livedaily.com conducted an interview with Rob Bourdon of Linkin Park.
drummer Rob Bourdon sees his band's latest single, "What I've Done," as evidence that the group is evolving.
Spawned from the new album "Minutes to Midnight," "What I've Done" finds rapper Mike Shinoda lurking in the background as a guitar player, thereby eliminating Linkin Park's trademark rap/rock sound.
"I think the single definitely has a new, unique sound for us," Bourdon said. "It definitely touches on some of the old elements of what we do as a band, but it also is a breath of fresh air at the same time."
Bourdon talked to LiveDaily about the songwriting process, how the band went about choosing acts for its Projekt Revolution Tour.
How did you go about choosing your bands for Projekt Revolution?
Well, we kind of all talked about the bands that we wanted to tour with. We basically just came up with a wish list of all the bands that we'd like to tour with. The way our band works is, we have miniature committees within the entire band that deal with all the different aspects of our band, from art to videos and business, and one of the committees is the touring committee. Chester and I are on that committee. We just put the word out to a bunch of bands. We were just blown away by how many of the bands on our wish list were actually able to do the tour. It's going to be a really incredible tour this summer. I'm really looking forward to it.
What other committees do you have?
We have one for art, which is mainly Mike and Joe. They are very involved in all of the album art. Joe directs our videos. We have a committee that looks after the business and legal stuff going on in the band. We do band conference calls. We try to do them once a week, just so everyone in the band has input on everything that's going on in our world. We've learned that it's really important for at least one or two people in the band to be involved in almost every decision that happens around us. We found it works better like that. Our message never gets lost in translation as long as we're involved in everything.
I noticed that "Leave Out All the Rest," the third song on "Minutes to Midnight," has a real Ministry sound to it. Is it sampled?
No, that's a completely original song. I don't know if anyone in the band listens to that much Ministry. I think it's more of a coincidence that it sounds like that. But I've heard other people comment on that too, saying it sounds like Ministry.
There's definitely a new sound on the album. It seems that Mike is being used a little less as a rapper on some of the songs.
There's definitely less rapping on this album than on the past albums. I think the best way to explain why is that, at the very beginning of the process, when we sat down with [producer] Rick Rubin, we knew we wanted to make a different album. We didn't want to follow our other albums up with a trilogy record. We knew that we wanted to do something different and Rick helped us to do that. One of the first things he told us was to forget about what we thought we should sound like as a band, just to go write whatever type of music we were inspired by. That's what we did. I think Mike was more inspired to write more melodic vocal parts. He did write a lot more rapping parts, but when we voted on the final songs, [the non-rap songs] were the ones chosen as the favorites.
How many songs did you write?
We estimate somewhere between 100 and 150. Some were very rough and just in the demo form. About 30 got closer to the final form. We ended up recording 17 total. We put 10 of those, plus an intro, on the album.
Will any of the remaining songs see the light of day?
I think so. One of them was released as an iTunes exclusive, called "No Roads Left," and I think the other ones will eventually find their way out. We don't know exactly what we're going to do with them yet. We have four or five other songs that are kind of really good and almost done. So, I think so. A lot of them will probably never see the light of day. We're going to hide them and erase them, because they're horrible.
That's a big chunk of songs from which to choose. What were you looking for?
Even though it sounds like an overwhelming amount of songs, it was a long process and every week or two we'd get together and vote on songs. A lot of them would get only one or two plays for the whole band and they'd get voted off or we would focus our energies elsewhere. When we got to the point when we had 30 songs in our A folder, like our top choice songs, we stopped the writing phase and went more into focusing on the songs and making them better.
Where did you write your songs? In the studio, on the road?
We were actually off the road for awhile before we started writing. When we came back from the "Meteora" touring cycle, we took a little time off just to relax. Mike was working on his solo project, Fort Minor, for awhile. Then, we just felt right after being home for a year, [and] we started writing together for the album. We did a lot of the writing in a studio in Hollywood that we actually rented from Korn. We worked there for about six to seven months, writing and recording. Once we had that solid batch of 30 songs [and] felt like we were ready to start recording, we moved to Rick Rubin's house in Laurel Canyon [CA] and finished writing and recording there.
What was it like to work with Rick Rubin?
Working with Rick was a really enjoyable experience for me. Rick is a great guy. He's really easy to get along with. He's so mellow. When he comes into the studio, it doesn't feel like this overwhelming strong hand is coming in. But he comes in and just drops these incredible suggestions and words of wisdom that keep the whole project on track.
Definitely he's the type of producer that, if you're stuck on something, he won't tell you what to do to fix it, but he'll kind of just guide you in the right direction. He'll give you some other songs to listen to or some ideas that open your mind up to going around to where you're stuck and coming up with something great. It was a real joy working with him. He definitely helped me a lot as a drummer and a musician. And definitely opened my mind up to different things and helped me to look at music and recording music in a whole new way.
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