In the days and weeks that followed the tragic suicide of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, Mike Shinoda had the same conversation with everyone. “First they’d ask, ‘How are you?’ and then they’d ask, ‘What are you going to do?’” he says. “I honestly couldn’t come up with an answer that felt like it was the answer. That time was a blur; my reality had been turned upside down and I was just completely lost at sea. So I started trying to pinpoint some things that I could do, to anchor myself and feel like I was attached to the real world again.”
Shinoda, who founded Linkin Park around the time he started at Art Center College of Design in 1996, did what he has always done to process his emotions: he made art. “I wasn't eating or sleeping well, so I eventually started making some music and painting. It was meditative in a way, but also scary. For so long, all my creative output was focused on the band. But I reminded myself that I had made music and art all my life before Linkin Park. Not only could I do it, this was necessary in order to move toward recovery.”
With no agenda, Shinoda hunkered down alone in his Los Angeles home and began writing, recording, and painting. The result is the upcoming Post Traumatic, a transparent and intensely personal album that, despite its title, isn’t entirely about grief, though it does start there. “It’s a journey out of grief and darkness, not into grief and darkness,” Shinoda says. Ultimately, Post Traumatic is an album about healing. The songs, though specific about Shinoda’s experience with loss, manage to be universally relatable, thanks to their honesty and heart. “If people have been through something similar, I hope they feel less alone,” he says. “If they haven’t been through this, I hope they feel grateful.”
In January, Shinoda released the first three songs as an EP — each one a powerful, stream-of-consciousness expression of unvarnished grief, accompanied by a homemade video. “Place To Start” ends with a series of condolence voice mails from friends. In the video, the messages play out over shots of Shinoda’s kids’ bedrooms. “I used those images to remind people that this is real life — that real families have been affected on a deep level,” he says. The way the voice mails are stacked one after the other is a stark reminder that Shinoda has been a main repository for all of the emotions that Bennington’s death unleashed in the Linkin Park community. “It felt like a responsibility I didn’t ask for,” he says. “I’m a member of a club I don’t want to be a part of.”
Those qualms surface on the raging “Over Again,” which captures the visceral anxiety Shinoda felt before performing a three-hour tribute show to Bennington at the Hollywood Bowl in October. The stunningly raw verses, which were written the day-of and the day-after the show, include these lines: “’Cause I think about not doing it the same way as before / And It makes me wanna puke my fucking guts out on the floor…Everybody that I talk to is like, ‘Wow / Must be really hard to figure what to do now’ / Well thank you, genius, you think it'll be a challenge? / Only my life's work hanging in the fucking balance.”
