Mike Shinoda

their seventh studio album, One More Light. It became their fifth album to debut at number one on the Billboard Album Chart, and in fact, all the two of their albums have debuted at number one, which is a pretty remarkable run over an eighteen year stretch. But what should have been a moment of celebration was marked by tragedy. On May eighth, the day before the release of One More Light It, Chris Cornell of Sound Garden took his

own life. Cornell and Lincoln Park's Chester Bennington were close, and at a memorial service in Los Angeles ten days later, Bennington saying Hallelujah, accompanied by bandmate Brad Delson on guitar. Here's how Bennington paid tribute to Cornell on Twitter. Your voice was joy and pain, anger and forgiveness, love and heartache all wrapped up into one. I suppose that's what

we all are. You helped me understand that thing week. Indeed, Bennington had a lot of pain and heartache of his own, more than a share who cares it for more like goes out in the sky of fa millions, and two months later, on July, he took his own life, as some people immediately noted that day was Chris Cornell's birthday. Kind of thing that can make you think you understand an action that at its core resists easy explanations or understanding.

As Mike Shinoda explains, he himself grew up a visual artist and a musician, and he's always used his art as a way of processing his experience of making sense of things. But immediately after Chester's death, he really wasn't sure what to do. It was weird because when I look back at it, I don't think there's ever been a time when I've not been able to go write, Like when I felt like weird about writing a song. It's always like, if I have something going on, that's

like the best time to go write a song. You know you're dealing with stuff. I use my visual art and my music as therapy, so it's always like a thing. If I'm going through something difficult, oftentimes I'll go straight to the songwriting stuff. But with this, there was a time where I was really like scared to be in the studio a little bit. Let'm like scared, but just like anxious. What was going on? Well, yeah, so after Chester passed, it was hard for me to go in

the studio for a while. And then at a certain point, I remember speaking to Dave Phoenix from the band and um, actually all of us got together at Dave's house and he had said, oh, have you guys listened to any of our music yet? And everyone was like, no way, but he had, and he was like, you know, it was hard. It seemed scarier than it was, you know, And now that I've listened to it, I know I can listen to it. Well. The same thing happened to

me with getting in the studio. It's like, at first it seemed like, oh man, it's gonna feel really weird to go in and write about anything. And I did a few I just kind of, you know, bit the bullet and went in and did some stuff and some of it was really just screwing around and just playing whatever, like play guitar for a couple of hours, or just doodle around on the piano, or make some sounds, make a little like beat. Eventually I was making songs every day.

It seemed like all the ones that were about stuff that was actually going on, songs that were actually serious songs, most of those just kind of turned in this record, I Don't have a Leg to Stand, spinning like a whirl and in the Land. The solo music Shinoda began to release starting in January, talked about loss in ways

that we're both deeply personal and universal. In a song called Place to Start, he sang about feeling like he was in a whirlwind, sometimes scared that everything he'd built might fall apart, sometimes feeling like he was so focused on endings that he'd run out of the will to find a beginning. But it felt less like a song

and more like a page out of his journal. And that feeling was reinforced by a video he put out of him simply singing this ang into his phone, which was more like a skype call than a video from a musician who's been selling out arenas for almost two decades, and that immediacy was the whole point. Shonota was figuring out things as he went and sharing the process. And when I say figuring out things as he went, I

mean it very literally. The first verse of over Again was written and recorded on October, the day Lincoln Park played a memorial concert at the Hollywood Bowl, with friends from Blink, No Doubt, Korn, and many others stepping in to help honor Chester Bennington. Shinodah is describing the feelings he had beforehand, right down to wanting to puke his

guts out rather than get on stage. But at the same time, anyone who's experienced the death of a friend or a loved one is wrestled with what's expressed in the chorus of this song. That's saying goodbye isn't confined to a single moment or even a series of moments. It happens over and over and over again. And anyone who's experience loss also knows the moment when someone comes up to you and expresses his or her condolences, and it is more to do with them than it does

with you. Shinodah talks about this and hold it together, they say that they sympathize. I'm grateful they take the time for bringing it up. But to six year old, what I really wanted to do with a lot of those things, and it happens in the show too, is to take you and put you in my shoes, you like, and make sure that when you're hearing it, it's like, oh shit, like I haven't thought of what it must

be like, right. And there were a few moments like like that on the record where you know, somebody's asking about you know, oh, it must be so hard, are you okay? And whatever, and it's like, you know what, motherfucker, I was doing really good until you started bringing it up, Like I haven't even thought about that all day. Now I'm thinking about it and we're at a birthday party.

Maybe you could have stopped yourself like thirty seconds ago and said, wait, it's now the appropriate time to ask this or to say this, like maybe we wait till later to understand the magnitude of the loss that charges post traumatic and you have to understand how Chester Bennington in My Shinoda each served as the engine of one another's dreams. When Lincoln Park first released their debut album,

hybrid theory. In two thousand, they were lumped in with a lot of other bands that had grown up on both heavy guitars and hip hop, and some of them shared a pensiont for the gratuitous use of the letter K when spelling their names. I'm thinking here of Corn and Limp Biscuit. But Lincoln Park were bigger and have lasted longer in part because they did more, not just made me USI with a broader range, more open to

other sounds and feelings than pure rage. It's also as they were coming up, they cared about nothing but playing shows and meeting fans afterwards. We're shooting for the title of hardest working band in America. Bennington boasted to Rolling Stone in two thousand and one, and that is the year that they did three hundred and twenty four live performances, which is not exactly one a day for a full year. It's one every one point one seven days. I did

the math. They also had something that other bands with the K didn't too, vocalists Mike Shinodah and Chester Bennington. Shinodah was the rapper, Bennington was the singer and also the screamer and also everything in between. On breakthrough songs like In the End, Bennington could sound delicate like the piano and raw like the guitars. It was like a whole band in one throat. It starts with I don't know why it doesn't need no matter how hard to keep that in mind, I protect to was playing to

do one thing. I don't know why it doesn't need to. It took more than a year for Hybrid Theory to climb to number two on the album chart. Don't let that number to fool you. It was a dominator. Hybrid Theory would become the best selling album of two thousand and one, beating out records from jay Z and Sinc. And Britney Spears, and it stayed on the Billboard chart for two hundred and nine weeks. A little more than

four years gets sold better than ten million copies. Lincoln Park went added hard when they were on stage and hard when they weren't, but not the way most bands did. We'd rather go to somebody's house and write a song than go to a party, Shinoda told Rolling Stone in two thousand and three. At parties, you knew what was going to happen, you knew who was going to get drunk. But when we got together to write songs, we never knew what was going to happen. It was much more exciting.

Lincoln Park became the biggest new rock band of the two thousand's for years. They had their own touring festival project Revolution that in two thousand and four featured both Corn and Snoop Dogg. Thank You, Thank You, Thank you kind And that's the same year they get a special friend, TV jay Z that became the Collision Core CP, the rare man ship project that works for more than a few minutes at the time. It's amazing how well Numb and Encore go together and how much each side gets

from the other. Lincoln Park is a whole new kind of swagger. Jay Z has a new kind of thunder. It shouldn't work, but it totally does, you know. After that, it was natural that Lincoln Park hook up with producer Rick Rubin, who had masterminded some of the first fusions of rock, guitar and hip hop with Run DMC and

The Beastie Boys. They recorded three albums with Ruben, who pushed them to write songs rather than make tracks, and on songs like Shadow of the Day from two thousand and sevens Minutes to Midnight, they sounded more like a band than ever. In fact, they sounded like they were ready to be the next you Tube. At the beginning for Lincoln Park, everybody played two roles, one in the band, one behind the scenes. Shinoda and keyboardist turntablist John handled

the visuals, with Han directing the videos. Guitarist Delson and drummer Rob Borden handled some marketing and finance duties. Bassist Dave Farrell was the tour correspondent, doing updates for their website, but Bennington's job was more like being the heart of the band. He and Shinoda wrote the lyrics, and in interviews he embodied the pain, the angst, and the positivity

expressed in the songs. He talked about his past, his struggles with addiction and childhood abuse, and he talked about being a regular guy, about working hard, and about life being good. The band had existed before Chester Bennington joined. They'd written songs, they'd played together, they had recorded, but it only really came together once he was there to add a voice and a face and a heart to the music. It's no surprise that you notice says, now,

the future of the band is an open question. It's tempting to hear all of post Traumatic as a reaction to Bennington's death. Some songs aren't so sometimes even those have a way of coming back to the subject. But

there's a post in post Traumatic for a reason. Mike Shinoda is struggling to find the way to move forward, and in one of his first in depth sit downs since Chester Bennington's death, we talked about whether or not there's a future for Lincoln Park, what it's going to be like to go on tour playing his own music and some Lincoln Park songs by himself on stage in massive festivals, and how much Chester Bennington meant him. Let's hear what Mike Shinoda has to say. So, how are you.

I'm good, Yeah, I'm good. Yeah. Tell me about putting this record together. First, Let's start at the beginning. Now, the songs that we heard on the post Traumatic EP seemed to very directly address Chester's death and your feelings afterwards. But are you saying that there were other songs you were making during that period that we're about something else or or didn't fit into this project but had a

different direction. It was mostly that I was writing about whatever was on my mind, so usually that would fit under the umbrella of this album. I did a couple of things that were a little more like stylistically like way different, Like I've joked around. It was like the sounded like like a bad Smashing Pumpkin song or like a Nine Inch Nails song or something. Yeah, those just didn't pan out like I did them for fun, just to do it. But the vast majority of the stuff

I made became post traumatic. And there's sixteen songs on the record, which is the longest album I've ever done or been involved with. I should say, you know, it's autobiographical. It had this live journal feel to it. I mean it's journalistic in some sense, particularly once those videos started coming out. Tell me about the process of putting together those videos. There's place to start over again. I had

done the first few songs. I didn't know where it was going to go, but I knew I had some songs, and the first ones it seemed to me that it should be in some chronological order or something that resembled that. So the first few songs I had were the ones you just named, and I decided At one point I was listening back to them in my studio on the sofa, and I pulled out my phone and I I had this idea of what a video for that song could look like, and I just pulled out my phone and

did a selfie video of it. I just saw the look of the thing, and I thought that would actually make a kind of cool video, so I just shot it, and then later, having done that, I did another one, and I did some more little shots and it became stylistically that again, like autobiographical kind of depiction of what I was doing felt like the right way to visually represent the songs. What it did is it removed any

kind of like intermediary in the conversation. It was just me talking to you right as opposed to like it's being shot by a director. Here's Mike talking about this really personal stuff, and we storyboarded out this really cool narrative. All of that was removed, the feelings happening in time and the songs being documented that way. Yes, And once I did them, it became part of the visual aesthetic of the whole thing. Part of the idea was from the paintings that I was doing at the time, those

became the packaging, they became the merchandise. The videos and the autobiographical nature. Just like the communication style is there on the record, it's there in the visuals. In one sense, it just blurs the line between real time social media and videos and things that you don't usually think of as a real time Like the most recent when I did was for a song about you, which we just put out a couple of weeks ago. Decided to put

it out. The week that we were putting it out, I decided to shoot the video while I was out promoting the record, and I flew to China. I was already going to be out there to do some record promo and shoot some stuff for tour announcements in Asia, And while I was there, we shot the video and then a few days later it was on the internet. Like everything is in real time. And just to be clear for people who haven't heard it, about you, like a lot of songs on this record is addressing loss,

so about you. The idea of the song is even when I don't think the song is about this, even when I don't think the moment is about this, it comes back to this, right or there's two versions of it. Sometimes when I'm writing about something, it does come back to the context of having lost Chester or the uncertainty of the band's current situation. The other thing is, though, that even when I actually don't write a song having anything to do with those things, people see it through

that lens. So, in other words, just to put it into somebody else's context entirely, so that you can see where I'm coming from. Joe, if you have a public breakup with a woman, let's say you get both super celebrities and you're dating, this is going to be really imaginary. But okay, Scarlett Johansson, right, good for me. And then you broke up and everyone's like, oh man, they broke up. It's on the front page of all the things and

all that, and people are talking about it. And then you go and you get coffee in your sweats and they take pictures of you and it's like, oh see, he's super depressed, Like didn't put on jeans in the shirt today today it was sweats, Like he must be super depressed. It's all about her. And then you get a slice of pizza. You see he got the like five different toppings could have been. Yeah, he's really hurting

right now. They see everything through this lens of like what they think you're going through, and even if you're like no, I literally just felt comfortable in my pj's and I went and got a slice of pizza because I like pizza. Guys, Like, that's all there is to it. There's no reason to read further into it. But that's just how our world works. They're gonna start seeing things through that lens. In fact, just this weekend I had

my first show. Two shows. Actually, I did a double header and did a radio show in the afternoon and did a longer headline set in the evening. It was in front of City Hall in l A. It was part of an Asian festival. Really special way to like kick things off. Perfect for me. I just loved it. A couple of the journalists who came and wrote about the events called it a tribute show. So I asked online just today, I tweeted, did you guys think that these were tribute shows? And if so, like, do you

feel like that means it was sad? Did it feel like sad overall? Not that it didn't feel bitter sweet at certain moments. There was definitely a tribute moment I played in the end and we sang it together, just piano and me and the crowd. You mentioned that you were working these tracks chronologically, and I'm curious to know is the album sequenced that way. For the most part,

it's not exact chronology. It doesn't follow exactly in the order in which they were written or have happened, because I did, as a listener have this sensation of getting too not exactly the more upbeat songs, but definitely the sense of as the tracks go on, I'm getting this feeling of you're going on, You're moving on right, And I think that one thing that's different about this album than most albums I've put out, from all the Lincoln

Park albums to the fourth Minor album. Usually, when you put out an album, it's hey, I finished a thing, check out the thing I made. It's finished. And this is almost like I started a thing, like this is an album that captures a moment in time for the last six to nine months, and it is what it is, and now I'm going to continue to evolve and move on from here. Because we get deeper into the album, we come to these tracks like make it Up As

I go World's on Fire. These are songs that seemed to me we're addressing the same sorts of problems or feelings. Make it up as I go? How do I go? On? Worlds on fire? This is a bad time. But they were also had another side to them. They had this side of like, here's how I get past this? Yeah, so like make it up as I go. Actually started the hook of that we wrote towards the end of One More Light. It was Brad and I and k Flay.

That song is more about in its inception of having that feeling of like not knowing what the next steps are, but you just kind of power through it and figure it out as you go. And I thought, you know, I came back to that song because I just always loved it, And then I wrote the verses more recently. I think that one relates a little more closely this stuff of this last year. But the other one you

mentioned the World's on fire. When I wrote that one, the course of that is basically the World's on fire, But all I need is you. It's the first time I've really written that kind of like it's like almost like just a love song. I was specifically thinking of my family It occurred to me because it was one of those days when I was like really like up to my eyeballs in my social media feed and it

seems like everything was just a mess. You know, you're reading it's like the political tweets are firing and everybody's like freaked out about the state of the country, in the state of the world, and then environmental tweets and like net neutrality tweets, and then on top of it, like there's like five wildfires going on in Los Angeles at the same time, so all of this is happening at once, and all of that without the crap that I had been through in the six months proceeding, that

would have been enough as it was, but all put together was just like everything is just falling apart of the seems what a mess. And then I can go like sit down and play with my kids, and it all kind of evaporates. And what's so interesting is receiving it now. I connected to some comments you've made about lost being like a wildfire. You know, things are destroyed in a clear space for something new. But also there's that image. The image of the wildfire is actually in

the Nothing makes Sense video. Keep in mind. I grew up thinking I was going to be a painter. I grew up in art. I went to school for illustration. I've had three gallery shows now. The only reason I haven't had more is because I'm busy with the playing music. You know, there's that minor distraction in the world. Doing that, I would do what I really want to do in

all seriousness. I grew up painting, And one of the things I get out of doing an art show, creating a body of work that way is that when you walk in, if it's done right, like, you have a sense of this thread of intention that just weaves its way through everything that you're experiencing. Because some shows there's painting and installation and sound and all of these different ways that you can communicate the concept of the thing.

And so this record, in a sense, I wanted to bring a little bit of that gallery experience, with that gallery intention to the thing. So something we mentioned, like the fires or or other symbolism on the record, it occurs in various media in the whole effort, And still I'm still weaving it in even as we're starting to do live shows and and look at the production to the show. But it's funny to me as a listener, how conflicting some of the emotions on this record are.

There are moments of real rising above, like I think of can't hear You Now, which is almost like a battle rap if you're a hater, I can't hear you now. But because that's really one way of looking at that song and hearing that song, really, I think that was the intention of the song for sure, And yet I hear it now and I come to that line woke up knowing I don't have to be numb again, and I think, oh, yeah, maybe that's a reference back to

this other thing I've been thinking about on this record. Well, that's the reality of the record and of going through something like this is you know, most of us know it's that it's messy and the references going to blend into one another. And even I listened to it and I go, oh, yeah, I was definitely thinking about a But subconsciously there's a little bit of be in there. You know. It's funny with a tragedy like this, Sometimes difficult days are the good days. Sometimes you have a

good day. Everything's fine, you're with your kids, you're with your family, you don't think about the other thing, and you catch yourself feeling good and that feels strange. I thought that I would get taken off guard by that more than I did. A lot of people that I I've talked to had real difficult battles with feeling guilty for feeling good. One person described it as like I made it all the way to lunch without thinking of the horrible thing that had happened. In their case, it

was it was similar with somebody passing away. Oh I made it all the way to lunch without thinking of them. Oh my god, I'm so horrble that I didn't think about them until lunch, And it's like no, no, no for me, I'm like grateful on days when I can get back to more of a sense of normal, there's

no disrespect or guilt that should come with that. Maybe I don't feel like elty because I did feel like when things kind of fell apart and the dust settled, that I was able to take a step back and look at my life and say, Okay, am I doing things that I'm proud of? Am I doing good things? Like what I do with the music and my professional life. Is that in a good balance with my family and like, am I taking care of my wife and my kids

and that type of stuff. I do feel like I looked at that and said, yeah, I'm doing I'm doing good fine, And this isn't just about like sell records and make money. This is about getting out with the people that have been hard. My Lincoln Park and individual musical community we have like a family. There are people with my drawings and signatures and banned artwork tattooed on

their bodies. This is a a moment in time when they have been there for me when I'm feeling like I don't know what the hell is going on, and when I have been there for them to reassure them that things are going to be okay. I'm not responsible for them, they're not responsible for me. But we can be support for one another, and they can be support for one another without me even being in the picture.

It's really reassuring to see that. I wish there was a way for me to like share that with more people, because when I look in my mentions and I see them talking to one another and saying such wonderful things, like I mean, the end of the thought was just that that's really reassuring the other day, when I did that show at l A City Hall, some of the fans had gotten there super early in the morning, six in the morning or something, and it was an unusually

cold day and l a kind of rainy. I saw them tweeting like san tacos and pickets, send blankets and tacos, right, believe it or not. One of the folks on our side, like who works at Warner Brothers. His name's Adam and he ran our Lincoln Park fan club first before he moved over. He got poached by the label. But he's a friend of the community of Lincoln Park and of my music. He went and need to made sure they were okay, Like are you warmed? You guys need some

merchandise in a sweatshirt? Can I get you some water? That's what I'm talking about. Like you'll even see it in in Chester's wife Tlenda's feet. She'll retweet people who are just being kind to one another. Let me ask you about Chester, those of us that knew him through the songs. Yeah, and in the songs, there's a lot of pain, there's a lot of struggle, there's a lot of moving beyond that. But tell me a little bit

about the Chester we didn't know well. The one thing that I like to remind people is that he was naturally gifted with the way he performed in his voice, in particular, like he had a world class, one of a kind voice. Obviously if you didn't know, he could sing basically any genre, any type of song that you threw at him, barring hip hop, maybe a little bit like it wasn't the best rapper. You give him a singing part, and the dude could do anything. It didn't

matter if it was like quiet female singer songwriter. In fact, he'd be singing something like one of our songs, like tracking it in the studio, and I'd say, do it with five more, Dave, gone, do it with twenty five more, Adele. I'd throw out these references of other singers that I wanted him to imitate or at a flavor of, and he knew we had a vocabulary of that type of stuff that I could say to him, and he knew

what I meant. Nobody else had that with him, So that was a thing personally, you know, studio and all that stuff aside. I think when we wrote, we wrote about these difficult topics, but in general, especially in the past few years. He was so much more together then he had been in years prior. Like he joked that

the band was his most stable and together relationship. I think he was saying that in a joking way, because I think with his wife and his kids, I think that was probably number one and we were probably number two. But but just to be clear, there aren't a lot of bands that have a run this long. Just last year, you have a number one album, right, Usually when you have that situation, you have your couple of classic albums

and then it's just you play the old stuff. We were fortunate enough to for most of the records that we put out, we got a number one or two on the rock charts and alternative charts, and a number one release and in many countries. So still very relevant,

is the point. I guess. I think with each album I've ever been involved with, each step of the way, I'm trying to see what have I not done that seems exciting and fun, that will keep it fresh and like in the in a sense of like they to go back to, like that body of work, like this is the art show, like curate your experience, what is the experience you're curating for the fans this time, and how is that different than the other things that you've done.

You've worked with a remarkable range of rappers across the career of Lincoln Park common of course jay Z. Have you given thought to Lincoln Park's impact on hip hop? Oh? Sure, absolutely that I grew up a hip hop kid first and foremost, Like, that's the first type of music I ever got into and fell in love with it and most of what I listened to it. It's the legend that your first show ever was a Public Enemy Anthrax show.

Is that truth? That is my first The first concept I ever went to it was you went in the black young black teenagers primus Public Enemy Anthrax. So you go to that and you're like, we get some depeche Mode keyboards in here, we might have something. It's like, it's almost comedic. How like it sounds like I would just be I'd be making that up right, that that

would be the first show. But if you think about it, at that time, those types of music were being put together for the first time, and it was clumsy, like in a way, there was a simplicity in the way they would just like mash the stuff up together. There were moments when it was really seamless, like walk this way absolutely, like that is an album, Whereas when I listened to it, I go, Okay, that's that's like a

very seamless blend. There's a lot of food analogies in our band, so that would be like a soup where you take the ingredients and you blend them together and you can't tell one ingredient from the other. The Anthrax Public Enemy thing is like a salad. You've got all the ingredients, but you can see them all. They're all separate ingredients, right. So sometimes we take one approach, sometimes we take another, and it's the gray area in the

middle when it becomes really interesting. Whenever I've approached the stuff, just the awareness of how blended do you want this thing to be? The hybrid theory brand of it was like kind of blended, but like you can kind of still see the arts from one another. But if you fast forward a few albums in you start getting songs like on Um. For example, our fourth record was called A Thousand Sons. There's a song on there called when

They Come for Me. When They Come for Me is just this like I don't know what genre that song is. There isn't a name for that thing. This is a long way of saying we were growing up in a time where music was very separate, and I know that we played a role in making it less separate. When I grew up, kids were metal kids, rock kids, rap kids, pop kids. You weren't like just fans of music. People

didn't really do that. I mean, I think early late nineties, early two thousands, you ask somebody what do you listen to and they go, oh, everything, And that was the beginning of oh everything. When I first heard Little Loozy for Exo Tour Life, I was like, you know, this is a rap song that would not exist without you guys. You know I mean that that sense of like those big keyboards, that keyboard drama, being open to that that was a turning point. I think it's it's something different.

Uh Well, also lyrically, if you think about that song, like there's a darkness and and an openness to just saying like, well, this is how I feel I'm going to write about in a depression and whatever. Right, that emo side of current rap, some of those rappers are kind of running from that a little bit and playing that down and saying no, it's not emo or whatever. I get why they're doing that. I would probably feel

the same way. You didn't want to be called a rap rock band in the year two thousand and one only because of the associations. We just wanted it to be clear that they were such a big difference between what a lot of those bands were doing. One of your songs from the fort minor Days deal specifically with identity, and I'm talking about Kenji. Yeah. Yeah. For those who don't know, it's the story of Japanese immigrants held in internment camps during World War Two, it's a personal story

for you. Well, they weren't just immigrants, they were American citizens of Japanese descent. Basically, what happened is when Pearl Harbor was bombed, there was a high that, you know, the highest level of wartime paranoia going on. The American government decided, oh no, like, we don't know who could be a spy, We don't know, you know, what bad things can be happening. I mean, this sounds like it could happen today. Let's just make clear that that there

is a personal dimension here. Yeah. Yeah, my dad's Japanese. My dad's side of the family is all Japanese. I'm half. I grew up understanding that my family had unjustly been put in these camps. Basically, what happened is short version of the story Pearl Harbor happens. The government says, we're putting all the Japanese on the West coast in prison camps.

They tell everybody to get out of their homes. They let them pack two bags of stuff, and you have to leave the rest of your earthly belongings in your house alone. And you say, oh, well, when are we coming back, And there's like, whenever we tell you you can, you get thrown in horse stalls to sleep, sometimes just tents, sometimes busses whatever. Once the camps are built, they are built in the desert. You get shipped off to the desert and you stay there for years until the end

of the war. And then when you go home, your home has been vandalized and some cases burned. Some cases people's stuff was okay, my family's was not. The place was vandalized and everything was stolen um and they had to start their lives over. When I was listening back to the Fort Minor record, I was really struck by the creeping sense of this feels like it should have been impossible, and there are things happening now that feel

like they should be in part. Oh. Yeah, the Japanese American community has been one of the most vocal communities in the past couple of years, especially as it relates to Muslim and immigrants. For example, um, when the whole thing was going on about shutting the borders to to folks who are coming in living in l A, the Japanese American community in in l A was really vocal about that subject. All of a sudden, they want to

start rounding people up again. So of course the Japanese Americans like my family are saying, no, guys, we already made this mistake, and the US government said we can't make it again. You know, you mentioned that that you recently played your first solo shows, and just to be clear, these were really solo shows that we you on stage, nobody else. You've got some dates coming up, I do. I'm headed to Asia and Europe. You're going to play the Reading Festival. Yes, is it just going to be you?

I thinks so I want to try that first and uh see how that feels, and after that we'll see what happens. I mean, I'm curious about what the show would look like if I start adding a couple of people, but I don't also don't want it to be confusing in terms of, like, you know, the fans wondering if it is or is not Lincoln Park, or you know, anything like that. What was the feeling going into these two shows? Were you nervous? Did you know how it would feel to do those Lincoln Park songs by yourself?

I felt ready to do of them. I did feel anxious, quite a bit more anxious before the first show, and I was glad that I did the two on the same day because the first show was almost like a nice warm up, and I then I felt really relaxed going to the second one. To your point, like, I don't know, maybe I'm just really good at compartmentalizing. I felt, Okay. It's impossible to get through, for example, like Lincoln Park

songs without thinking about Chester, you know. You I look out and I see one person like just raging, like screaming and having the best time, and then like I look over the other side and like somebody crying. Right, that's a little tricky, Like that's new that's not something I normally would see. How did it compare to last October when you were at the Hollywood Bowl you did this what was a memorial car? That was yeah, completely different.

In October we had done that show because we realized that we had a private memorial and that the fans didn't have a public one. They didn't have one that they could go to. They didn't get to say goodbye, they didn't get to experience that closure that comes with it. We set that show up, we scheduled it to play that role for the fans. Really don't get it twisted. It was like very hard for us to do. You know. Sometimes we'd be rehearsing stuff and the guys are just like,

can we like, let's take a break. It's like too much. There are a few like realizations that were really necessary about doing it. Number One, the warmth and the connected energy of the whole Lincoln Park fan community of all of the world like really came together around that show and around the band during that time, and I'm super

grateful for that. I mean, everybody was so supportive. It was incredible, and they've continued to be artist community, people jumping in, sending in videos like I wish we could be there coming on stage and singing with us and doing all that really really special we had. I don't

know how the artist twenty something artists, I think. And then in in retrospect, after having done those rehearsals and played the show, you know, even watching it back and stuff, I was like, these people who came on stage with us all have awesome, awesome voices, and they're really really wonderful and talented people, and not a single one of them is chest her like that. There's no one's who even if I'm imagining, like who could we sing these

songs with in the future. Is listening back to those It's like those are all great moments, but that's none of them are sustainable things. There isn't a version of the band that exists with any of those types of people, as wonderful as they are, right, So that just puts more of a I doesn't doesn't add more of a question mark, maybe, but it just checks things off the list that are not. Really we just know what things are not the option, Well, then what are the options?

I don't know. That's the million dollar question, right, And unfortunately, you know I've said it before, but unfortunately there aren't any answers to that at this point. It would be awesome if there were. That would be really easy. Um, I wish we were in in a Brian Johnson Bond Scott situation where it's like, no, the guy, like our best friend who sang for the band who passed away.

He literally said, this is the guy, and we listen to the guy, and the guy is definitely the guy, and we all love hanging out with him and we want to play with him. That's not a normal that that didn't happen to anybody else. Really, that hasn't happened to us. Somebody comes and says, Hay Lincoln Park, do

you want to play a show in Germany? Then you have to have a discussion with all the guys, and you have one guy who's like, I definitely don't want to do any one guy who says, I don't know, maybe I agree, maybe we shouldn't do it, and two

guys to say we definitely need to do it. And then there's concerns and all that noise, like that is not something I can deal with right now, and it's not a knock on anybody else, any one of us could be the outlier opinion though, like minority voice on something. But I definitely need some more simplicity in terms of like decision making, Like oh my gut says that the right thing to do is to shoot a video on the crappy camera on my phone. I chewed it, I look at it, I go I like that, and I

can put it on the internet and it's done. I don't need to call anybody else. And that for me, that power and that and that control has been part of my like recovery process. When you miss Chester, what do you miss most about him? In the beginning, I'll tell you the thing that whenever I saw it, it just made me like so it just like oh' just so painful. Is at the end of every show we put our arm around each other and always say a good show. And that was always such a special moment.

It was always that like really satisfying, like hey, good job, we did it. If the show is really good, then it's like, hey man, that was a good show. It was bad. I was like we made it through that show. Good job. Also, like we always traveled together, we'd have a lot of the same conversations and a lot of

inside jokes, and we played a lot of poker. Those are things, especially on the road, that like other people around us would have mentioned a lot of times, like, man, it's always so funny hearing you guys like post show in the van, like just rambling on about nonsense the way we do. We do that goofy voices. And they had like these characters and he he had like a Russian character that always showed up like in this weird Russian accent. Yeah, that was all really great stuff. I'm

shout to thank you for being here. Good show. Join Inside the Studio for more in depth conversations with the biggest names in music. Search and follow Inside the Studio on I Heart Radio or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so that you never missed an episode. Inside the Studio is an I Heart Radio original podcast created by

Chris Peterson. This episode was written and hosted by me Joe Levy, our executive producer Sandy Smallens for audiation and of course special thanks to Mike Shinodah and Warner Brothers Records.