Spring Music Preview: Fifty Must-Hear Albums

Q&A: Chester Bennington, Linkin Park

Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington checked in with our Kevin O'Donnell from Disneyland -- where he was patiently waiting in line for Space Mountain with the wife and kids -- to discuss the band's new album, Minutes to Midnight, out May 15th.

So how did you guys decide to hook up with Rick Rubin? Was that your idea or did he approach you?
We -- the band -- made a list of people we wanted to work with. Rick is somebody we wanted to work with since we started making records. If you don't think about working with Rick Rubin then you're probably an idiot, you know what I mean? We decided to approach him, and after meeting with him we didn't even bother with meeting with anybody else. He seemed really into shaking things up as far as what we were going to do musically and lyrically. We were looking for a new direction and we knew he was going to get us there.

Which of the songs best encapsulates the results of working with Rubin?
"In Between" is a track that probably best captures what I'm talking about, It's a song that just starts out with a cello. There's literally a cello and a little sample beat. A piece of a beat. And Mike comes in and he sings the whole song.

He sings, he doesn't rap?
Right, he's singing the whole song, it's a very heartfelt, beautiful track,and its something no one would expect on a Linkin Park record.

What about "Hands Held High" and "Little Things You Give Away"?
Well "Hands Held High" [musically lends itself to singing]. And Rick was like, 'Forget that lets rap on that, Mike go ahead, do you thing.' It was an interesting piece of music to rap over but it works really well. "Little Things You Give Away" is this epic long, beautiful ride, and it's a little unconventional in the way its arranged too. So I think that's something that represents the diversity of the record.

Was it lyrically inspired by you know your Music for Relief charity for the tsunami?
The thing about this record we have made some observations on our perspective of things, we don't want to preach or get into politics or what ever, we are at an age where we're paying attention to that more in our lives.

So what kind of ideas did Ruben have that you guys really like and what ones did you try that he threw your way and you guys just really couldn't go for?
We took everything Rick said to heart. We have a lot of respect for him and he's got great taste in music and a really good ear so if he was like, 'Let's try this beat,' we really tried everything. We took every challenge and worked on it, that's the reason we wrote close to a hundred and fifty songs, and narrowed it down to 12 tracks on our record.

How did you whittle them down? Was there a grading system?
There's a grading system for everything and there's also a voting. We graded everything, voted, graded them again and voted again and that process just happened throughout. It was very tedious. Sometimes democracy felt like it wasn't a very good idea, but the end result was that we all walked away with a record that was lyrically stronger, very musical, really well written. think [we all looked at Rick] and thought we could live with this one. This one's good.

Does Mike do a lot of singing on the album? Because the songs I've heard are largely you singing.
Mikes was like, 'I wrote myself out of the record.' There's not a lot of Mike on this record -- there's a couple of songs he's rapping on, he has a couple of songs he's singing on, he's singing a lot of harmonies and playing a lot of guitar. And, you know he produced this record as well, so it was interesting. I questioned that early on, like, 'Hey there what are you doing? Maybe we should try some rapping or more of you.' And he was like 'No, no, no. This is all you dude.' It was almost like after awhile we just stopped paying attention to him. We were just writing songs.