Linkin Park's Bennington Readies Side Project Dead By Sunrise

Chester Bennington will take a brief sojourn from Linkin Park this autumn to unveil his new side project Dead By Sunrise and their debut album Out of Ashes. According to Bennington, the songs on Out of Ashes developed as he was writing tracks for the follow-up to Linkin Park's 2007 LP Minutes to Midnight.

"I came up with a few songs that felt and sounded really good, but I knew they weren't right stylistically for Linkin Park," Bennington says in a press release announcing Out of Ashes. "They were darker and moodier than anything I'd come up with for the band. So I decided to work on them on my own rather than turn them over and have them transformed into Linkin Park tracks."

Among the tracks featuring on Out of Ashes — which was produced Howard Benson (My Chemical Romance, Motorhead) — are "Crawl Back In," "Let Down," and "Walking in Circles." While Bennington is joined by members of Orgy and Julien-K on the disc, Out of Ashes represents Bennington stepping into his own spotlight. "It's got me all over it," Bennington says. "This is the music I hear in my head." The album also won't feature the hip-hop elements awash in Linkin Park's catalog.

Bennington's schedule promises to be busy in the coming months as Linkin Park are also working on their next album, the follow-up to 2007's Minutes to Midnight. "They're going to have to come up with a new genre name for what this record is," co-frontman Mike Shinoda told Rolling Stone about the possible direction Linkin Park's music may be going. As Rock Daily previously reported, Linkin Park gave fans a taste of their next album when they recorded the theme song "New Divide" for the blockbuster Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Related Stories:
• Linkin Park Cooking Up Genre-Busting Album for 2010
• Linkin Park Record New Song, Help Score "Transformers 2"
• Linkin Park Hit the Studio in L.A.: "We Have a Ton of Material"

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Song Stories

“Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Nirvana | 1991

"Smells Like Teen Spirit," named after a brand of deodorant marketed to girls, was Kurt Cobain's attempt to "write the ultimate pop song," he said, using the soft-loud dynamic of his favorite band, the Pixies. Cobain "had that dichotomy of punk rage and alienation," the song’s producer, Butch Vig, told Rolling Stone, "but also this vulnerable pop sensibility. In 'Teen Spirit,' a lot of that vulnerability is in the tone of his voice." Sadly, by the time of Nirvana's last U.S. tour, in late '93, Cobain was tortured by the obligation to play "Teen Spirit" every night. "There are many other songs that I have written that are as good, if not better," he claimed.

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