Linkin Park's first "band meeting" of 2010

Mike posted yesterday on his Blog, January 5th, news about the progress of their fourth studio album. They had their first band meeting of 2010. One of the things he talks about is how many songs they have so far, and they will have another batch of songs that they will discuss. Mike's news update are as follows.

We had our first Monday meeting of 2010. First, we took a listen to the first five songs, which are almost finished and sounding great. I was going to tell you guys the working titles...but I changed my mind. I realized if I did that, the linkinpark.com, lpunderground.com, and fan site forums would be flooded with threads about them, where people make crazy guesses about the songs' sounds based on the working title...followed by thousands of fake links to "leaked mp3s" within a few days. Since I have great respect for your valuable time, I won't tempt you to waste it on such things. :)

Anyway, back to Monday: We started thinking about the second batch...we have 15-20 songs that we like, and we'll be picking a new batch from those. There are a few common themes beginning to circulate in the lyrics and in the music. As I think I mentioned, the record might be a little more conceptual than our other ones. Not a "concept album" per se (it's not as far-out as that term would have you imagine), but it definitely has some thematic threads tying it together.

One funny thing came to mind as I was writing this: the term "genre busting" seems to keep coming up when talking about this album. In fact, if you Google "genre busting," the first thing you get is a link to an interview with me about this new music. If you read the piece, you'll see the following:

Linkin Park co-frontman Mike Shinoda says the band’s fourth studio album is going to be so unique, “they’re going to have to come up with a new genre name for what this record is.”

This offhanded comment was meant to be a bit of a joke. Most people don't take it as lightly as I meant it; because of that, part of me regretted saying it. But recently, there's a voice in the back of my head saying: Why not really make that the bar? "So unique that they'll have to make a new genre name." I don't know if we'll ever be able to hit that mark, but we might as well give it a shot.

It's fun to see that they have that many songs that they like already and even more songs that they will discuss, it's gonna be awesome. It would be cool if they made a new genre, but I've always thought that Linkin Park had their own genre, because they are so unique.