Kids today have it good.
That’s in essence what Linkin Park singer Mike Shinoda says when he talks about the ability fans of his band will have to almost immediately download a free, top-quality recording of shows they attend on the tour that hits Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena on Tuesday.
Gone are the days of sneaking a tape recorder and microphone into a show, and trading bass and hiss-filled bootleg tapes with other fans via mail. The ease of click-and-play recordings gets Shinoda musing pretty quickly about shows he’d love to have saved on an iPod for instant enjoyment.
“Man, I wish I could have had the opportunity to take home a souvenir recording of the time I saw Alice in Chains at the (San Francisco Cow) Palace, back in the ’90s,” Shinoda said via phone recently.
“I saw Panthrax and Public Enemy play together. That was one of the first concerts I ever saw, which was the Killer Bees tour. I remember seeing Pearl Jam playing, they were, like, the second band on Lollapalooza. For young people, I know they don’t necessarily remember a time when this didn’t exist, but for those of us who have that kind of perspective, it’s something that’s exciting.”
Heading out to support the new album “A Thousand Suns,” the band is now into its second decade of a career that’s been marked by wildly successful albums and side projects that have merged hard rock, hip-hop and electronic music.
Shinoda said the blend comes from having six members with wildly divergent musical interests working well together and being unafraid to take chances while creating music that excites them.
“That gap (from rock to hip-hop) has been bridged a million times and we just happen to have grown up on many different styles of music and when we write music that’s how we write it,” he said. “One misconception about how our band might write is that when you sit down to write a song you’re thinking of imitating something else. When we go into the studio, we don’t set out to say, ‘Let’s write a song like another song.’ We sit down and try and write something that is exciting to us and something that’s fresh and especially on the new record, that’s where the majority of the songs came from. Just trying to write something that sounded different and was exciting to us.”
That creative daring resulted in “A Thousand Suns” becoming perhaps the band’s most adventurous and mature album. While there’s still a healthy dose of anger and frustration flowing from songs such as “Wretches And Kings” and “Burning Skies,” as a whole the Rick Rubin-produced album is more restrained and measured than the band has ever shown itself on record.
“We were making demos and we knew that the sound was a little bit more electronic-based and it was more loose and almost more abstract,” he said. “Ideas would just kind of pop out, and I wouldn’t even know that I was thinking about some of this stuff and it would come out of my mouth and the song would develop.
“There’s ideas of kind of like self-annihilation and fear that were popping out and surprising us. We’re very analytical when it comes to rating our songs and putting them all together, so we’re looking at songs from every angle, and we’re thinking about things and we start asking ourselves, ‘What do we all feel about these ideas being on the record all over the place and maybe taking the record in that direction?’ And it turned out that all six of the guys felt like there was definitely a universal fear that I think a lot of people these days do have that fear, whether it be in the front of their mind or in the back of their mind, that humanity as a whole is and has been for a long time on the brink of destroying itself.”
That departure has made the tour for “A Thousand Suns” something of a creative adventure as the band has tinkered constantly with its set list and execution of new songs, to find ways to help them fit and find context with its past work that was largely more visceral.
“You can plan it out from beginning to end in the studio and whatever, but there’s something else that happens when it comes to stepping on stage with that set list. We’re constantly tweaking the set list and making little changes and improvising on parts, because we’re searching for ways to improve it,” Shinoda said.
“The new record definitely lends ... a narrative to the show, which is really nice, kind of ties different parts of the show together, and I find that some of the old songs take on a new meaning when they’re put in that context.”
And while not everything has worked and some pairings and transitions have had to be cast aside, Shinoda said on the whole the tour has yielded more pleasant surprises, such as the live rendering of the largely electronic and sample-based “Blackout.”
“I’s mostly like drum sounds and keyboard sounds and stuff like that and we were thinking, ‘This is going to be a nightmare to try and play live, like literally the whole band is going to need to play samplers and synthesizers, so how are we going to do that and make it sound as exciting as the song is supposed to sound?’
“We threw some ideas together and rehearsed it and felt pretty good, but, I mean, the crowd went out of their minds. It was so much fun to play that song and it actually is now probably one of the most exciting moments in the set.”
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