‘I was making personal music because I felt like I had to’

Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda talks to Keri-ann Roper about his new album Post Traumatic

In the dictionary, the word trauma has two meanings. One of them being “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience”.

And while musician Mike Shinoda, 41, has endured a year that could at the very least be described as traumatic, his new album title – Post Traumatic – suggests there is light in the period after such an event.

This week on 20 July it will be a year to the day that his longtime friend and former Linkin Park front man Chester Bennington, 41, took his own life.

In April last year, just a few months before Bennington’s death, I met him and Shinoda at a recording studio in Kensington, west London, to discuss Linkin Park’s seventh album One More Light.

Outwardly Bennington had all the aesthetic markings – tattoos, black nail polish, piercings – of the quintessential rock star. But inwardly, he had long battled personal demons, many of which he spoke about publicly in the years before his death.

Today Shinoda and I meet in a hotel in central London ahead of the release of his solo record.

“Beginning about a year ago, I was not leaving the house for probably a couple of weeks,” he says, explaining how this 16-track album came about.

“I went over to our [Linkin Park’s] bass player Dave’s house with a couple of the guys and we were talking... He said, ‘Have you guys listened to our music yet?’. I said no, and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s like ripping a band aid off, you gotta just do it, because if you don’t, you’re going to be anxious about how it’s going to feel. So on the way home, I listened to some of our music and that was tough and interesting...”

Taking the next step and getting into his home recording studio was no easy task though – given it was the same place he and Bennington had made music so many times.

“I’m in here [the studio], where I’ve written stuff for our band forever and where Chester used to stand right there and he would sing, I

0 For Mike Shinoda, his new album title has genuine resonance

would play him songs I was writing, we would tweak the words. It was in that room so... I eventually just started to jam and doodle around on instruments and eventually words started to show up and I was making songs.”

This isn’t his first solo venture, he has previously performed as part of a side act he launched called Fort Minor. But this album is infinitely more personal. In fact, after listening to it, you get the sense it’s almost like a diary and symbolic of the emotional journey he went through in the aftermath of losing Bennington.

The album opens with a track called Place To Start, which features excerpts of voice messages of support left for Shinoda following Bennington’s death. The rest of the album is a perfect mix of his musical talents combined with a searing honesty, making the final product poignant and extremely powerful.

“It’s post traumatic, not traumatic. So, what do you do after something like that happens?

“The experience of going through all of this stuff, it felt so unique in the sense that, the part of it that is not unique is people lose someone, you

know, that happens. But when you do it in a public way, when you lose someone who is, like, one of the pillars of the thing you’ve built for many years, you know I was defining myself as a founder of Linkin Park – this is what I do and who I am. When people think of Linkin Park they think of me and vice versa.

“And so if I’m asking myself do I, are we going to play music anymore, then I’m asking myself – do I have an identity anymore in a sense or if that’s not the identity, what is my identity?

“So these are the types of questions that were happening in the beginning and obviously as I went I was finding answers to certain ones or at least narrowing it down. And where I ended up today, it’s not all clear, it’s not like I have answers to all of those things, but I definitely have more of a sense of it all than I had a few months ago.”

In August he will take to the stage at Reading and Leeds festival.

He can be critical of his own work when he listens to it with company.

“It doesn’t matter if it is a sixyear-old with no idea, it could be one of my kids and they could love everything I do, but the second I play it with them in the room, I will hear the song differently and I will find something wrong with it.”

For this album though, that might prove a nearimpossible task.

“It’s not all clear, it’s not like I have answers to all of those things”

● Post Traumatic is out now