Since forming in 1996, Linkin Park has sold over 100 million records worldwide. Their enormous success mixing genres like hip-hop, metal and anthemic pop was spearheaded by the band’s ultra-talented founder, Mike Shinoda. In this episode Rick Rubin talks to Mike about the albums he produced with Linkin Park that helped redefine the band’s sound. Mike also reminisces about the band’s early inner-personal dynamics. And Mike talks about the community of thousands of followers he's amassed on Twitch who watch him make beats live five days a week.
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Pushkin. Since forming in nineteen ninety six, Lincoln Park has sold over one hundred million records worldwide. Their enormous success mixing genres like hip hop, metal, and anthemic pop, was spearheaded by the band's ultra talented founder, Mike Shinoda. Two months after Lincoln Park released their seventh album in twenty seventeen, their charismatic frontman Chester Bunnington, died by suicide, sending the band and millions of fans into a tales. Following year, Mike Shinoda detailed his grief on his solo release, Post Traumatic, and since that time, Mike has continued its relentless dedication to making music all through Quarantine. For instance, Mike has been creating tracks from scratch live on Twitch five days a week. He's a massive community of thousands of followers who scour the Internet for new artists from Mike to collaborate with, using the hashtag Shinoda produced me. In this episode, Rick Rubin talks to Mike about the albums he produced with Lincoln Park that helped we define the band's sound. Mike also reminisces about the band's early interpersonal dynamics and how the Beastie Boys License to Ill helped lay the foundation from Mike's life world. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin and Mike Shinoda. Tell me about what you're doing on twitch. That's so weird, man, it's great. I love it. When Quarantine first started, every day was the same day. I was in pajamas half the time. I was just like walking around in sweats. Like it wasn't depressed, but it was just like everything is the same. So when I started streaming effectively, because it created like structure, so I stream. I started then and I still do stream five days a week. I stream weekdays ten to you know, noon or one ish. And that was a nice like it was a nice way to be like, oh, I've got like you know, I've got my weekdays now, and oh I'm not streaming today. I know it's Saturday. Like it's just a stupid thing. And I got to use really dig in with this space and get creative and get weird, which is part of the most fun part of it is doing stuff you go, oh, I didn't even know that was a weird idea. That was fun to do. And all last year I was getting I was getting faster and faster and faster in terms of like making a track, and then I realized at the end of last year, like, how do I do Now that I've done this for a while, I'm starting to get a little bit burnt on it, like I want to do something different with it. And I decided early on I wouldn't do vocals because I think that would burn me out. So I was just making instrumentals, and then I realized I could since I'm live on Twitch and there's anywhere between I don't know, like a thousand, and I think we peaked at like almost thirty thousand people watching at one time. I wanted to do something to like enhance the channel and give back to the people they've been watching. So I started taking like fans submissions of vocalists and songs because I just realized, like looking at Instagram and looking at TikTok, like there's so many good artists out there who have no following. They've got like, you know, six hundred people following them, and they're actually very good, and so I just started taking submissions from those people. Now I I called, you know, and I mean you'll get this joke right away. I started calling the chat the A and Army. So it's like it's like, you know, nine hundred people whose job it is to go find me the best stuff, and they do. They go, they go and find the good stuff and they bring it to me, and they're like, you know, the more they say, the more they shout, like look at this one, look at this one. I know, it's like pretty good. So cool. Yeah, And so I've been I do two to three, starting like a couple of weeks ago, I've been able to do two to three brand new songs all like I'm in a morning, I'm probably like a stream and a half. I'd get a song done from scratch to like finished, and I send them something that's effectively like mixed and mastered. It's incredible that they can release. It's so fun, man, it's really really fun. And the fans, I mean, you can imagine how excited they are, right and and some of the cases what I haven't like talked to the fans on the channel about actually I'm telling you about this is that I will reach out to somebody and say, hey, that thing you posted on TikTok or Instagram was really cool? Would you want me to produce it? And I say that because they've used the hashtag. They've used shinoda produce me as the hashtag would do. So they've they've raised their hand and said I want Mike to produce me. So I hit them on the DMS and I say, you want me to produce and they always say yes, and then half the time they say I haven't finished the song though, Like the thing I posted is it's a verse and a chorus, and I don't have a second verse. I don't have a bridge or any you know, middle aid or whatever. I don't have anything else. And so it's like, okay, like take your time, don't rush it, because I want you to be I want you to submit something you love, because like the whole idea is for you to get to more people than you've already got to. So give me something great and when it's ready, then send it to me and I and that's generally it's if it's if it's somebody in that scenario I find that they're getting they get back to me within like three or four days, And what do they usually get back to you with like a more expanded same demo, but with all the parts. Yeah, it's usually like we we transfer link or something like that with multi tracked vocals, and I always tell them like I'll tell them like speed it up like to this bpm or whatever, or I'll tell them make sure it's in your like very best range. It sounded low to me, but up to you. And then I can and they can go crazy on the on the over dubs and harmonies and background vocal whatever else they want to do, they do, but they do that before the track is before there's a track. Is that correct, Yeah, before there's a before there's a track. So what you get is basically finished vocal stems for a song. Yeah, and then you start from scrat you take it as an a cappella yeah, and you build music to support whatever that is. Yeah. Do you remember when we were doing the Thousand Sons Together that at the end of that record, before the first single, The Catalyst was the single on that record, before the single came out, so no fan had heard the song. We released pieces of stems to that song and we told them take these pieces, make a song out of them. We didn't give them enough to know what the song even was. We just said, take pieces and make a song out of it, and whoever's thing is the coolest to us, we're going to put you on our record, on the album itself, and we ended up putting them on. I think it was When They Come for Me was the song we put them on. But we chose it based on who is like, as I recall, like I could be getting some of this wrong, but as I recall, it was like we gave them pieces to remix, but they'd never heard the song they were remixing, so I called it like the premix, like they just they had to just assume the song. And that's why I feel I feel like there's something to that, something about that that relates to this where it's like, I don't know what you were thinking your song is, but here's what I hear, just based on that vocal on a grid so cool. It's fun, man, super fun. That Thousand Sons is my favorite of the things we worked on together. That's my favorite, just because I feel like it really is. It felt like the beginning of something new and something new and really good. We didn't like the record before it Minutes to Midnight was that the whole effort the whole. When we first met, you asked the band, what do you guys envision doing with this album? Like why why are we talking like what you want to do? And we all said, like we want to we want to redefine the identity the band, Like the whole point was to make something that didn't sound like the stuff the people that already heard, because albums one and two were so similar. And You're like, great, that's exactly how I feel, and He's you said, I don't know if I would want to work with the band if you didn't feel that way. So it's great. We're all on the same page and we just kind of hit it off from there, and that first record we did together, it was a very long, hard process, was very difficult. We were like one hundred and fifty demos eighteen months or something, and you and I had a couple conversations towards the end of it where I was like, Rick, I can't do this anymore. It's like we're turning it into guns n' roses Chinese democracy. We're just gonna be in the studio for years on this thing, so we need to put a stop to it. And I think that's because we hadn't gotten to the place place yet where we're gonna get on the next record, and I didn't want to like just have our heads down underground until we thought we were there. I don't think we could have gotten there on one try. It was a two record evolution, yeah, and I think it worked fine, and it ended up being more of a somewhat more smoother transition for the audience as well, because yeah, oh god, it would you imagine if they had been if if Thousand Sons came out first, it would have just been, like I mean, there would have been a lot of people who just said, fuck these guys. Yeah, yeah, that even as it was that album, like a Thousand Sons was one or five stars, like it was a solid two and a half star record, because nobody was in the middle. Everybody was on what we love it or we hate it every day, which is which is there is no better way to know you took it as far as it needs to go. When people love it or hate it and no one's in the middle, that it tells you everything. That's the dream is to have people love it or really hate it. Totally totally agreed. I remember us having a lot of conversations about like music technology stuff around the time of soos and do you know what I'm saying, Like you've always been interested in well, I mean you've always been interested in cutting edge technology. Let me ask you this, is there stuff in music technology that you're interested in right now? And then beyond that, is there stuff in technology at large that you're really interested in? These days? I'm interested in how blockchain is going to affect music distribution. I'm looking forward to a place where if an artist makes something that can put it out and people who want it can get to it. Even from the early days of hip hop, it's always been a struggle of people wanting to silence hip hop. I mean the right to express your feelings. You're not saying what's No one knows what is or isn't. All you have is All we have is our experience of the world and we share it. And as artists, that's what the game is. It's just sharing what you notice that no one else notices, or that what you notice that other people notice and like oh yeah that or not or something to react to. You know, Like as we talked about, I like the fact that the people who vote one star for a thousand sons get to say that. It's like, that's right, that's what that's their opinion. They don't have to like it. That's fine, Yeah right, No, I love I mean you know this, I love polarizing music. I love stuff that, like, I mean, one of my favorite groups ever is something like I had said this the other day. We did a remix. We gave you know, one hundred guess yeah, I gave we did we let one hundred gecks remix one step closer, And so obviously the fans were like, wait, that's what they look like. Wait, that's what it sounds like, like like they could they hate, like so many people were hated it so much, and then other people were like, this is their favorite thing. I posted about it because I was seeing all that. I was like, you guys know, like ever since from from Public Enemy to Death Grips, like, I love stuff that. I love that dissonance. I love that, like Visceral. It takes it's hard to like get that like in tune with almost like your intuition to like make those weird sonic experiments to make something sound that way, like you don't get you don't arrive at m one hundred guess or like by the Way, or like Umru, or like Sophie, you don't arrive at that just in a day, like screwing around and mistakenly like making it. Like there's so much work and experimentation and like self reflection in a sense that that is required to find that that sonic like identity. I love that work absolutely me too. I can remember the first time I heard Sophie and how my mind was blown, just like you know, like Lemonade song destroyed Me. Destroy was so cool, it was so original and so cool. I can't believe Sophie passed away, kind of believe it. Yeah, it's crazy. We'll be back with Mike Shinoda and Rick Rubin after a quick break. We're back with more from Mike Shinoda and Rick Rubin. What's your first memory of music in your life. I remembered listening to my parents' records. They had like a what my dad would call a high five system. Any we play vinyl, and I remember their music like they didn't listen to stuff that was very exciting to me. They listened to a lot of like slower seventies, like almost sounded like ballads and love songs. It was like this whole soft rock period. And then honestly, like the first record that I was like, what is that was Beastie Boys License Ill. Wow. That was the first time. Yeah, I mean music was happening, was happening all over the place. But the first record that I was obsessed with was was Licensed Ill. And that opened the door for because it's funny, it's weird to think that, like at the time, I wouldn't have known that that hip hop was, that these guys were underdogs, that the style of music was being what you'd call it today, you'd call it a meme, like they was being it was being minimized as like not real music, it's just a bunch of and part of that there was a racism involved with that too. It's like, oh, it's just these black guys talking over other people's beats, other people's songs, so like it's not music right. But to me, I was like, these are the first songs that I've ever felt like, that's that's what I listened to, and I memorized every word. I knew everything. Then I was buying Ella Cool J and I was buying Run DMC. Eventually, like Iced tea and stuff that my parents didn't know what I was listening to, had a lot more profanity and whatever. My mom. I tried to get the first the debut Cypress Hill record for Chris Smith, and my mom like Christmas Day came and went and I didn't get it, and I was like, that was like the number one thing on my life. I had more expensive things on my list, but the number one thing was the Cypress Hill CD. My mom is like, are you kidding? She's like, I realized that's what you wanted, but like, do you see the names of the songs? How I could just kill a man and pigs and hole in the head. She's like, I'm not buying you any album with that you cannot listen. I had that album the next day. I think I went I found a way to get it, like in me. As soon as I knew that, She's like, I'm not buying it for you. Well I get this record, yeah, right, because we didn't believe that, Like no, but any any person who's ever been on that side of the equation knows, like listening to this stuff, it's like, I'm not gonna go and like do anything. I'm not gonna go shoot cops because I listened to Cypress Hill. That's stupid, obviously, Yes, it was funny like I thought. I thought they were hysterical. And by the way, all of those things, like there was something I related to in terms of like this feeling of like being an outsider, and I think it was a I think it had to do a little bit with being mixed race and like people would think I do. Even nobody ever knew what I was. I was just like, oh, they just talkally speak to me in Spanish. I was like, I'm not Mexican life. So if your entry into your love of music is hip hop, did you start with the idea of making music? Did it start with the idea of being a writer and writing at being an MC or did you think about making beats? Where were you on the scale? My mom made me do piano, so I was doing I was listening to rap and I was playing classical piano and I hate I didn't really care. I didn't hate classical, but I didn't care for it. I was just doing it because it was a class that my mom was making me take. I think an important moment was around my must have been in junior high I'm gonna say, I don't know. Like twelve ish, thirteen ish, my piano teacher had a songwriting contest with another teacher or a couple of teachers. So there's a recital, and before the recital, everybody submitted their their songs on paper, and you play. Everybody played their song too in the concert, and then and then afterwards you went down a hallway and they put like ribbons on the songs that won, and I won first place, and I won and there were kids who were they're like high school kids who had submitted songs and I was I beat them, and that was the first moment where I was like, oh, that's so crazy. I beat that, like I've I've wrote a better song than those guys. And I was like looking at their thinking about what they played and looking at theirs and like figuring out, like why, I don't know, why do you remember the piece of music? I can still play it? Yeah, it's basically a thirteen year olds version of like a Dungeons and Dragons theme, Like imagine the most simple medieval like fifths and a minor and that's it's that, Like that's all it is. It sounds like the hobbit like so that and I don't know, I guess that's what I was into since I was also drawing all the time. I drew a lot of that type of thing, So those things all converge. So eventually shortly after that, I know, I went to my piano teacher and I was like, I want to get more into like writing music. I love it and I want to write stuff like my favorite rap songs, So like, can we do more blues and jazz? And she was like, well, number one, like I'm not your best resource for that kind of kind of music, partially because jazz in particular is so specific and it's not something she studied or really and there was an improvisation element to it too, so she's like, this is this goes outside of the academic trading that I'm prepared to teach you. The other thing is you what you're talking about, she said to me, with the other thing you're talking about is making and recording things, and that's not what I do. So she basically talked me into quitting her lessons. She said, you should go buy a keyboard and buy these types of pieces of equipment to learn, and you'll learn hands on how to use it. And if you can imagine, I always say, like two people, imagine somebody who makes their living teaching students piano and is telling their student to quit piano because it's the right thing. Like there's them no more admirable, that's amazing. I always incredible, incredible. So you're you're so lucky, You're so super lucky, super lucky. Big lesson too. Yeah, what was the recommended equipment then? Like what did you start with? Well? I got she said to get a keyboard that had other sounds so I can start playing different sounds with the same notes that I already knew, which I did. And then after that I think it was um like an SM fifty seven, Mike a task Camp four track, and then my big purchases were I got a little Mackey mixing console and a and a Kai S nine hundred sampler, and that needed to be to be programmed with something else, so like you needed to send MIDI to it. It didn't have an internal sequencer. So I bought this Eleasis I think it's they're called. I think it's an HR sixteen drum machine. And I could use the HR sixteen as a drum machine or I could shut the volume off and run the sampler off of it, and then I was Then I was off to the races. That's how my band started. It's once I got those pieces of gear. I was making beats. My friend was coming over with his guitar, and we were making like we started by making joke tracks, like we were making almost like we think of like weird Al Yankovic, Like we had this thing, this thing that was like like G Funk Snoop Dogg style Gfunk Gangster app his group peripheral group was the dog Pound, so ours was the Pooch Pound, and we had this we had this song where we were North Coast killers, so we hated Canadians, so stupid my friends. It was only to make our friends laugh and to get and meanwhile like learn how to use the gear like I was. The more songs I made, as stupid as they were, they made my friends laugh and I was learning how to put a song together. Well, that that was how to be. The album that influenced you is made as well. It was like it was just everything was written with the idea of making our friends laugh and that's all. Yeah, it was never thought past that yeah. Do you think that the fact that you started learning piano before getting into the production aspect of recording turned out to be a good thing for you? I do. I mean for me, that was like those are fundamentals, those are your building blocks. Like I don't know if I don't know what I would have done. I don't know if I would have had the tools to get excited. Yeah, if I didn't have that, right, if it was just about plugging things in and making noises. Some people are very excited about just making noises and they don't have to be musical. But for me, there was always like hip hop was based on hookey moments, whether that's like finding the best loop off of an obscure record and turning that into a song or like creating your own That has always been something I've been drawn to. Like everything is just like like it's like lego bricks of the most catchy little bits and then you assemble them into either something that's kind of linear and doesn't change a lot, or something that changes a lot, and it's more I think of it as more like an arranged like pop song. And then how has your relationship to the technology and the technology change from then, so we know what you started with. How is that different than what you use now. Let's say so in the beginning of Lincoln Park's career, it was very much of like a hip hop you remember you probably remember this very much of a hip hop approach, where it was like track first and vocals on the track. And then when we met you, you said, okay, well, I remember this one conversation you and I had where You're like, well, have you got have you ever you know you're since I was like the primary writer, you were like, have you ever done a song demo starting with just vocals and an instrument like you you know, piano and vocals would seem obvious? And I was like, usually not, but like there have been a couple cases. You hear like which ones And I'm like, well, in the end and breaking the habits like big So our biggest songs were the ones that started that way, and he like looked at me like this. I was like, I know, Rick, Like, I know, it's not that I it's not that I don't recognize it, it's that it's hard for me to do for some reason, I don't want to sit down to do it. And then I don't want to do it, and it was just because it was so comfortable doing it the other way. I think, yeah, that's really funny. Not that we didn't have good results doing it the other way too, we did, yeah, and then eventually, so I think that the next step in the evolution was learning how to like identify parts in a more abstract way, Like I don't need to have the full backdrop of a fully produced track to get me excited to make words and melodies or to make rap lyrics or whatever. I can make a great rap song off a click track, and that's happened so and that In terms of technology, I remember when we had to have like, you know, like a computer rig the size of a refrigerator to make a song. Now I gonna do it on my phone. I had a nice a couple of nice sessions with Tom Morello a few years ago, and we didn't come up with much, but it was just nice to like get together and hang out and pick his brain in whatever. But I love Tom and he's credible. And one of the things that he's all about is like he's got his pedal board, he's got his guitar, Like it's punk rock it's like not a lot of stuff doesn't want it. He doesn't even want the newer version of his wah pedal, like he just wants the old one. And that got me thinking, like, yeah, you know what, Like I've got a lot of plugins, got so many of them, and once you know how they work, like you can download a brand new plug in and already know how it works. But my tried and true stuff, like there's some there's some stuff that I know that I've used for years that like just works really well, and it's kind of signature stuff, and I just know how to manipulate it to find a new thing too that doesn't have to be the same sound every time. I just know how to get in there by plugging in this sampler to that guitar dull to that speaker and it's and miking it with this mic and it sounds great. When did you start with guitar? When I had to? When it was like it was like my friends. I used to play casually with my friend who was like he was taking guitar lessons. He was way into Zeppelin. He would teach me a couple of the like riffs and stuff. But I started really getting into it as the band was starting to take off, just because we needed a second guitar player and I and the riffs weren't hard to play. I don't think I ever asked you how did how did Lincoln Park start? It was really just me and my Like, remember I told you about the joke songs. My friend Mark and I were doing that. We made four real songs and sent those to this guy who's like it was. He was an A and R guy. He put the record labels address on the back of the CDs was Immortal Records, and they had corn and Incubus and so, and the mailing address was on the bat So we just sent it there and it was just like whatever. And then he called us and we were like, holy shit, we have to go in now, we have to go see this guy. And he was so flabbergasted that we made the music that we were making on that cassette four track and sample that thing I described he was. He was like, okay, so how many people are in the band. We were like two. He's like, who plays all the who plays the drums? I was like, it's our all samples and like drum machines, and he's like well, I hear like multiple guitars and bass, and he was like, yeah, we switch off on that stuff. And he's like, do you have you ever played live? We're like no, Like, have you ever been in a real studio. No. He's like, okay, so you need to do everything, like please get a band together, please play shows, please get into a real studio and record, and when you do some of those things, to come back and play me what you're doing. Like, I think what you're doing is great. You guys are just you have a really like long way to go before you're doing you can You're gonna experience so many things. I can't wait to hear how good it is once you get to that point. And his story is that we never came back. I obviously know that we did. We did send him more demos and he was not interested. We would have we would have killed to get on there to be signed by that label, and I am positive we sent them demos. But yeah, it ended up being that Mark was I've known I've been like super super close friends with Mark since we were since around that age, since twelve, and we had to part ways because he was going to give himself an ulcer being in the band, Like he couldn't get up on stage in front of people. He had a panic attacks. He was just freaking out whenever. He was the kind of guy that like, we would show up for our sound check and he'd lash out at the monitor engineer, like five minutes into the being at the club, and the monitor engineer would just be like, fuck these kids, and he'd screw us the whole night. Mike's would he feeding back everywhere because he was just he literally just like set the faders up and went to the bathroom. And part of that was like, okay, Mark, like can you please not scream at the guy who's in charge of us not sounding like crap and having a fun night. But he was just so panicked about the whole thing all the time, and so like he at the end of the day, he knew that it was just not a good fit for him. He loved music, he loved he actually loved more of it than just being on stage part and he and he ended up being he manages, helps manage you know, Mark Wakefield's system, great system of a down, Alison Chain's Deftnes like so many great bands. He's doing great, amazing, So he found what was right for his life. It's like so funny how we the path becomes clear? Yeah, you know exactly who was the first of the members we of the classic assemblage of Lincoln Park. Yeah, who was the first member after you? Brad? Right? And how do you How did you know Brad? So Brad was Mark's next door neighbor. It was like a TV show, Like you could look out Mark's bedroom window on the second story and throw a pebble and hit Brad's window and Brad would open it and he'd be in there with like his slightly long hair and his like ibanez or whatever it was, practicing Metallica. And I didn't know Brad very well in high school, like we knew we knew of each other, and Mark was his next door neighbor and whatever. But Brad hung with different people, remember, like hip hop kids and metal kids. Didn't like co mingle. Yeah, Mark was in a band with Brad before he was with me. He was a little more of a rock kid than me, Like he would he played me Rage against Machine for the first time. He played me Chili Peppers for the first time. He played anything that had a rap like element to it. We saw our both of our first show together was pe Anthrax, Primus and Young Black Teenagers, and we saw in the crowd before the show started. We saw Iced Tea in the crowd and ran over and got his autograph before anybody else like bothered him. So cool, what an InCred I mean? So it's almost like a joke that was my first concert because that's like what I ended up doing. So cool. So but yeah, Brett Mark and I like they had already been in bands together, and then I kind of started writing stuff with Mark on the side just because we were such close friends. And they had this they had this awesome like like rap metal band called The Pricks, which is such a punk rock nay. I love that name. And when did Joe and Dave? Yeah, Brat was the UCLA with Dave. I was at Art Center with Joe. Rob was from a neighboring high school. And then eventually we found Chester through we had gotten like an attorney that was interested in us and a publisher who was interested in us, and they found this kid from Arizona named Chester who we should check out, like we were trying out A bunch of people tried out, Like I don't know how many people tried out a bunch of people, and it was pretty obvious to us, as you can imagine. Yeah, once the group got together, even even before you found Chester, once you started making music together as a group, was the direction of the sound very clear right from the beginning. Yeah, I mean it was. It was clear to the extent that, like so even right now. It last year we released um this Hybrid Theory box set, which I was when it first started, the idea of putting out a box set of our oldest demos and whatever was like, I was like, that just sounds like you're cashing in on whatever on Like you know, we're not doing other things as a band, so like you're going to release this thing, Like I'm not into it, but you're welcome to like prove me wrong. I just I don't at face value, I don't know why we would do that. And management started to come back with some ideas about what it could be, and they had already I had already sent them some demos of things from back then for our fan club that we didn't use, and they were like, well, you've got all these things, and we know you've got more. And other people have found demos and we found all this material. They ended up finding like a whole hard drive full of video from that time. So this conversation, like, it's all documented on this Hybrid Theory twentieth edition thing that we put out last year. If you want to want to hear those early demos right after we stopped making jokes songs and we we want to hear our first three demos with Mark that's on Spotify right now. Wow, so cool, and and I couldn't believe we found all that stuff. So all this stuff is like top kind of top of mind because we just went through all of that and he was there, Like you can hear my favorite one of my favorite tracks is track called she Couldn't, which there's not a single distorted guitar in it. It's a it's a hip hop beat with some really weird, like weird organic like vocally sounding samples, and like it's done on my old Akai S nine hundred, which is like a twelve bit like boom bap sampler and has a clean guitar with delay on it and Chester singing the entire time. And we wouldn't one of the lines as you are not alone in that song and I'm like that everything in that song is stuff that we were still that was the identity of the band until like five six years later, Like it was still we were still exploring that identity and catching up with ourselves in a sense like amazing. It was all baked in from the very beginning. It was all there. It was just really messy. It's amazing too, And it wasn't It wasn't conceptual. It was just you guys making the music you like, yeah, and exploring different like facets of the architecture that I already existed between us because we weren't naturally all super good friends. We just had similar like once we got interested in a thing creatively or stuff something we would make, or something we would hear or something we would see, then we geek out together. And that's again there's things like oh, man, isn't that cool? Yeah, it's so cool? Have you seen this? And we'd go down these weird rabbit holes together because it because it faced value, Like when Chester first auditioned for the band and we and then we talked, and then we talked after the audition a little more. The reservation my recollection is the reservations that came up. Weren't about his singing obviously. Everyone was like, he's the best singer, He's better than anyone we're hearing on the radio, Like he's the best singer, but his person, Like, but what kind of person is he? Like? We know, we got the sense of like I think he's like kind of into drugs, and like we got Rob's in the band, Rob's straight edge, like Rob was in the programs. He's an a for who knows how long at that point, and that might be a rub, like I don't know, And so we really had to get to know him as a person before we could commit. And that was the part it was like okay, yeah, like we're really different, but we're definitely cool, Like we're definitely we we like each other, and it's it's like we're going to disagree on some things, as any band will, especially with six people in it, but I think we're fun sometimes that the fact that having outliers working together leads to something that could never happen without those different opposing energies coming together. It creates something much more intense and much bigger. So I'm glad that you chose to go out of your in a way go out of your comfort zone to allow that to happen. It's like, well, he's not one of us, but we can do this together. Yeah. Well, I think what we realized is there wasn't there wasn't an united US. There wasn't like us and us and him. It was like Joe and Brad for example, like Joe's favorite kind of stuff. Would you ever hear a group called Lutirics. There's a rap group called the Lutirics, and one of their songs they both rapped at the same time and panned their vocals left and right, so they were just it was a beat going and two guys rapping different verses at once, and you go an you listen to kind of one guy and you listen to the other. But it wasn't it wasn't a type of thing you'd want to just put on and listen to. And Joe loved that kind of thing. That was like one of in that time. It was his one of his favorite records. Brad was meanwhile listening to Britney Spears like right, So like we had to remind ourselves and the conversation it's like all of us, are you know, similarities or whatever, Like we overlap on certain things, but we we definitely are polar opposites in a lot of different ways. Like we we definitely rub this, there's friction in a bunch of other ways. So this this other guy who we don't didn't know very well at the time, Like what's the difference between Brad and Joe and like Brad and Chester, Like we'll have to find out. Yeah, we'll be right back with more from Mike Shinoda. We're back with the rest of Rick's conversation with Mike Shinoda. You've played all over the world and a lot of shows, from very big shows to small shows over the course of your career. Tell me what you've learned from playing live that you've that you bring with you into the music making process. M Sometimes I beat myself up a little bit for not slowing down and like thinking more deeply about like some of the bigger picture why and what you know what I mean, because I know that would be and part of me says, like that's the right thing to do, to like think about the kinds of questions you just asked. Then the other part of me is like really loves like letting intuition drive the ship and just going with it, because I feel like it's not just the creative flow, but there's also like a flow to things. Chester and I used to always talk about like riding the wave. And sometimes you just notice like, well, this came up in conversation yesterday randomly. I don't know why that came up in conversation, And then I got I saw it on a Twitter yesterday or Instagram, and then and now we're talking about in the studio and that Isn't it weird that that's come up three times in two days and you just start to pay attention to like little things like that. It's like, Okay, well that feels like a pattern. It's just like in the ether. Let's write a song about that. Why not? I don't know what that is. I mean, it's stupid, but it's worth it seems like a thing. With that said, I feel like the show thing I didn't, by the way, I didn't just say that just to buy myself time to think about the answer the question that was. By the way, that was a great answer. I feel like that's a thing that for me, like doing the things that I do, I probably learned things from them consciously. I probably learned some things from them subconsciously that I don't know that I know because because at the end of the day, when I'm making making a song, I know it's up. Like just like any artist when you've toured a bunch, you go, oh, that's not gonna be very fun to play live. It's not question, it's like, it's not like I wonder if it is, like no, if it definitively is not. Like, So I've to now make a decision as I'm writing it, like is it a thing that I record or I write right now because I'm going to have to live with it later. I think maybe the reason I asked it is of all the artists I've worked with, you were the first band who didn't do the process like a band. So it struck me as here are a group of people who all are essentially producers, and they would create something and share the files and pass around the files to create it, and then at the end of the day make the most interesting music. Virtually the whole process was virtual. And then when it would come time to or you'd figure out, Okay, who's gonna play what, how's this going to work? How what would the band version be like because it was never made like a banned version in the recording. I was shocked when I found out, just like how some people would like write a thing in person or jam a thing out until they got the pieces. Like we were talking about Tom earlier, like when they were doing that first Rage record, they like just went in and jam stuff and then Zach and the producer would like assemble it and then he'd like rap over it. I thought that was crazy, Like to just jam for a couple weeks and walk away and then come back a month or two later and have a record. That's super weird to me because you're leaving all of your You're leaving like all of the why what about all the development time? In my head, I'm thinking, like I could have if I had a good bit have peace in the jam that I then took home and I really thought about, And so this riff caught my ear. What elements are that are cool? What if I change the drum sound? What if I change the tempo? What if I change instead of it being four bars, what if it's two? What if it's eight? What if it's instead of being that guitar, it's it's a keyboard. You have a whole universe of ways to change it. I think that's where the like producer slash hip hop producer comes in, right. I love that process of experimentation. By the way, the Twitch. Coming back to the twitch thing. One thing that's awesome about doing that same process that I'm talking about on twitch. I just had two thoughts the Twitch thing. I can get immediate feedback from the fans. You know, you're playing a thing on stage, like people used to do this, people in the seventies. They'd write a song, play it, and then they'd get audience feedback, and then they change it and then go on the next show and play it again. Oh tonight it was. It got better feedback. But fans really love this part, or the fans really reacted when we did this. So then they kept that, and they changed other thing, and they kept doing it. They kept doing this trial and error with these test groups of people who are in the club listening to them, and eventually the song got good and they recorded it. They went into studio and they play the exact same thing that they've worked up however many times, and that was the track Twitch. I'm on the channel, I'm recording. I'm writing and recording in real time, very fast, and at every moment where I go what's better this or that, I literally just asked the chat. I can literally put a pole up. There's sometimes there's people in the chat who are louder than others. Other people don't want to talk. I can put a poll up and get an and know exactly how popular a choice is the other day, I had a song that was like it was I had vocals and I had like drums, and I was like, should I go keyboard like a like a low whole note keyboard thing, or should I do this like more funky bassline with a live bass. So I did both, and I asked the chat which one's better, and they and in my mind they're both equally good. In their mind's eighty percent for the belive base. So cool. So that's taking everything we just talked about and wrapping it up into one moment in four minutes, right, I'm jamming in real time, like an idea pops in my head, my fingers go to whatever, frets like, my fingers go whatever keys maybe some accidentally like that's what's recorded. I've just now made a thing. And then they can give me their feedback in real time, and I can know, oh, the audience actually prefers this thing. And now I'm it's done. I'm sorry, it's not only is written, it's recorded, and I just move on. So cool. There was also an aspect of an artist playing playing live in a club and getting the feedback that wasn't only based on the feedback coming back from the audience, but how the artist's relationship to the music changed when they're playing it in front of people, which it does change. Like when you play a song for the first time in front of people, you might realize, oh, this, uh, this solo section is twice as long as as it wants to be, or the opposite, it wants to go longer at the end, you know, it wants to have this Like you feel the energy of the music in a different way when even just people are listening, not based on their reaction. Yeah, I also realize if you're playing the same song for twenty years, sometimes you play with those things just like you just those those realities change, Like we've played this song and back when we first started playing this song, they really the fans wanted to hear the album version and so did we If we changed it, it was less, it was it made it worse right, And then at a certain point, once everyone has heard it that way, then not only did we want to hear it a different way, like they wanted to hear it a different way. So all of a sudden, then it was like, well, let's take a song that's two minutes and forty five seconds and expand it to four minutes by like doing a brand new thing in the bridge for like two minutes. Yeah, just because like because now that's fresh. Now that's you've heard thing, and now we can play with the expectation absolutely, and there might even be a time in the future again we want to go back to the album version and it'll feel new again. And then it feels new again. Yeah. So the last three projects you've put out were instrumental only. Oh yeah yeah, I did. I mean, I know I consider those like mixtapes or something, Okay, but did they tell me how did that happen? Those are the things I was making on Twitch So I was just making like all like for nine months last year, I was just making instrumentals. So I generated over one hundred songs. I made a ton of songs, and some of them got released. I put some of them together in this like trilogy called Dropped Frames, which is a reference to like basically having bad Internet and not being able to stream properly, which was the case and when I was first streaming and I put some of those out, and like part of me was like, I know that those types of releases are some all they're not for everybody. I also love I've always loved like Dyla and DJ Shadow and like so many fine lotus, like so many producers who when you listen to their tracks it's almost like they can hold my attention with no vocal yeah, you know, because it's it's just they're creative enough without it. And so I felt like encouraged in a way by listening to some of that stuff to be like, oh it was you know, it's with COVID and everything, Like I feel like, actually, it wasn't just COVID. It was it was like with Trump and COVID and all of the noise on social media. I felt like everyone's always screaming, So it's nice to listen to music with no words. There's a break, Yeah, really cool And it's funny when I would listen to them. I would hear like baby Lincoln Park songs, you know, like often like I could hear it's like, oh, I if this was going to be a Lincoln Park song, I know where this would go. Like it wouldn't be so different than the seed ideas that would start that would often start songs. Yeah, that's I mean, that's it's I think that's the for people that make music, or it's aspire to make music they love. There's a lot of folks in my who watched that channel, my channel, who are in that category. A track like that, you know, ten years ago, that would be like two days of work, and these days it's like ninety minutes of work. Right, I just get there. I get there very fast now. And it's because of the repetition. And I'm not saying it's like like my my worry. Actually sometimes I worry because there are some little I don't expect everything to be great. I don't expect everything to even be good, but I do know I do guess that just because of the the volume, that there's actually gems in there. And it's like am I throwing away these gems? Like one of these little pieces of a thing could actually be like a very like big song. Yes, is it worth it to like just throw them out there on twitch and do it in live and then maybe not even release it? Like is that? Is that a dumb thing to be doing? And at the end of the day, I feel like that's where modern culture is. Like that to me, that's that's right on the edge of like where we're at in terms of like like entertainment and music. Like music is not music. Music doesn't mean what it used to mean back in the day. And I don't mean that in terms of value. I just mean that in terms of identity. It doesn't it does to a thirteen year old. A song generally is just like a little piece of background thing that you associate with a moment, and that moment is short. Once in a while, it kind of goes back to that you remember that long tail, the book The long Tail. It's kind of like that, Like once in a while, something will go up the rise up to the to the front of that long tail and become like, I mean, we're looking at it with right right now, there's a song that song is it Driver's License? Am I gonna screw up the name? Huge song? Number one? On at least the US charts for three weeks, and the first time I heard it, I listened to it twice. I was like, what the fuck did I just listen to? That's incredible? I love this and it takes that It's almost like a Yeah, it takes that level of a song. That's how it's got to be that special, and everything else is just way lower on the on the long tail. Yeah, yeah, it feels like that too. With you know, when you put out Hybrid Theory, you probably put out how many singles did it have? Do you remember? Oh god, five? Yeah, arguably five, Chester would say six, five or six and that was over a two year period till the next album, would you say more three something like that? Yeah, eighteen eighteen plus over eighteen months. And in today's world nothing exists like that. There's no such thing. Whatever. Whatever the biggest record in the world is comes and the super fans of that record a month later are probably over it. Whatever it is, it's just like the rhythm, the rhythm has changed. Yeah, they burn really really bright and really fast. Yes, And that being said, you could put out something on Twitch that's that in its use feels disposable, but you did write it, and it does exist, and you could take one of those and turn it into a giant song at some point if you wanted to. It's like that, the beauty is now. It's like they're not gone. Yeah. I think the reason one of the one of the reasons I switched to the idea of working these songs off of like to include the fan vocalists and the and the aspiring vocalist is because all of them, I mean, they literally have a thousand followers on their biggest social platform, right, most of them are very comparatively very small, and so doing it this way, then I get to deal in volume. I can finish five songs in two weeks. Yes, give those to the artists. That's the that's their best ticket so far of having a shot to get on playlist and get in front of more fans. And they're going to work really hard to get there with it. It has my name attached. So that's that helps them, right, hopefully with some people, it helps them. With other people, it hurts them. Hopefully it helps yes, And then your intentions are good and I get to explore every genre. I feel like exploring every type of song. Today's today is a rap song, tomorrow's a metal song. The next day we're doing a female vocalist, no drums, like it's every day. It can be something completely different, super fun, great experience. It's fun cool. I love seeing you. I miss you you too. Man. All right, Rick, Thanks Man, great to talk to you. Thanks to Mike Shinoda for taking time away from making beats to talk to Rick. Do you hear a playlist of our favorite Mike Shinoda and Lincoln Park songs. Check out a playlist we created at broken Record podcast dot com. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find extended cuts at new and all episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chafee. Our executive producer is Mia LaBelle. Broken Record is a production of Pushing Industries and if you'd like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast at right. Music by Kenny Beats, I'm justin Richmond Bass