Linkin Park interview: inside their blueprint-burning new album

The biggest band of the past decade has blown up its blueprint. Again. Something in the DNA of the six-piece outfit known as Linkin Park seemingly compels them to burn their own sound to the ground and start from scratch with each new album, a pattern which has never been quite so evident as with new release A Thousand Suns, which represents uncharted sonic and conceptual territory even for them. “There might be a misconception that this album is a commentary on what we think of our past albums,” says bassist Dave ‘Phoenix’ Farrell. “It’s not that.”

Still, the album sees the band tinkering with its patented formula of combining rock, rap and other styles of music in the kind of way that no one else had previously thought to. So, then, what drives Linkin Park to keep gambling with its own success? “That aspect is what makes being in a band fun for me, and when you’re in the studio, my head is not usually trying to wrap itself around ‘Will people like this?’”

As a measure of how untraditional A Thousand Suns is, while nine of the fifteen tracks have a standard length ranging from three to five minutes each, five other tracks are less than two minutes long. But rather than being an attempt at shaking things up, it’s more a representation of how the material naturally developed. “A song like Blackout, even from its earliest incarnation, always was in three movements and it was just a process of trying to figure out how to make those individual movements best fit that whole song. And the end of it, it turns into a four minute or six minute song,” says Phoenix.

“And then at the same time there’s always these little things that we’re doing where it’s more of a fragment or more of an idea, and maybe that turns into a shorter, thirty or forty second thing that is working to keep the album moving from front to end.”

In other words, the eighteen ethereal seconds of track four interlude Empty Spaces is how you get from the peppy potential single Burning In The Skies to the gritty When They Come For Me without losing flow. It’s all about creating and experience where in “if you get a chance, you can sit down with it and listen to it from front to back, kind of get a really well rounded three dimensional experience with it in the same way that it used to be back in the seventies, sixties.”

The emphasis on making a fluid yet varied album put the band, which still has to operate within the boundaries of the music business to some extent, in a quandary. “One of the biggest pressures or tensions on this record was trying to figure out what we were gonna do as far as the first single,” says Phoenix. “Chester and I were even joking, obviously it was never anything more than a joke, but we were joking about like, what if we just released this record as one giant MP3?”

As it turned out, it was the next to last (and longest) track on the album, The Catalyst, which was ultimately sent to radio, as it was “a great indication to our fans that it was gonna be a different type of record.“

The fact that the lead single just happened to fit best in the fourteenth slot on the album, rather than being positioned closer to the front of it, is yet one more unconventional fact of life for A Thousand Suns: “At the end of that process, we didn’t want to necessarily mess with the track order.”

As further evidence of the chances that the band has taken with the record, the rollicking five-plus minutes that make up The Catalyst flow directly into an acoustic ballad called The Messenger to close things out.

If history is any indication, the risks taken in the name of moving forward will pay off for Linkin Park with their new release, just as they always have. But even Linkin Park’s overwhelming popularity over the past decade doesn’t in itself entirely explain why the band has found a level of popularity within social media which has otherwise been reserved strictly for individuals, not bands.

The handful of entities to have crossed the ten million fan mark on Facebook can be counted on ones fingers, and thus far include the likes of Lady GaGa, Barack Obama, Eminem, Michael Jackson – we’ve come to learn that something in human nature compels users to be far more likely to click the “like” button for an individual than for a group. And yet Linkin Park finds itself comfortably in that tiny club with twelve million fans in its own right, more than doubling that of any other contemporary band, and even comfortably outpacing The Beatles.

So, aside from being wildly popular as a band to begin with, just what is Linkin Park doing right within social media?

“The short answer is I don’t really know,“ Phoenix admits, “but I can make hopefully some educated guesses. I think a big part of it is our fanbase is pretty awesome, and the community aspect of Linkin Park fans kind of lends itself really well to the internet. They have this interconnectivity and this web that works out perfectly with the internet.”

But there’s more to it than that. The band members, who are of an age where they didn’t get their first real taste of the internet’s potential until they were finishing high school, were nonetheless able to pinpoint the internet early on as being a way of connecting with potential fans. “When we were first starting out, we were finding people online that were interested in our music and talking to them. This was way before Hybrid Theory came out, way before anything, and we were just kind of finding people all over the U.S. through the internet who had some sort of interest either in our music or in other bands that were doing different things. After we found them we’d ask them if they wanted to try and help us get the word out or whatever, all of this being done online.”

He’s talking about way early on. “At the end of that process, we would send them a cassette. So it was this total fluxpoint of using all this technology, but it was still at that stage where it wasn’t really ready to send MP3′s or do anything else online. We were still actually sending out these demo cassette tapes.”

And it’s not just about Facebook in particular, as Apple set its sights on the band when the company decided to recently launch its own “Ping” social network within iTunes. “We got a chance to meet with them early on, before they went with it, just to be able to potentially be included in that,” says Phoenix of the fact that Linkin Park was one of the handful of artists to be featured in Ping at the moment of launch. “I know that they’re planning on continuing to grow that, and I think it could be really cool. I think it could be just a further way for us to be able to stay in contact directly with our fans.” Not surprisingly, the band has already racked up more than a quarter million followers in the network’s first two weeks of existence.

One of Ping’s early features gives fans the option to announce to their friends that they’ll be attending a band’s concert, which leads back to the question of just what Linkin Park’s shows are going to look like as they gear up to tour in support of the unconventional A Thousand Suns. The band’s live performance of The Catalyst this past Sunday night at Griffith Park Observatory as part of the MTV VMA awards offered an early hint, but Phoenix says there’s plenty more where that came from.

“This tour for us, it’s the first time we’ve really had a good chunk of time on the front end to really be able to transition what we wanted to do with the album itself,” he says. “Not only on the musical aspect of what we’re gonna be doing, but we’re lucky enough that for the last maybe eighteen months we had an artist team, basically, creating visual content for the album packaging, everything, the merch, all the way down to the video content that you’ll see at the live show. The goal of creating this is everything you see will kind of play off of one another and help round out that immersive world that the album is intended to be.”

“I think the live show is gonna be great for fans to be able to see that bridge from the old music to the newer music, and at the same time to kind of have your experience with the record rounded out even more with the visuals that will come with it.”

And as if to emphasize that the new direction of the new material isn’t meant to step on the toes of Linkin Park’s previous work, “it’s also fun to go back and find new ways to reinterpret the older stuff, and really work it all together.”

interview by Bill Palmer

LinkinPark.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

Beatweek Magazine issue #83: Sara Bareilles, Ping, Anberlin, Twitter for iPad, Jessie James, Kirsten Price

New in the 83rd issue of Beatweek Magazine:

• Sara Bareilles interview: uncharted territory and her first new album in three years

• inside the iTunes Ping social network

• Anberlin interview: light and dark and the art of the impossible

• hands on with the new Twitter for iPad app

• Jessie James interview: the country pop singer on her next album

• interview with indie singer-songwriter Kirsten Price

Read this issue now

Subscribe for free

iTunes Ping: huge potential for music discovery, rough around the edges

iTunes Ping is the first social network for music lovers that actually has a chance to succeed in the mainstream, and for a few reasons. The first is that it comes from Apple, a company the mainstream increasingly trusts to deliver usable, understandable, non-geeky products. The second is that a ton of people already have iTunes on their computers, which means that Ping gains the benefit of being app-based from the get-go. That gives Ping the potential to be much more polished and sophisticated the comparatively clunky web browser interfaces that even the top social networks like Facebook and Twitter suffer from. Most social networks don’t bother to launch a full featured desktop app because they know that most users won’t download and install it no matter how superior it is to the crappy web browser version. But in Apple’s case, the past several years the company has spent getting iTunes placed on not only all Macs but many or even most Windows PCs, by making it an integral part of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad experience, is now paying off in an unexpected manner. All of the above having been said, Ping is still very much in the early stages of something that could be the next big thing.

I love the concept of Ping in iTunes 10, but man is it ever raw and rough around the edges at the moment. It should have been labeled beta for now, in my opinion. But no one outside the geekdom wants to use anything while it’s in beta-test, and if Ping only attracts geeks, it’l never get off the ground. Ideally, Ping is 92% about music, 8% about social networking, so it needs mainstream (non-geek) users to get involved from day one, which means pushing it out there in an “official” capacity now even though it clearly hasn’t yet become what it has the potential to be.

The majority of my Ping stream is currently along the lines of “so and so is now following so and so” with the remaining minority of my stream being actual music-related items. When that ratio is reversed (and it presumably will be once the current land-grab is over), Ping will be a useful tool for music lovers.

Still, there are other early hiccups. Other than right-clicking on my own name in Ping, grabbing the URL, and making my own bit.ly link, I have no idea how to tell anyone how to find me on Ping. The lack of a unique username or custom URL means that most Ping users will have no idea how to tell their friends on Twitter or Facebook or email how to find them; this will inhibit mainstream growth until Apple decides how to deal with it. For a minute there we thought Facebook was integrated into Ping, but that turned out not to be the case.

There’s also the fact that Ping isn’t initially doing such a great job of analyzing my musical tastes. The ten artists it wanted to automatically display on my profile, while all coming from my iTunes Store purchases, were in no way representative of my purchases overall. How can an artist I’ve only ever purchased one song from make my top ten list, when there are other artists I’ve purchased dozens of songs from didn’t make the list? I ended up making my own manual list, but found that even I couldn’t accurately depict the breadth of my music collection with a mere ten album covers. And I was tempted to blame my three-day-long inability to upload a profile picture on my own sometimes-flaky home internet, until I heard another Ping user say that she was having the same problem. Now I’m not sure. Based on the fact that most users do have profile pictures, it doesn’t appear to be widespread.

Some indie artists have already begun (rightfully) complaining that musicians can only be listed in Ping as being musicians (as opposed to just being any other end-user) by invitation. My stance is all that artists who sell music through iTunes should automatically be allowed to have an artist account in Ping. I heard from one indie, still under-the-radar artist today who has in fact been invited into Ping, so it appears Apple is already opening things up to artists beyond the Lady GaGas of the world. To me it looks like a staggered rollout in that respect, which goes back to the fact that this feels like Ping Beta without the “Beta” label. Perhaps Apple merely didn’t want to turn on the full floodgates on the artist side until it got a sense of what the floodgates on the end-user side are going to look like. If so that’s fine. But within a few weeks at the most, Apple should begin allowing all artists who sell their music in iTunes to join the party without an invitation. Any longer than that, and it becomes unfair to the artists.

It’s been pointed out that the lack of a web browser-based interface means that Ping users will struggle to access their accounts while at work (where they can’t install iTunes) or on someone else’s computer (where they might not want to log into iTunes at the expense of logging out the owner of the computer). This is a valid point. But I feel like with crappy web browser interfaces for social networks having become such an ingrained (and unfortunate) norm for both the geeks and the mainstream, Ping’s success is going to depend on being able to break users of that habit – and if that means initially making Ping only accessible through iTunes itself, then so be it. Six months from now, after the early adopters have gotten used to the idea that using a social network can actually be done through a real desktop app instead of a lame approximation of one in their web browser, then there will be no harm in launching ping.itunes.com as a browser based way of participating in Ping on some level.

As for now, I’ve found myself thinking long and hard these past few days about the notion of my iTunes experience, which has always been a very private thing for me, suddenly becoming public knowledge. I frequently interview musicians for Beatweek Magazine, and those interviews are as much a reflection of my musical tastes as anything else – so if anyone should be used to having their musical tastes plastered out there in public by now, it ought to be me. And yet even after publishing hundreds of musician interviews, which I generally conduct for the sole reason that I like the music and want Beatweek’s readers to know more about the artist behind that music, even I’m finding it a foreign concept to think that the public will now know about it whenever I purchase a song in iTunes. But that’s a good thing. Why shouldn’t you guys be able to see what music I’m buying? Why shouldn’t I want you to know what I’m buying?

The more I think about Ping, it’s a concept that I wish Apple had introduced into the iTunes Store from day one, years ago. But perhaps it’s something that had to wait until now, when even decidedly non-technical people (and in some cases even non-social people) are fairly comfortable with the idea of being part of a social network and sharing what’s on their mind. As of this week, that concept now finally extends to music on a (potentially) mainstream level.

If successful, Ping has a fascinatingly open window right now to corner the market – and not just because it’s part of iTunes. Facebook’s music efforts have largely been misguided while Twitter has never even really tried, and all of the music-specific social networks up until now have been so decidedly geek-oriented that the mainstream has never even heard of any of them. Ping could even finally, official kill off the abandoned amusement park known as MySpace which far too many musicians still inexplicably try to use as a promotional vehicle, even after most of the general public has long since vowed not to set foot on MySpace ever again for any reason.

Finally, it’s interesting to me that while Microsoft’s “Bing” is just a terrible, terrible name for anything, Apple’s “Ping” sounds like a decent name for a social network despite rhyming with Bing and only being one letter off. Is that because Ping really is that much more of an acceptable name than Bing, or is it because Microsoft’s long history of comically horrible product names has led us to simply reject every new product name Microsoft comes up with?

And come to think of it, am I the only one who finds it interesting that Apple’s latest product is called Ping and not iPing?

Ping, new Apple social network in iTunes 10: it’s not Facebook or Twitter

Apple has introduced its own social network named Ping. (No, not Bing). The network is built into the new iTunes 10 software, which is aimed at encouraging socialization of music and content. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has made it clear that Ping is neither Twitter nor Facebook, however his demonstration of a Lady GaGa-themed page shows that Ping does integrate Twitter. Jobs referred to Ping as being for “social music discovery” – with the ability to follow artists and friends. “You can get as private or as public as you want,” Jobs says of building your own Ping social network. Jobs is also apparently a fan of Paramore.

A half-dressed Lady GaGa appeared via pre-recorded video from the studio to talk about Ping.

Jobs also announced that iTunes digital music sales will surpass total sales of CDs in the United States in 2011.