Photo Credit: Mythical Kitchen/Youtube – Chester Bennington/Instagram
In the new episode of Mythical Kitchen, Mike Shinoda explained why Linkin Park didn’t change its name after Chester Bennington’s passing.
“So the simple answer to that is that the music sounds like Linkin Park. Like, the DNA is all still in there,” Shinoda replied to the question. “It’s obvious to anybody who listens to it and gives it a chance. The second thing though is that as we were navigating the, I don’t know, like the decisions we were making about like what is the band? Like, what do we make? Who’s in the band? Who’s playing what? All of that.”
“We could have chosen a male singer. We could have chosen somebody that sounded very different. We could have chosen somebody that sounded very similar. We could have had the singer of one of our cover bands who covers Linkin Park and is like a doppelganger. Like, so, so, so close to Chester, could have had them. And so what we did end up doing, which just naturally felt better, it wasn’t a strategy,” he continued.
Shinoda then detailed how they decided that Armstrong was the right person for the band’s next chapter: “When Emily came in, she sings so well. She’s a ton of fun to hang out with. We end up just sitting around. It was like, oh, we’ve been here for like two hours just talking. Yeah. Like, that’s the thing at the end of the day that made it obvious what direction we should go.”
The rumors about choosing a new singer for Linkin Park first surfaced when the Orgy frontman Jay Gordon accidentally revealed that the band’s new singer would be a woman. “Very, very cool guys and obviously a great band. They’ve been around a long time and they’re still going for it. It’s going to be tough without Chester [Bennington], but we’ll see. I hear they got a girl singer now. That’s what I heard.”
It seems that Shinoda is happy with the way Linkin Park is going in this new direction. In another interview, Shinoda said that the new lineup has a ‘strong’ LP DNA. “It’s really complicated,” Shinoda said in another interview. “For me, two years ago it was very overwhelming, and I think the best thing that we did was to just basically let things happen in the order and at the timeline that they were gonna happen, let things happen organically and not push too hard.”
He added, “And I feel like what ended up evolving was we just naturally kind of found each other, we found this new lineup, we found Emily and Colin in particular, and the music just kind of came into focus based on what we were having the most fun doing.”
Linkin Park will be performing three shows in Mexico at the end of January and the beginning of February. In mid-February, the band will head to Japan and Indonesia for additional shows. In April, they will kick off a U.S. tour in Austin, Texas, and later in the year, a second U.S. tour will run from late July in Brooklyn through to September 24 in Seattle.