Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda has spoken out about the difficulties he has been facing getting back into the studio after the tragic death of the band’s frontman Chester Bennington, who committed suicide last July.
Since then, Linkin Park have only played one show which was a tribute show to Bennington in October. Shinoda did, however, reveal this January that the band has “every intention” to continue.
“A week after Chester passed, the idea of the studio was scary,” Shinoda says. “And it wasn’t just the idea of attempting to make a song and being overwhelmed by those memories. There’s another layer of fear for artists in this situation that is, ‘What if I can’t make anything good [without that person]?’ Those hurdles start to accumulate, whether that’s fear or depression or the chaos of the outside world, it creates an echo chamber of anxiety.”
Shinoda revealed that he was making bad music during that period.
“I was making bad ’90s grunge songs, making bad rap songs… and then I made something good,” he says. “I’d make all these different things with no intention of putting them out, but just diving into some of the ideas that were already in my head.”
