Extended interview with Linkin Park on MTV

MTV has posted five video clips from their interview with Linkin Park, watch here.

Linkin Park Bury A Thousand Suns ‘Concept Record’ Talk

In November 2008, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington gave an interview to MTV News that he probably regrets. In it, he talked about the band’s follow-up to Minutes to Midnight and, at several points, referred to the still-gestating effort as “a concept record” (a “delicious” one, to be precise).

As is usually the case with statements like that, the whole “concept record” tag stuck with the band throughout the entire recording process of what would become A Thousand Suns, and though Bennington never entirely backed away from the statement, you could tell that he was trying very hard to distance himself from it.

Now, nearly two years after the fact, we know why. Because while A Thousand Suns is a lot of things, it’s certainly not a “concept record.” Far from it. In fact, if anything, it’s a “multi-concept record.”

“People asked us if it’s a concept record, and in the middle of the process, we were contemplating whether or not that was what we wanted to do,” LP’s Mike Shinoda told MTV News at their VMA rehearsal on Saturday. “And I think, as we finished it, it became clear that, usually the problem with concept records is, like, [the] term usually refers to things like [the Who's] Tommy or … rock operas and stuff like than that has a narrative. And this doesn’t have a narrative; it’s more abstract that that.

“So if those albums are more of an Andy Warhol, this is more of a Jackson Pollock,” he continued. “You can kind of look at it, and all the stuff’s in there; you pull out whatever it means to you.” So now that we’re clear that A Thousand Suns isn’t a concept record, we couldn’t help but wonder: What concept was Bennington mulling over in his head when he sat down with MTV News back in November ’08? Let’s just say it involved a boy and a bike — and that it’s probably better he abandoned the idea completely.

“I tried to write 30 songs about a kid with a red bike and make it the most moving thing that ever happened in music, and it wasn’t good at all,” he said. “So we kind of dumped the kid-and-the-red-bike concept really early on.”

Linkin Park Take Guitars To New Places On A Thousand Suns

Depending on which side of the great A Thousand Suns debate you stand, Linkin Park’s use of guitars on the album (or, more specifically, the general lack of them) is either a brilliant, ballsy move or a total letdown.

After all, LP’s near-trademark guitar tone — something between a rocket-launcher and a firework, explosive, arching and incendiary — was a big part of what made them one of the hugest rock acts on the planet, and on Suns, it’s largely absent, replaced instead with a myriad of effects-laden squelches and rumblings. How you feel about that fact will affect how you feel about the album itself.

And, yes, Linkin Park are aware of that — they’ve been following the debate rather closely, in fact.

“I heard a lot of comments about how certain songs on the record … fans were hearing them and going, ‘Wow, those are so heavy!’ and I even caught people talking about guitar on a song like ‘Wretches and Kings,’ for example, and somebody else would call them out, be like, ‘Actually, I don’t even think that’s guitar. I think it’s some kind of sample or something,’ ” LP’s Mike Shinoda told MTV News. “We’ve been getting a lot of questions on that. Our approach on that stuff has been really something different for us. We didn’t just plug the PRS [guitar] into the Mesa amp; it was like, we played these guitars through all these different effects, and we put them in the computer and we sampled them and played them like you would make a hip-hop song.”

And those new sonic ideas — while alienating to some — were also the key building blocks to A Thousand Suns. Linkin Park knew they were taking a risk, but in the end, it was worth it. After all, they’ve walked away with perhaps the first major-label rock record in recent memory that doesn’t sound like a major-label thing. Or really, a rock record, for that matter.

“Loosening that process up really enabled us to make some sounds that felt really fresh to us,” Shinoda said. “And [it] made the songs better.”