Mike Shinoda did a Q&A with Amazon Music, we have posted about the Q&A regarding The Hunting Party but not about the books, however we thought it would be better to keep it all organized here. I’ve also added the new promotional picture (above) that was featured on one of the Q&As in the gallery.
What books were your entry point into reading?
As a kid, even at three or four, I was really interested in reading. I would ask my parents what every word said or meant. It was probably pretty annoying, but they were excited that I was interested so early. At my grade school the kids were separated by reading level, and I was in a group with only one other person because we were already reading at the level of high school sophomores. It was just me and this girl with our desks pushed together in the corner of the room, completely isolated. Luckily we weren’t complete nerds, so we didn’t get stuff thrown at us. The first book I remember being really into was Call of The Wild. It was the first one I felt like I wanted to read on my own.
What’s your strongest memory of reading as kid?
I remember doing a project in high school on Lord of the Flies and being really fascinated by the arc of the story – the idea of these young boys gone wild and they have to make up their own rules.
What sorts of books do you read now?
I don’t read a lot of fiction anymore. The book that is currently in the stack next to my bed is The Big Sort by Bill Bishop, which is about how Americans separate themselves into likeminded groups and how that creates a bit of isolation and keeps people from relating to one another. I occasionally will read fiction because my wife Anna is a writer of young adult fiction. She just released her first book, Learning Not To Drown, and she is very discerning when it comes to recommending a book for me. She was the first to turn me on to David Sedaris. She told me about House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, which is about a clone who lives in this future country that exists between the border of America and Mexico and ruled over by an opium king.
How do you pick which nonfiction books you’ll read?
Usually from a recommendation. I get recommendations from friends in emails or in conversations.
Has a fan ever recommended a book to you?
I read Freakonomics because a fan recommended it to me. A lot of fans, if we talk about books, know that type of books that tend to pique my interest. And I loved Freakonomics.
When your wife was writing her novel did you get to read various drafts?
She let me read it at various points when she felt like she had gotten the book to the next level. I probably read it a dozen times because she’d been writing it over the course of almost 10 years. I read many different versions of it. Just thinking about reading it once a year… a lot happens in that amount of time.
Do the things you read ever make their way into your songwriting?
The only times a book has informed the lyrics of a song, the inspiration was usually a children’s book. Our writing process is very long – we may work on an album for nine or even 12 months – and during that time we’re always coming back to the vocals and the lyrics and continually working on them. So the lyrics end up existing on all these different levels. There’s one song called “Burning In the Skies,” which has this theme of taking your environment for granted—it’s destroyed and you’re potentially unable to get it back. Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax came up in conversation about that song. I brought up Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree when we were writing the song “Until It’s Gone.” It’s a flip on the idea of “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” and our story is not just about taking something for granted but also being able to let something go in order for it to reach its potential. The Giving Tree was a story that dealt with that as well.
What book would you recommend to fans of Linkin Park?
The first one that comes to mind is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It’s fiction. It was recommended to me by our bass player Dave [Farrell]. Especially for people in their 30s; it uses a lot of pop culture references from the ‘80s and does an incredible job of capturing those things in a story. For musicians and people trying to do things that are creative I love the book Becoming A Category of One by Joe Calloway. He approaches it in the context of a company trying to differentiate itself from other companies, but if you can see past that and think of it as a creative person, then it’s about what you can do for yourself. I try to challenge myself to benchmark what I’m doing against things in other categories. You have to look at anything that could be comparable in any way ever. This book is about how to transcend the norm. And, of course, I should say the other book fans should check out is Learning Not To Drown, my wife’s book.
The Hunting Party
What was the vision when you first started working on The Hunting Party?Source: Amazon Music Notes
I write most of the demos for our albums and I had written a handful of things that I liked in an indie/alternative style. I listen to tons of different types of music, and one day I was trying to find a more aggressive and heavy sound. But I couldn’t find what I wanted. It started to get frustrating. I couldn’t believe there weren’t more bands playing this certain sound I wanted to hear. When I went back to listen to my own demos, I didn’t like them anymore—they were soft and derivative. One day the band came over to the studio for a session and I said, “I know I played you guys a bunch of demos you liked, but I think we need to change direction.” I played them some more aggressive stuff and we all agreed that that sound was much more exciting.
Where did you record?
The majority of our past albums were recorded at NRG Studios [in North Hollywood]. But this time I felt there were other studios more equipped to capture the right sound for this album. We wanted a grittier and more raw sound. We visited a bunch of studios, but ended up spending the most time at two studios. One was a well known studio called EastWest, which is where everyone from Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys to Rage Against the Machine, Tool and Muse have worked.
Was it an easy process?
It was inspired and clear. Once we got the initial idea we were laser-focused. That was partially because of what the idea was. I remember having a conversation with our guitarist Brad and I was explaining where I wanted to go with the new album’s sound. I knew the only way to get there was for Brad to play guitar again. He’s been playing since he was a little kid and would play six hours a day. But at one point in the ’00s he got burnt out and tired of playing guitar. More than just being anti-guitar, he was pro-experimentation. He wanted to play with different instruments and be creative in different ways.
What did you say to inspire his return to guitar?
I said to him, “Imagine I’m you when you were 13 and I’m sitting here thinking about Linkin Park. Would the guitar work on a Linkin Park album inspire me to become a guitarist?” Probably not. From a technical standpoint, I don’t think it’s the kind of playing that makes a young guitarist go, “Holy crap, I need to be a guitarist! I need to learn that instrument.” That experience tends to happen with an instrument that sounds a little more complex and has a different energy. Brad really connected with that idea – we all did – so we wrote the kind of album that would make our teenage selves want to learn to play instruments.
It seems important for all musicians to make that connection…
It felt right. It was such a clear picture. We all know what music inspired us at certain points in our lives. When I was a teenager I liked very specific [bands and musical genres] and hated everything else. I liked one percent of music and I hated 99 percent. And today I’m the opposite. I like so many different kinds of music, so this wasn’t the most obvious way to approach an album for me. But it got us really focused and inspired. And at a certain point we knew we didn’t even need a producer. I always do our in-house production. This time, Brad and I were handling much of the production and it was clear where we were going. So when the time came to talk about producers, we realized we weren’t interested in having anybody join us. So this album is self-produced.
What inspired you to enlist guest musicians for the album, like guitar virtuoso Tom Morello and Page Hamilton of alt-metal outfit Helmet?
I love many different types of music and I can write in many different styles. If I hear a [song or sound], I can emulate or copy it, or write something that’s relative. Most of the time that’s really useful and a lot of fun. But on this album we realized it’s better to go to the source of the sound. Rather than saying, “Let’s play something that sounds like Helmet,” we instead reached out to Page, who is Helmet, to see if he wanted to play on our song.
You’ve been talking a lot about the state of rock music lately. What’s your perspective on that?
The idea for The Hunting Party was a reaction to feeling that rock music right now is very safe and soft. At least in the U.S., the rock genre is now mostly just pop music. You hear Lorde, Mumford and Sons or Avicii on the radio—and that’s your rock station? I like listening to [those artists], but I don’t know how I feel about that being the meat and potatoes of my rock station. Those are all pop artists. It was time to go against the grain and make a statement with a rock album.
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