Home Entertainment Mike Shinoda debunks a big misconception about Linkin Park’s biggest song, recalls how he wrote it in just one night

Mike Shinoda debunks a big misconception about Linkin Park’s biggest song, recalls how he wrote it in just one night

Entertainment — 10/10/2024

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Mike Shinoda denied the rumors that Chester Bennington hated the song “In the End”, and recalled how he wrote Linkin Park’s mega-hit in just one night.

The final single taken from Linkin Park’s 2000 debut album “Hybrid Theory” to this day remains the band’s unofficial manifesto and the one piece of music that every single Linkin Park fan is bound to have a deeply personal relationship with. Moreover, it became the band’s highest-charting single in the US, where it peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Speaking to Howard Stern in a recent interview, Mike Shinoda recalled how quickly the song came together, even though he was writing it surrounded by “junkies and prostitutes”. Shinoda wrote the song in a rehearsal studio on Hollywood and Vine, where he decided to spend the night in order to stay engaged with the music (via Louder):

Mike Shinoda a Linkin Parkból a zenével tette túl magát Chester Bennington halálán | 24.hu

“My lyrics on the first version were different. But by the end of that night I had written the words to the chorus. The next day I played it for our drummer [Rob Bourdon]… and he was like, ‘Dude, this is the song that we’ve been waiting for, this is the best song we’ve got’.”It didn’t feel big to me, it didn’t feel like a hit song. I wouldn’t know what a hit song felt like, I was too young. I was feeling despondent, like, we’re doing all this stuff, we’re trying to realize some kind of identity, or some kind of meaning, and it’s not working.”

 

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After Howard Stern noted how the band’s late frontman Chester Bennington was said to have hated the song and that he didn’t want it on the album, Shinoda said:

“He didn’t hate it. No, no, no, no. That’s actually a misconception. Some people think that he hated the song. He liked the song, he just loved really heavy stuff, and so when people were like, ‘This should be a single’, he was like, [shrugs], ‘Ah, whatever!’ It’s not the one that he would have chosen.”

Linkin Park recently revealed a hitherto unreleased song titled “Lost”, which was recorded during the “Meteora” sessions. The song will be released as part of a 20th-anniversary box set of the band’s famous sophomore record this April 7.