Who can't relate to the idea of leaving one chapter behind and moving on to the next?
Mike Shinoda
I like sneakers. I guess I could call myself a collector.
My parents still treat Christmas like I'm thirteen years old.
When we started the band, it was because we were waiting for a sound that never happened. We got tired of waiting, and we decided to just do it ourselves.
I liked the piano. I always liked playing. I just hated homework.
We have people in the band who don't drink or do drugs... some of us like to go sightseeing.
I know at one point I had bright red hair and I had bracelets from my wrist up to my elbow and I was wearing size 50 pants. I wouldn't wear that today, but I'm not embarrassed about wearing it back then any more.
I'd rather get up early and go out and do something than stay up late and screw up my body.
When I was in high school, if my favorite band got too popular, I'd watch carefully.
I spent ten years playing classical piano, and that was what led to keyboards and eventually to production and to Linkin Park.
Go find something that you haven't done before. Don't do the same thing over and over again.
As a creative person you just get an idea in your head, and sometimes you just can't shake it off.
A decade is a long time to be doing anything, much less to be with the same guys, chasing after the same goals.
I feel really lucky to be in a band where the guys, for all the opportunities to do things that potentially would be good for them but detrimental to the group, that everybody stayed loyal to the whole.
Usually I spend my holidays with my family.
Little pieces of advice like that can provide us with months' worth of entertainment.
I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.
Most of the musicians that I know almost to the man everybody uses Apple computers. They've thought of the steps that you're going to think of when you're trying to create your thing. And that's where the tools get invented to make better art.
We learned pretty early on in this band that you can't have snobbery in music.
In high school I was making beats for my friends and for myself and rapping over them.
I've been really excited about some new cutting edge electronic music and technology.
I remember being a little kid sitting in the living room with my brother and some friends from around the neighborhood, and I would sit at the piano and as they were running around the room doing different things and being silly, acting out, I would actually play the score for it - the music that went along with it.
I have a BFA in illustration.
You definitely pick stuff up when you go back and listen to older material.
The thing is, there are so many different ways to make music these days with virtual instruments, software applications, physical instruments, and computer programs.
I loved Transformers when I was a kid.
I got over being embarrassed.
The casual listener won't be around forever.
My dad remembers being in school with my uncle, and the teacher would say outright to the class that the Japanese were second-class citizens and shouldn't be trusted.
I'm excited to doing more scoring work in the future.
