Interview with Phoenix

Beatweek has an interview with Phoenix where he talks about A Thousand Suns

The biggest band of the past decade has blown up its blueprint. Again. Something in the DNA of the six-piece outfit known as Linkin Park seemingly compels them to burn their own sound to the ground and start from scratch with each new album, a pattern which has never been quite so evident as with new release A Thousand Suns, which represents uncharted sonic and conceptual territory even for them. “There might be a misconception that this album is a commentary on what we think of our past albums,” says bassist Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell. “It’s not that.”

Still, the album sees the band tinkering with its patented formula of combining rock, rap and other styles of music in the kind of way that no one else had previously thought to. So, then, what drives Linkin Park to keep gambling with its own success? “That aspect is what makes being in a band fun for me, and when you’re in the studio, my head is not usually trying to wrap itself around ‘Will people like this?’”

As a measure of how untraditional A Thousand Suns is, while nine of the fifteen tracks have a standard length ranging from three to five minutes each, five other tracks are less than two minutes long. But rather than being an attempt at shaking things up, it’s more a representation of how the material naturally developed. “A song like Blackout, even from its earliest incarnation, always was in three movements and it was just a process of trying to figure out how to make those individual movements best fit that whole song. And the end of it, it turns into a four minute or six minute song,” says Phoenix.

“And then at the same time there’s always these little things that we’re doing where it’s more of a fragment or more of an idea, and maybe that turns into a shorter, thirty or forty second thing that is working to keep the album moving from front to end.”

In other words, the eighteen ethereal seconds of track four interlude Empty Spaces is how you get from the peppy potential single Burning In The Skies to the gritty When They Come For Me without losing flow. It’s all about creating and experience where in “if you get a chance, you can sit down with it and listen to it from front to back, kind of get a really well rounded three dimensional experience with it in the same way that it used to be back in the seventies, sixties.”

The emphasis on making a fluid yet varied album put the band, which still has to operate within the boundaries of the music business to some extent, in a quandary. “One of the biggest pressures or tensions on this record was trying to figure out what we were gonna do as far as the first single,” says Phoenix. “Chester and I were even joking, obviously it was never anything more than a joke, but we were joking about like, what if we just released this record as one giant MP3?”

As it turned out, it was the next to last (and longest) track on the album, The Catalyst, which was ultimately sent to radio, as it was “a great indication to our fans that it was gonna be a different type of record.“

The fact that the lead single just happened to fit best in the fourteenth slot on the album, rather than being positioned closer to the front of it, is yet one more unconventional fact of life for A Thousand Suns: “At the end of that process, we didn’t want to necessarily mess with the track order.”

As further evidence of the chances that the band has taken with the record, the rollicking five-plus minutes that make up The Catalyst flow directly into an acoustic ballad called The Messenger to close things out.

If history is any indication, the risks taken in the name of moving forward will pay off for Linkin Park with their new release, just as they always have. But even Linkin Park’s overwhelming popularity over the past decade doesn’t in itself entirely explain why the band has found a level of popularity within social media which has otherwise been reserved strictly for individuals, not bands.

The handful of entities to have crossed the ten million fan mark on Facebook can be counted on ones fingers, and thus far include the likes of Lady GaGa, Barack Obama, Eminem, Michael Jackson – we’ve come to learn that something in human nature compels users to be far more likely to click the “like” button for an individual than for a group. And yet Linkin Park finds itself comfortably in that tiny club with twelve million fans in its own right, more than doubling that of any other contemporary band, and even comfortably outpacing The Beatles.

So, aside from being wildly popular as a band to begin with, just what is Linkin Park doing right within social media?

“The short answer is I don’t really know,“ Phoenix admits, “but I can make hopefully some educated guesses. I think a big part of it is our fanbase is pretty awesome, and the community aspect of Linkin Park fans kind of lends itself really well to the internet. They have this interconnectivity and this web that works out perfectly with the internet.”

But there’s more to it than that. The band members, who are of an age where they didn’t get their first real taste of the internet’s potential until they were finishing high school, were nonetheless able to pinpoint the internet early on as being a way of connecting with potential fans. “When we were first starting out, we were finding people online that were interested in our music and talking to them. This was way before Hybrid Theory came out, way before anything, and we were just kind of finding people all over the U.S. through the internet who had some sort of interest either in our music or in other bands that were doing different things. After we found them we’d ask them if they wanted to try and help us get the word out or whatever, all of this being done online.”

He’s talking about way early on. “At the end of that process, we would send them a cassette. So it was this total fluxpoint of using all this technology, but it was still at that stage where it wasn’t really ready to send MP3’s or do anything else online. We were still actually sending out these demo cassette tapes.”

And it’s not just about Facebook in particular, as Apple set its sights on the band when the company decided to recently launch its own “Ping” social network within iTunes. “We got a chance to meet with them early on, before they went with it, just to be able to potentially be included in that,” says Phoenix of the fact that Linkin Park was one of the handful of artists to be featured in Ping at the moment of launch. “I know that they’re planning on continuing to grow that, and I think it could be really cool. I think it could be just a further way for us to be able to stay in contact directly with our fans.” Not surprisingly, the band has already racked up more than a quarter million followers in the network’s first two weeks of existence.

One of Ping’s early features gives fans the option to announce to their friends that they’ll be attending a band’s concert, which leads back to the question of just what Linkin Park’s shows are going to look like as they gear up to tour in support of the unconventional A Thousand Suns. The band’s live performance of The Catalyst this past Sunday night at Griffith Park Observatory as part of the MTV VMA awards offered an early hint, but Phoenix says there’s plenty more where that came from.

“This tour for us, it’s the first time we’ve really had a good chunk of time on the front end to really be able to transition what we wanted to do with the album itself,” he says. “Not only on the musical aspect of what we’re gonna be doing, but we’re lucky enough that for the last maybe eighteen months we had an artist team, basically, creating visual content for the album packaging, everything, the merch, all the way down to the video content that you’ll see at the live show. The goal of creating this is everything you see will kind of play off of one another and help round out that immersive world that the album is intended to be.”

“I think the live show is gonna be great for fans to be able to see that bridge from the old music to the newer music, and at the same time to kind of have your experience with the record rounded out even more with the visuals that will come with it.”

And as if to emphasize that the new direction of the new material isn’t meant to step on the toes of Linkin Park’s previous work, “it’s also fun to go back and find new ways to reinterpret the older stuff, and really work it all together.”