Defining a new era (April 12, 2007)

Quelle: http://www.star-ecentral.com/

Linkin Park is poised for bigger things with its eagerly awaited third studio outing Minutes to Midnight.

During a whirlwind visit to Kuala Lumpur last week, an enthusiastic Chester Bennington spoke about Minutes to Midnight, an evolving career and the pressures of holding up the Linkin Park name in the shifting music scene.

Working with Rick Rubin

�He told us right from the beginning: �whatever you think your fans like to hear, whatever music you think you need to make, just forget about it. Whatever limitations you think you have, just put it out to rest and throw it out the window because none of it matters. What matters is making music that you are excited about regardless of style, a particular sound or anything like that.� He really encouraged us to stay on that path throughout making the album because it was easy for us to fall back to our old patterns and old ways of making music.�

Follow up pressure

�There was definitely not as much pressure doing this album as there was when we did Meteora, because Hybrid Theory was such a huge success when nobody had heard of us before, you know? We were getting pressure from everyone � from the fans to the record label � and we really felt that we had to prove to everyone that Hybrid Theory wasn�t a fluke.

When we did Minutes to Midnight, we�d already done Reanimation, Meteora, Live in Texas and Collision Course. Including Hybrid Theory, everything that we�ve done has established us in the minds of our fans and the record label. So we really had a lot of freedom to experiment with our sound. I don�t think we would have been able to write this album before and because of our past successes, we actually given a lot of freedom to really expand our writing skills and hone everything.�

The band's new sound

�It was a very conscious decision on our part to expand our sound. We didn�t want to make a trilogy; we didn�t want to write a record that sounded like Hybrid Theory or Meteora and we didn�t want to stray from the things that we felt were essential to Linkin Park.

�We also wanted to live up to what we say about ourselves. So we went to great lengths to change the sound of the band and rediscover how to write songs that didn�t corrupt what we had already created, and that was a really difficult process. That was one of the reasons it took so long. We could write songs like those on Hybrid Theory and Meteora in our sleep. Writing songs on Minutes to Midnight was really difficult for us. We had to open our minds and be willing to explore.�

The title

�Naming the album was harder than anything else. We always find ourselves over-thinking titles of all the records and even when it came down to naming the band. It was hard finding a title that suited the mood of the songs that were finally chosen for the album. I was watching a documentary on the doomsday clock and they kept repeating the phrase �Minutes to Midnight�. From that perspective; midnight is the end of the world as we know it. That�s a little dreary for me but I I thought it worked.

�The fact that the album is so different from the previous records and that we were more mature and embarking on a new era seemed to fit well with the title. I think the title really captured how we were feeling and where we were going in so many different ways.�