Word: bennington
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While the original members of Linkin Park (who named themselves after Santa Monica's Lincoln Park) were struggling to catch a break in L.A., Bennington had effectively retired from singing in his native Phoenix, Ariz. "I just got tired of being in bands that weren't dedicated," he says of the apathetic Phoenix metal scene. He had taken a job transferring property maps into computer files when a mutual friend told him Linkin Park was looking for a singer. With his wife's encouragement, Bennington drove to L.A., auditioned and never left. "Another guy was trying out the same...
With the addition of Bennington's soaring vocals, the band's sound took on a richer, more dramatic tone. But rather than wait for record companies to notice, Linkin Park started building a fan base on its own. "I would assign everyone in the band to go on the Internet and recruit five or six people a day," says the business-minded drummer Bourdon. "We'd go into a Korn chat room and say, 'There's this new cool band called Linkin Park, go check out their MP3,' pretending like we weren't in the band." When interested kids...
...appeal to alienated teens. By comparison, Linkin Park's three biggest hits--Crawling, One Step Closer and In the End--are strictly confessional yawps. Here, the band offers no apologies. "There's a lot of music out there that our producer [Don Gilmore] describes as 'poor me' music," says Bennington, who says that much of the pain he sings about stems from physical abuse he suffered as a child, though not at the hands of his parents. "Don says he wants to listen to music to be entertained. That's not where we're coming from. We like to talk...
...members can't just declare themselves positive and leave it at that. Is a line like, "You try to take the best of me/ Go away" really positive? Sure, some kids may empathize with the sentiment, but the lyric hardly provides an adequate means of transcending loneliness and insignificance. Bennington and Shinoda have to find a way to get the message they truly advocate into their songs, and so far they haven't really done the job. For a band so heavily invested in trying to communicate clearly, they still have lots of work...
...record new material as soon as the band's members can tear themselves away from the road. They were also an exceedingly young band when they wrote Hybrid Theory. They wrote what they knew. Now their lives are much more interesting. "Our next record could sound like anything," says Bennington. With a little more discipline, it could even sound like what they intend...