Interview with Mike on Herald Sun

Herald Sun has posted their interview with Mike about A Thousand Suns.

It is safe to say Linkin Park likes to keep its fans guessing.

After the monumental success of its nu-metal influenced albums Hybrid Theory (2000) and Meteora (’03), which sold 40 million copies between them, the band tossed the formula out the window in favour of a classic rock and hip-hop sound for Minutes To Midnight (’07).

But that reinvention was nothing compared with the radical leap the US sextet has taken on A Thousand Suns, which was released last week. The menacing, bleak and politically charged blend of rock, hip-hop, acoustic, electronic and industrial sounds will leave some of the band’s many fans in raptures – but just as many will be scratching their heads.

The polarising first single from the album, The Catalyst, a six-minute hybrid of thumping techno and fist-pumping rock is a case in point.

When we are in the studio we always want to make something that is fresh and interesting to us,” says undeterred rapper-guitarist Mike Shinoda of the band’s changing musical palette.”That has been our approach from day one.
“With this record, I think we were really striving to make a new sound – to make an album that had a very consistent thread that ran through it and a handful of concepts that ran through it. Hopefully, as you listened to it, you would get a sense of the concepts but you would be forced to make your own decisions about what they were and what you thought about them.”

Minutes To Midnight was a reference to the Doomsday Clock – the countdown to nuclear annihilation – and the title of the new album, which is taken from a Hindu scriptures-inspired quote from the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, suggests Armageddon is already on us. But despite the sense of pervading menace and impending doom on A Thousand Suns, Shinoda insists it’s not only about a nuclear threat, rather about a whole range of “scary” things the band observed over the two years it took them to make it.

“We hear these things on the news about not just that topic but all kinds of different things that are going on in the world that threaten the existence of people everywhere and those fears and those concerns worked their way into the lyrics,” says Shinoda. “I hope people don’t listen to it and think that we are trying to preach to them. “From my point of view as a writer, I don’t listen to the lyrics of our songs as a vehicle to tell somebody what to think, it’s more a way to vent my own frustrations and fears and thoughts.

“When people listen to the record I want them to walk away feeling they have their own questions or interpretations and not feeling I have told them what to do or what to think.” In addition to the ominous Oppenheimer quote that opens the album, the band has scattered famous speeches from civil rights activists Mario Savio and Martin Luther King Jr throughout the songs, found on Shinoda’s frequent exploration of YouTube.

Savio’s 1964 rage-against-the-machine speech, which says in part, “there’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious – makes you so sick at heart – that you can’t take part and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop”, made a particular impression on Shinoda.

“I hadn’t even heard that speech before and it was so powerful,” he says. “His voice and his passion are just undeniable, so we just wanted to throw it on the song and see what it did. “The great thing about these clips is that they say something that we feel we could not really say any better. “These are little moments in time that I think are as relevant today as when they were said, even if today they maybe resonate in a different way.”

Shinoda is confident Linkin Park will be able to do justice to the complexities of A Thousand Suns when it heads out on a world tour that will bring it to Australia in December and reassures long-time fans the band hasn’t abandoned its older material.

“Over time our live approach and gear have always adapted to keep up with our ideas in the studio,” he says. “We layer parts, play a lot of different instruments and at the end of the day we just want to record a good song, so when it comes time to translate that to the live performance, it’s sometimes a challenge. But there is so much great gear out there that allows us to bring that to life on stage that it has never been a problem.”