Linkin Park reunited last year to great fanfare with the addition of vocalist Emily Armstrong helping to fill the void left by late singer Chester Bennington. Still, some fans have a hard time accepting Linkin Park without Bennington, but band co-founder Mike Shinoda made the choice to continue to help honor the legacy of his late friend.
Shinoda recently appeared on the Mythical Kitchens’ Last Meals podcast where he revealed that the group’s label at one time pushed for Bennington to be more of a solo act, though the frontman was having none of that.
“When you’re young and you’re new at a label, they’re doing their best to try to sell records,” Shinoda explained. “They want to get the thing that’s the hit. In the process of making ‘Hybrid Theory,’ they weren’t hearing it. I can’t explain that, we were positive that it was good. More importantly, we felt like this is us on this record.”
Shinoda continued: “They went to Chester and got him alone in the studio and were like, ‘Look man, this is all about you! You’re the star here! Let’s just build this project around you because, what you guys are making, we don’t get it. Chester had come into the band with the understanding that he’s part of a band. I felt like what he wanted was — he liked the band, he wanted to be part of the band, and he had way more loyalty to us than he did to them.”
“He went immediately from that conversation back to us and said, ‘This is what just happened.’ And we were like, ‘Oh no, thanks for telling us. What did you tell them?’ ‘I told them to go f*ck themselves.'”
Shinoda’s full interview can be seen below.
