Mike
no choice but to simply shut down and
grieve. Which happened organically, cathar-
tically through his new music, first issued as
a three-elegy EP this January (also dubbed
Post Traumatic) then expanded into the full
album version this June. Currently, he’s
venturing out of his retreat to present the
songs virtually alone onstage, for fullest
impact.
s far as album titles go, Linkin Park
guitarist Mike Shinoda couldn’t
have chosen a more apt — and dig-
nified — one than Post Traumatic, which
pretty much sums up the surreal, decidedly
painful past year of his life. On May 26 in IE: The actor Ron Livingston was making
the talk show rounds, chatting up his new
suicide-themed TV series A Million Little
Things, which follows other trendy shows
like 13 Reasons Why. Has suicide suddenly
been crassly commodified?
Mike Shinoda: Ah! You know that I’m kind
of involved with that, right? My friend D.J.
Nash wrote the show – he created it. And he
2017, Chester Bennington — his band’s
charismatic but mercurial mouthpiece —
stood up at the Hollywood Forever
Cemetery and delivered one of his most
touching performances ever, a heartfelt ren-
dition of Leonard Cohen’s signature dirge
“Hallelujah,” as his good friend Chris
Cornell was laid to rest after a rumored sui-
cide. Two months later, on July 20,
Bennington himself committed suicide by
hanging, just as the group’s seventh mono-
lithic set One More Light was rolling out. It
was a shock that no one saw coming. And
Shinoda – as busy as he is at 41 with his
spinoff combo Fort Minor, and work in pro-
duction, fine art, even graphic design – had had an experience that was similar to mine,
and as he was writing the show, he couldn’t
have been more focused on getting it right.
My wife (Anna Hillinger) is an author, and
she says that one of the problems in litera-
ture is that they use suicide as a plot point.
It’s minimized just to keep the story going
or to wedge against a story. But D.J.’s show
is entirely different, and suicide is certainly
not reduced to a plot point. He created a
whole universe around this very real sce-
nario, and he checked in with everybody
about it. Like, What’s the reality of this?
What’s the right way to tell this story? The
right way to handle this topic? I think he did
a great job. We talked about me doing some
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Mike Shinoda
music for it, but it didn’t happen naturally,
so I didn’t do any,
IE: Just playing devil’s advocate here, but it
is an incredibly creepy world we live in,
with humanity just hurtling toward extinc-
tion. I wouldn’t blame someone who truly
wanted to leave.
MS: I have a couple of things to say about
that. I’ll start with a more specific thing and
then broaden out. Specifically, with artists
who are creative – especially ones who’ve
had success – there’s a pressure to repeat it.
And there’s a pressure to embody it, to be
the thing that people expect you to be,
which are two different things, by the way.
And that pressure is put on the creative in
part by their own drive to be great. Because
you start out as a kid who wants so badly to
be good at a thing or playing an instrument,
and you read amazing stuff and hear amaz-
ing stuff about stars, and you think, “Man. I
would love to be that good.” But the truth is,
you can’t control it. And I’m not necessarily
talking about commercial success – there
have been times when I’ve written some-
thing where I’ve been like, “Wow. That real-
ly was the song I hoped it would be.” And it
doesn’t have to be everybody’s favorite
song, and it doesn’t have to get a bajillion
streams on whatever service you’ve got.
Sometimes you just feel like you nailed it.
But then you sit down the next day, and you
go, “My God! Can I do that again?” People