Ultimate Guitar's Brad Delson Interview

FireHawk

FireHawk

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Minutes To Midnight is the highly anticipated third studio outing by multi-platinum selling act Linkin Park. The band spent close to a year and a half crafting their latest opus. Co-produced by the band’s Mike Shinoda and famed legendary producer Rick Rubin, it marks a change in the band’s musical direction and approach.
As Rubin stated recently when asked about the new record: "They [Linkin Park] really are reinventing themselves, it doesn't sound like rap-rock. There's very strong songwriting. It's very melodic...a progressive record." On the eve of the album release and just days before the band headed out on their current tour, Joe Matera spoke to Linkin Park guitarist Brad Delson about the new album, vintage gear and haunted houses.
Ultimate-Guitar: The band’s third studio album, Minutes to Midnight sees Linkin Park moving away from their sound of old. It is more of a redefined sound for the band, was it a conscious decision or the result of a natural progression?
Brad Delson: Minutes to Midnight is really a huge departure for us. We decided when we began writing this record that we really wanted to take the sound that we had established with Hybrid Theory and developed further with Meteora and kind of put it aside and really, almost, start from scratch in a sense with what the sound of the band could become. And through a lot of hard work and really smart guidance by our producer Rick Rubin, we were able to achieve what ultimately became this record.
You spent 14 months working on the album and in that period amassed around 150 song ideas?
Yeah but I would say it was more about a 17 month period. We started it about November of 2005 and then we worked on it and didn’t finish the record until the end of last month [March]. There were definitely a lot of songs there that we had to work with. Some of them were good enough to be on the record but there were also a lot of stuff that you know, hopefully no one will ever hear because they were awful. There definitely is a lot of stuff that didn’t make the record that may come out at some point in the future.
Was there pressure on you with the success of the first two albums, to try and replicate that success with the new album?
We put a lot of pressure on ourselves creatively to try and not rely on existing methods or formulas on how to write a song. We really wanted to, with this album, do something totally fresh and new and it took a long time and a lot of experimentation to find out to how we would achieve that.
Speaking of experimentation, the band has utilized a lot of different instruments this time on the recording. There is everything from acoustic guitars to banjos to marimbas?
In the past if you read the liner notes to the albums it would say Brad Delson – guitar, Mike Shinoda – keyboards etc. But this time when it came time to address the liner notes we really simply wrote, “Linkin Park is” because all six of us played really anything and everything instrument wise on this record. There were no boundaries in terms of what some one could contribute or how they could contribute to the creation of these songs. It was really a product of collaboration by all six of us.
Rick Rubin co-produced the album with Mike Shinoda, what did Rick bring to the recording process?
He brought in a lot of perspective and a kind of a really great way of being able to guide us through a really challenging process and to do so while simultaneously creating a really positive and open atmosphere. Rick is really a big picture guy. You know, he’ll get immersed in the details when he needs to but in terms of basic tracking he usually relies on his engineers to kind of oversee that part of the process. So when it came to tracking guitars, I worked a lot with our engineer Andrew Scheps....
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Rest Of Interview On Ultimate Guitar
 
Linkin_lp_park said:
If new songs will be released on the new lpu cd, they'll be out on the internet:)
Click to expand...
Yeah I know... But I don't really like downloading the LPU stuff.. It seems unfair for the people who have to pay. :( Just like the massive fight about linkin-inside... they were sharing albums and everything LPU and people went of their nuts!
 
I download everything at the moment. And i probably will download these if i get the chance. I don't use Itunes, it runs bad on my computer, and ive tried many times to join lpu and ive jsut given up on it.
 

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