A Conversation with Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda – HuffPost 7.25.12
Mike Ragogna: Mike, production-wise, your new album LIVING THINGS was another collaboration between you and Rick Rubin, right?
Mike Shinoda: Yeah, Rick and I teamed up again on this. I guess that’s just a function of working with our band. I generally handle the ins and outs of production.
MR: How does the interaction with Rick work?
MS: Ever since we started with Rick, I’ve been kind of co-producing. Our working style is really different from what people would expect most bands to do. With that said, figuring out what to call what is a little tough. When people think of most bands writing a song, they think of bands getting together in a room and jamming and writing stuff together; basically writing the song and then recording the song. That’s really not how we work. Ours is a really fluid process, we kind of go back and forth. From the beginning, we’re writing it, we’re recording it, we’re mixing it, and even all the way down to the point where you’re mastering the album, which is the very very last step, we’re still writing a little bit. Every part is always open to change. We’re constantly trying to better the songs and even in the process of mixing the songs, we might change something as drastic as the chorus.
MR: So you have a final mix and then you say, “Let’s touch up this chorus”?
MS: On LIVING THINGS, just to give you an example, during the mixing process — for the people who are less familiar with mixing and recording an album, you should be done writing by the time you get to mixing. For us, that’s not how it works. Mixing is where you take the tracks and you kind of organize them and present them for your final album. For us, on every album, we’ve gotten to that point and said, “We still want to tweak things and make them a little better.” On this one, we actually changed the words of one bridge entirely and we added guitar on a song where they didn’t even exist before. We were mixing the song and we realized, “This song isn’t as bold or as big as it’s supposed to sound.” We thought all the sounds were there, but they weren’t. Luckily, our mixing studio was like twenty minutes away from our recording studio, so I just drove down the street, tracked the guitars, brought them back, and Brad was sitting there with our mixer. By the time he had even finished with our notes, I had brought back the guitars that belonged.
MR: Nice. Which song was that?
MS: I believe that was either “In My Remains” or “I’ll Be Gone”
MR: I think I get some of the concepts behind the songs on this album, like “Burn it Down,” that you’ve got to build it up to burn it down. Or am I missing the point?
MS: Well, definitely not. I think for us, the lyrics of the songs are whatever you want to take out of them. I think that came from a few years ago, I was doing an interview with our drummer Rob and we were talking about a song from Meteora, our second album, and the writer we were speaking to asked about the lyrical content and I told him what the song was about. After the interview, Rob said to me, “You know, man, I never even knew what that song was about. I thought it was about something completely different.” For him, it kind of took away from the song a little bit, because he had believed that his version of it was what it was about, and knowing that it was about something else was really jarring for him. It got us into the conversation, “What does it mean for somebody to bring their own story to a song?” Ever since then, I think we’ve been a little more careful about telling people what it means. You know, to be honest, we get the songs to a certain point, and once we put out our record, it’s up to the fans to decide how the song gets finished. In other words, we lead you to a certain point in the road and we say, “Okay, the rest of it is your call. You bring your own interpretation to the song.” In the case of most of these songs, I think Chester (Bennington) is coming from a certain place, I’m coming from my own experience, and on top of that, there are oftentimes metaphor and maybe a third read. In the case of “Burn it Down,” we’re talking about my personal story and his personal story, and there’s also a layer of pop culture that plays a role in the lyrics of the song. For example, people build up a certain celebrity or musician or actor or whatever and they’re popular one minute and the next thing, you know either they’ve done something wrong or they’ve done nothing wrong and there’s just a bad rumor that goes around about them and then everybody’s attacking that person. That’s just the way things are. We’ve actually lived through that as a band. All that stuff plays a role.
MR: Hey, Mike, on a song like “Lies, Greed, Misery,” do you get any more of an affinity to the storyline when you’re rapping on it?
MS: For me, it’s always coming from something that I have firsthand experience with, whether that be my own story or one of my close friends. We have a song called “Road Less Traveled” where I kind of wrote the song for one of my best friends. In every case, I feel like my best stuff comes when I’m thinking about something I feel strongly about. One day, I may not be inspired to talk about something, and then the next day, I may, and that’s when I really try and dig into the lyrics of whatever might be optimal. Usually, for me, it’s like the music will bring out that emotion or that inspiration and I just try and follow it.
MR: “Lost in the Echo” is probably my favorite track on this album. Without going into the meaning, what inspired it?
MS: “Lost in the Echo” started with mostly electronic sounds. I think that was one of those moments that defined what this album was going to be about. The past two years, whenever I brought anything in that sounded very much like Linkin Park — the thing that people think Linkin Park is supposed to be — the guys in the band kind of really turned away from it. For an album, I bring in anywhere between twenty-five to seventy-five demos to arrive at what we end up choosing for the record. Especially on the last two albums, a lot of those rough ideas can be really similar to what end up on the album or they can be just the egg that it hatches from. The thing about “Lost in the Echo” was it sounded a lot like what the “song” sounds like, I think. When the guys heard it, I kind of said to them, “What do you think about that?” and their responses, for the first time in a few years, were pretty good. They were like, “Yeah, we hear the merit. Let’s develop that idea. Let’s see what we want to do.” I said to them, “You know, this is like a real moment for us, now, on this album.” On the last two albums, if I brought in something like this, not everyone would’ve given it the green light; they would’ve said, “Oh, this sounds too predictable.” But clearly, we’re at a moment where we’re bridging a gap between what we’ve been doing and the future of the band, so that was one of those songs that kind of set the bar.
MR: It seems like you guys are progressing with each of the albums, experimenting more, and integrating things with the Linkin Park sound. Do you hear or feel the evolution?
MS: I mean, it’s hard to see it from inside, you know? It isn’t until we finish a record and step back that we get a real sense of what it is, at least for me. But when we’re in the studio, I’m personally always trying to figure out, “What haven’t I done, what I haven’t I tried, what can I do this time around and what kind of sounds have we not made?” We used to be called Hybrid Theory before we were called Linkin Park. The Hybrid Theory idea is the philosophy that we built the band on. It’s not just about jamming popular styles together, it’s a function of the band members being really honestly into a lot of different kinds of music, and as we’ve gotten older, that library of stuff that we like has gotten deeper and broader. When we were doing Hybrid Theory, we were really focused on a certain kind of rap, a certain kind of hip-hop, a certain kind of rock, a certain kind of electronic music, and as we’ve grown up, we’ve started to broaden that melting pot. On this record, it not only includes all these different types of music, but also stuff going back as deep as folk music from the twenties and futuristic sounds that hopefully feel as cutting edge as they feel when we’re in the studio. We’re also bridging the gap between our own records.
MR: Rick Rubin has been associated with so many different recordings and styles, but lately, he seems to be more of an organic producer. It’s fun to see him on projects that are more experimental. Not that I wouldn’t associate Rick Rubin with that, but you can never predict him or guess what his next creative move is.
MS: Yeah. I think he’s a great match for us right now. When we started with Rick, I was terrified because of maybe my top ten favorite albums, he’s produced half of them. I’m just a huge fan of the stuff that he’s done and once we got past that point of being nervous about working with Rick, we got a little bit of momentum and a rhythm. He’s such a great match for us, because of the things that we want to do, the ways that we want to mix styles, it helps us to have somebody who not only understands all those styles because they listen to them, but also because they have a hands-on working experience and a really deep catalog and understanding of what makes these different types of songs special. When we were working on the song “Until it Breaks,” which is kind of our attempt to do a Beatles White Album kind of all-in-one song, it’s just a bunch of craziness, jumping from one sound to the next to the next to the next, all in the span of less than five minutes. Some of the ideas we were throwing out ranged from Beatles to electronica to folk, all of that stuff that we were thinking about. I was thinking that there aren’t really any other producers where we could have this conversation and they would really know their s**t the way Rick does — and not just that, but to connect with us on a personal level; to have that conversation and not miss a beat.
MR: Mike, what advice might you have for new artists?
MS: It’s hard for me to give advice to new artists, because the industry environment we grew up in was so different. We were coming up playing shows at little clubs and everything. We’d put out a sign-up list to keep in touch with the band, and more than half of the list would sign up with their home address and phone number because they simply didn’t have email yet. When we came up with the name Linkin Park, we wanted to go with the presidential spelling but we chose L-i-n-k-i-n because we wanted to get the domain “.com.” There really wasn’t a Google yet. So if you can imagine coming from that and everything that’s happened since then, we’ve had to roll with it and really stay in touch with our fans, stay in touch with the technology, and try and stay ahead of the curve. I think that amount of perspective makes it tough for me to tell young artists what to do because we’re so used to just keeping our eye on what the next thing is, and a lot of these folks are growing up with those things being a reality. But a lot of that stuff aside, clearly, the thing that has always been a focus for us is making sure your songs are where everything is based on. You could have the best promotion in the world, you could get name-brand producers and video directors, whatever. Young artists are always aspiring to get with somebody else who is talented and say that that’s going to take their band to the next level. But truthfully, these days, with the direct-to-fan relationship you can build these days online, that stuff is less and less important. We built our thing on making our own music, making our own videos, doing everything ourselves to any degree that we can, and if all the other stuff went away, I feel like we’d still be pretty autonomous. I think that’s the lesson for young artists.
MR: How did you enjoy your recent Jimmy Kimmel stint?
MS: Oh, that was really cool. We played Jimmy’s show a few times. He and his team were there and invited us to play two nights. It was really fun. The fans were crazy, we were home from a crazy tour and happy to be back, so it was really exciting, being able to do stuff like that while you’ve got the opening of a record and fans being super-supportive of the album and everything. On our last record, we were really challenging the fans, thinking the sound of the record was going to polarize people and it was going to be like a conflict as soon as the album came out, and we were ready for that. This album was more like we were giving fans something they’d been asking for a long time, so it was a whole different kind of experience — support of the records, making us number one here in the States, which is incredible. That was a really tight race here in the States. I think we edged out Maroon 5 by less than a thousand records, so it was a really close one.
MR: And, of course, you have that music initiative with Open Labs and Dell, right?
MS: Yeah. That’s a new thing we’re actually doing EDM. The story behind that is that I’ve been using Open Labs stuff on my keyboard. Right now, we’re putting up the limited edition pro version. If you go onto https://www.LinkinPark.com, you’ll find the link to the limited edition Dell computer with the touch screen, and the software is on there. There’s a bank of limited edition Linkin Park sounds, so you can basically make your own music using our sounds, a lot of which are unreleased. They’re things from our demos, they’re things that we had in our songs that we pulled out. There are actually some things there that are in our songs on record. So all that stuff is in the Open Labs/Dell product, and you should go check that out. On the radar, too, we have an amateur version of that, a more “mainstream” version of that. The version that’s out right now is a more “pro” version geared towards writing stuff and playing it on stage, and the version that will be coming out sometime in the next twelve months, I think, will be more of a broad thing. This one that’s out right now is a limited edition package with sounds and that’s the thing that differentiates it.
MR: Cool. Okay, thanks, Mike, for your time and all the information.
MS: Thanks, Mike.
Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne