Nearly a year has gone by since Chester Bennington passed away and fans of Linkin Park still mourn the singer daily. However, they are also wondering if the band will continue without Chester. In the first episode of Inside the Studio, a brand new podcast series on iHeartRadio, Mike Shinoda sheds some light onto how he and his bandmates are feeling in the wake of Chester's death, and what they are thinking about the future of LP.
When asked if Linkin Park will go on, Mike stated,
"I don't know. That's the million dollar question, right? And unfortunately, I've said it before, but unfortunately there aren't any answers to that at this point. It would be awesome if there were. That would be really easy. I wish we were in a Brian Johnson/Bon Scott situation where it's like, no, the guy, our best friend, who sang for the band who passed away, he literally said, 'This is the guy,' and we listened to the guy and the guy's definitely the guy, and we all love hanging out with him, and we want to play with him. That's not a normal... That didn't happen to anybody else, really. That hasn't happened to us."
Mike went on to give more insight into what the guys are feeling explaining,
"If somebody comes and says, 'Hey Linkin Park, do you want to play a show in Germany?' then you have to have a discussion with all the guys, and you have one guy who's like, 'I definitely don't want to do it,' and you have one guy who says, 'I don't know, maybe, maybe we shouldn't do it,' and two guys who say, 'We definitely need to do it,' and then there's concerns. All that noise, that is not something I can deal with right now, and it's not a knock on anybody else. Any one of us could be the outlier opinion, the minority voice on something, but I definitely need some more simplicity in terms of decision making.
Elsewhere on the podcast, Shinoda reflected on how amazing Chester was... except when it came to rapping. He stated,
"One thing that I like to remind people is, he was naturally gifted with the way he performed in his voice, in particular. He had a world class, one of a kind voice, obviously. If you didn't know, he could sing basically any genre, any type of song that you threw at him, barring hip hop, maybe a little bit. He wasn't the best rapper. You give him a singing part, and the dude could do anything. Didn't matter if it was quiet female singer songwriter, in fact he'd be singing something like one of our songs, tracking it in the studio and I'd say, 'Do it with 5% more Dave Gahan. Do it with 25% more Adele.' I'd throw out these references of other singers that I wanted him to imitate or add a flavor of, and he knew ... We had a vocabulary of that type of stuff that I could say to him and he knew what I meant. Nobody else had that with him. That was a thing. Personally, studio and all that stuff aside, I think when we wrote, we wrote about these difficult topics, but in general, especially in the past few years, he was so much more together."
Each episode of Inside the Studio spotlights an artist celebrating a milestone, heading out on tour or, as in Mike's case, about to release new material. Shinoda is readying his first solo album under his own name. It's called Post Traumatic and was created in the months following Chester's death. The record features songs Mike wrote to help deal with the loss of his friend and bandmate. Along with describing the meaning behind some of those tracks, Inside the Studio also features previously unheard snippets of songs off Post Traumatic ahead of the album's release this Friday.
Hear it all by checking out the podcast here.
Photo Credit: Getty