"I wound up putting a lot of guitar on this album..."
Does a record like One More Light offer you a very different challenge to The Hunting Party? The Hunting Party had guitars right upfront; is it more a case of finding pockets of space for guitar on this album?
“I wound up putting a lot of guitar on this album. There’s a lot of layers and a lot of different guitars. The guitar work is nuanced and complementary to all of the other elements that we have put in there.
“I find guitar to be a dominant ingredient in any soup. The minute I put loud heavy guitars into an arrangement, I feel like it is a heavy colour. One of the goals of the production of this album was to do away with any notion of genre. We were looking at ways to juxtapose influences that we have in ways that you haven’t heard before. Building the guitar work into that was a fun challenge.
“I love the guitar work and tones that our engineer Ethan helped create with me and Mike [Shinoda] throughout this album. Even though you don’t hear guitar in the foreground in a heavy-handed way, there really is a ton of guitar on this album, and I’m really proud of it.”
Do you enjoy challenging fan expectations by changing up the style from album to album? Do you worry that some fans will feel alienated and won’t go with you in a new direction?
“When we met Rick Rubin while working on our third album, one of the first things he asked us was what were we listening to. It was a serious question and we each went around and said what we were listening to. He was making the point that we are a band and artists, and we need to make whatever music we feel at that point most inspired to make.
“I gleaned his point to mean that a lot of artists that have commercial success can feel trapped to recreate something for someone else’s expectations. Then there are artists that constantly reinvent themselves and have that courage. Rick Rubin liberated us in that way. We thought people might expect a, b or c from us, but what did we expect for ourselves?”
Even though you don’t hear guitar in the foreground in a heavy-handed way, there really is a ton of guitar on this album
Some fans some that the lead single was called Heavy and expected a big, heavy song…
“I understand it, for sure. It’s almost shocking how surprising [Heavy] is. From our perspective it is very different. We started writing these songs in November 2015 and worked on these songs every day from then until February 2017. We have been living with them.
“Wherever we go with our music it is always very familiar to the band but very surprising to people hearing it for the first time. I’m excited for our fans to hear the whole album.”
You co-produced this record, so having lived with these songs for so long, did the process become all-encompassing for you?
“It is totally immersive. I would go to the studio for sometimes 10-12 hours a day every day. When we first started making music as a band, we did it because we love to make music and also because there was something specific that we weren’t hearing anyone else do, and we wanted to do it selfishly because we wanted to listen to it. That’s still the reason why we do what we do.
“Even when I drive home from the studio I am listening to these songs in the car because I want to hear this music.”