Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda is still grieving over the death of bandmate and friend Chester Bennington, but he learned to sort his emotions through his music.
In a new interview, the musician talked about he channeled his experiences over the past year into the very personal new solo album, Post Traumatic.
Mike Shinoda On Writing Music After Chester Bennington's Suicide
"One of the harder things I've gone through this year is that everything I do gets read through the lens of the year," said the 41-year-old singer-songwriter in an interview with The Rolling Stone.
Of course, he is talking about the death of Bennington, frontman of Linkin Park, nearly a year ago and its aftermath. Shinoda channeled everything he experienced, from the grief of unexpectedly losing a friend and colleague to finally becoming at peace with the tragedy on his LP. Post Traumatic, which features 16 tracks, sounded like diary entries of his emotional journey into moving on and letting go.
The song "Place To Start," which is the opening track of the album, ends with actual voice mails he received following the death of Bennington. In "Hold It Together," Shinoda recounts the time he attended a children's birthday party, only for someone to bring up the death of his friend.
However, he does not want people to see the album as a tribute, but a record about his own struggles. He said he never held anything back; the only time a song or a line got cut from the album was when he did not like it.
"Songs have to be about something," he continued. "And when you're not really going through very much and life is boring, it's harder to pull interesting songs out of the air. When things are going on and they're heavy, it's almost like you have a nonstop well of ideas to pull from."
Mike Shinoda On Finally Releasing 'Post Traumatic'
It was right around August last year when Shinoda realized that he has enough material to make an album, even if he was not exactly planning to release one. He admitted to GQ that he never really stopped writing or making new music even after tragedy struck. He still spent a lot of his time typing on his PC and making beats.
However, the topics and themes of his output were different from what he normally churns out.
"At the time, it wasn't even what I wanted to do. And it came down to the fact that grief and the path out of grief are personal things," he explained. "This record was inevitably going to be a personal, autobiographical journey. To me, the only way to present that process was a solo album."
Post Traumatic was released on Friday, June 15.
