Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda on ‘Hybrid Theory’ to ‘Living Things’

2012-08-24

Story by Anne Erickson

Linkin Park multi-instrumentalist says band’s new album ‘came at an interesting crossroads for us’

Linkin Park’s debut album, “Hybrid Theory,” may have dropped over a decade ago, but the guys still have it, as their 2011 album “Living Things,” debuted No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart earlier this year. If you ask multi-instrumentalist Mike Shinoda, “Living Things” came at an interesting point in the band’s career– a time when Linkin Park were ready to fashion a new phase in the life of the band.

“This album came at an interesting crossroads for us,” Shinoda recently told the Southtown Sun. “It’s the fifth studio album. The first two [‘Hybrid Theory’ and ‘Meteora’] were kind of like brother records. They were closely related and they sounded very similar.

“With the third album [‘Minutes to Midnight’], we realized if we did another album like the first two, we’d be stuck doing that forever, so we made a patchwork of songs that sounded different from one to the other. With the fourth album [‘A Thousand Suns’], we took the concept album kind of route and picked one idea and went as far down the rabbit hole as we could.”

So, on “Living Things,” Shinoda says the band “looked back and realized we were comfortable with the whole journey maybe for the first time ever… It’s frankly the most energetic thing we put together in the last few years.” The boys of Linkin Park are currently on the Honda Civic Tour with Incubus, and the trek wraps up Sept. 10 in San Diego, Calif. (Photo credit: Anne Erickson.)

 




Anne Erickson
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