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62 | FireFlyz
talking about aesthetics
or how you lay out a set
or what your video looks
like or whatever. Our
threshold for trying to
push it and do something
that’s interesting to us
and also challenging the
fans is pretty high, just
like what we did for A
Thousand Suns.
We heard a great
quote by Nas around that
time. He said that every
once in awhile he likes to
make a project to shake off his pop fans.
To intentionally get rid of them. If you’re
a casual Nas listener, he’s going to let you
know at a certain point that you’re not
welcomed to his party. We love that, we
thought that was so cool.
Intermsof strategy, howdoyourespond
tothechallengesyoufaceintheindustry?
The way we treat this is, “We live and
breathe this. If this fails, you get to go
home and have your jobs, but we don’t.”
We also go to our fans and try to get them
to see our point of view. On this record,
our first single is aggressive, it is six min-
utes long, and radio won’t play anything
over three-and-a-half minutes. Pop radio
won’t play anything over three minutes,
and they also won’t play anything with
aggressive guitars, and they definitely
won’t play anythingwith screaming in it.
There’s a ton of rules. And unless you’re
Rihanna, Nicki Minaj or Lady Gaga, they
won’t play anything cold – they need it
to be a success elsewhere. They’re only
going to be on the winning team. And
fromour perspective, we can’t live in that
world. It’s a business, do what you’ve
gotta do, but that world’s very foreign
to us. When we make a song, we don’t
do math. We think on what the point is
that we’re trying to get across, how we
can be better writers, better producers,
and all that.
It’s hard to put such an abstract
thing as an album into, like, three
words.Whatwas it basedon?
We have concepts behind the
record, but a lot of times they
have multiple meanings. The
easiest album title was
A Thou-
sand Suns
, which came from an
Oppenheimer quote. He said it
after they’d detonated the bomb,
and that’s sort of what the album
was about.
Howmanypeoplehaveheardthis
record so far?
The whole thing? Not very many. Right
now our manager’s flying around with a
five-song sampler playing it for journalists
and our label, because they need to know
what is coming up. The record comes out
this summer, and we need everybody to
knowwhat they’reworkingwith.Which is
to say that some of it is going to be a bit of a
challenge. This is going to be a hard sell for
rock radio, we knew that going in. Radio’s
really powerful for selling albums – at the
end of the day we’re artists, but we’re also
not stupid and we know in order to be
able to keep this momentum of this thing
we’ve got going, we need to perform to a
certain degree.
Howdo you compete against factories for
pop songs?
It’s crazy out there. What’s worked for us
in the past is to stick to our guns as far as
what our creative vision is, spend a lot
of time on it, and really craft it. On this
record we spent six months in the studio,
probably six more out of the studio in
Point of Authority
Said to be one of the best numetal/alt rock acts fromthe turn of themillennium, Linkin
Park is backwith their sixth studioalbum,TheHuntingParty, which they self-produced.
FireFlyz sits down for a short chatwith the band.
addition, just coming up with demos and
throwing them away. In contrast to that,
there was a pop artist (who I won’t name)
who was in the studio while we were
doing our record – they showed up for
three days. Day one, they showed up for
thirty minutes, day two they showed up
for fifteen, and day three they neglected to
show up at all. The song was done.
In general, people start to change when
labelled as mainstream. What do you say
to this since Linkin Park is viewed in that
perspective?
We’re at peace with the fact that not only
can we go to many countries and play
shows and people come, but also with the
fact that that’s howwe’re seen. We would
have fought that early on when we were
getting bigger, like “No, we don’t want
to be seen as a pop group”. But we do
think there’s a difference between being
accessible and mainstream and being
pop or whatever you want to call that.
It’s more about intention, whether you’re
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Five lucky readers will stand a chance to win Linkin Park’s latest
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TheHuntingParty
, simplybytellinguswhich isyourall-time
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