give you an idea what I mean by the right-brain thing, we did a lot of automatic writing on this record, and it really applies to what we\u2019re talking\u00a0about right now.<\/p>\n

Automatic writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a technique where you walk up to the mic and start singing as if you already know what the song is. You sing whatever words come to your head, whatever melody comes to your head. It\u2019s almost as if you\u2019re channeling the song, but because it\u2019s moving so quickly and words are just flying out, you don\u2019t really have any control over them, so a lot of weird subconscious stuff pops out of your mouth. That\u2019s where the pictures started to get painted on A Thousand Suns<\/em>\u2014about things we were scared of. Minutes to Midnight<\/em> was clearly a title about the moments leading up to self-destruction. A Thousand Suns <\/em>is arguably about the actual moment of destruction, and that was a coincidence. There\u2019s a line, \u201cWhen we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns,\u201d that was an automatic writing exercise. It just popped out of my mouth and ended up in the song. It wasn\u2019t until months later that we looked it up and realized it came out of [nuclear physicist] J. Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s mouth. It links back to this same fear of self-annihilation. Automatic writing shed light on things we wanted to sing about in a way that felt\u00a0natural and colorful.<\/p>\n

\u2013Eric R. Danton<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LINKIN PARK Making noise about n\u00fc-metal, new directions and nuclear war Linkin Park will not be rushed: A Thousand Suns, the California hard-rock group\u2019s latest, is just the fourth studio album the band has released since forming in 1996. It\u2019s something of a departure for the band, with less emphasis on heavy metal guitar riffs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[1728,1175,970],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3212,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3210\/revisions\/3212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}