Yet another great press event was streamed live on Facebook, Mike and Chester sitting down with Virgin Radio in France along with an intimate crowd of Linkin Park fans. We’ve collected the recap notes and videos- which includes the live debut of “Battle Symphony.”
Asked what the ‘drawing line’ was from The Hunting Party to One More Light and what the focus was, Mike explained that they don’t have a straight line of progression in between the albums, each stands alone; the definitive trait of One More Light is that the words came first whereas in other albums, “usually we start with the music, and the music [inspires the lyrics].” With One More Light, the concepts and words were written first for every single song.
Live acoustic debut for “Battle Symphony”
Joking a bit before taking more questions with Chester revealing he’s been sleeping in a closet at Mike’s house without his knowing (tunnels for the win), the original live stream unfortunately lost connection and a section is lost to those of us not present. It jumps to Chester telling their host that they were taking polaroids of their [visible moods] on a given day and then writing lyrics, developing the track in the months after.
With “Battle Symphony,” Chester again refers to extremely stressful times in his life in which he says they made him want to just walk away from everybody, not do anything- give up on life; but, “screw that, go take it back, go do something about it.” [That song], for Chester, puts together that struggle.
For Mike, he feels a lot of the different songs are built around the same stories and emotions, and “One More Light” is at the core of it all. ‘Who cares if one more light goes out? I do.’ embodies its message as it was written around a loss they all suffered together.
Their host noting that the album so far promises to be ‘more pop’ than others, he asked if that was done consciously: Chester explains a misconception is that people envision a meeting before writing the album deciding on a vibe and what instruments to use- for Linkin Park it is not that pre-meditated. At the end of the day for One More Light, they simply had melodic songs with some progressions, written from conversations and emotions on piano and guitar. When finally writing the track to support the vocals and lyrics, like always, they worked on finding new ways to present the typical ‘style’ to use an instrument.
To that point, Chester talks about a moment in the album development in which one of the guys asked where the guitar was, when was Brad going to start playing- Chester explains the songs actually had a lot of guitar, they simply weren’t obvious. Different effects, different pedals, to mask the guitars.
He wants people to truly listen to the music when they pick up One More Light; “It’s sonically really complex […] there’s a lot of delicate things happening musically.” It seems like they let the sound be ‘more pop’ in order to bring in a positive element as the lyrics alone on the record can be a bit hard and depressing.
They ended the event with “What I’ve Done” and “Burn It Down.” One More Light rises May 19.
