I can’t give you a date because we don’t know. We have begun mixing. That lets you know we are coming up to the final phases of the record. We have a ton of songs, so we are going to be mixing for quite a long time. We have been talking about first quarter of next year. It will be before summer, I imagine.



The new Linkin Park record is what I have been focused on; I’m extremely excited about it. We’ve been working with a lot of great collaborators in terms of writing. We’ve been doing this for a long time. This is our seventh record, and we’ve always kept things in house, meaning we shut the doors and don’t let anybody in like Willy Wonka. Then we go, “Look! Does anyone like the candy we made?”



This time we were really curious how other artists and other writers work because we like to gather as much information and expand on our education, so to speak. We look at music the same way doctors look at medicine. There is always an evolution, always something new that you can learn, so we don’t rest on what we already know how to do.



It’s funny because when we started the process of making a new record, we really wanted to focus on vocals and melody first. That was something that was suggested by Rick Rubin when we first started working with Rick.



It took us about three albums and 6 years to figure out exactly how to do that. For me, I’ve had a lot of time to get into the emotional and lyrical content of the songs. I’ve been able to sit with them for a long time, listen to them, and they’ve become ingrained into my mind before I even went in and sang. There is something special that I feel is very different from what we have done in the past as a result of doing things this way.



Many of the vocals I did were done with a piano or a simple guitar chord progression. Then we built the track around the vocals and created all the sounds that we wanted to replace the guitars and piano.

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