LINKIN PARK EXPLAINS AWAY DELAYS

One of the big disappointments for 2006 was the failure of Linkin Park to release their new studio album. The band had a lot of ideas and has had trouble paring the album down.

Linkin Park is working with Rick Rubin, and as is his forte, he forces the bands he works with to come up with only the best. Mike Shinoda explained the delay.

“We wanted to have it out sooner. Our fans know that. We’re really taking our time. The ideas are coming, but we really wanted the best for us and our fans, so it’s not quite done. We’ve had about 100 ideas, and we’ve been narrowing it down, and narrowing it down and it’s about 17 at this point. I figure it’ll be less than that when it comes out.”

Linkin Park said that one of the reasons they’re taking so long is that they want to make sure that any of their songs could be picked as a single and that there’s no filler.

[Mike Shinoda] “You pick up some records and you wanna, like, you really like some songs and you really don’t like some songs — that may be true for our records, I don’t know — but for us when we listen to our records, we want to listen to it and like every song so it’s hard to pick a single when you like all the songs.” [Bassist Phoenix] “Not only that, we actually… When Hybrid Theory first came out we used to think that we would be really good at picking singles, and we learned very quickly that the record company does that because they’re way better at it. For us, now we’re just going to be like, ‘You guys pick the singles. That’s not what we’re here to do. You know what works best in your world and we’ll just try and write music.'”

Fans who want to know a little bit more of what Linkin Park has been going through in the studio can pick up the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine, which hits newsstands November 16. The band also has some goodies for fans still interested in joining the fanclub, Linkin Park Underground for this year, and they promise great stuff for 2007 membership as well.