Nadia Neophytou spoke to Linkin Park’s bassist, Dave “Phoenix” Farrell in New York, ahead of their South African shows.

To catch up with part 1 of the interview, click here.

Read on for part two of our exclusive interview…

Your new album is called Living Things - can that title be taken to mean you feel songs are living things?

The album title stuck because it had a couple different reads that we liked about it. As the album was developing it felt a lot more personal. Lyrically it was more you and me, rather than a political or kind of world view. And that was just the direction it was coming out, so it was that Living things kind of mentality going into it. There’s a ton of different reads on it. The individual songs themselves kind of become your kids at some point in the studio, and they do become these living things themselves.

It’s not the concept album A Thousand Suns was. Was this a conscious decision, and was there any pressure from the fans to steer away from this?

A Thousand Suns wasn’t intentionally a concept album. When we finished it we looked at it and said, “Wow, there are a lot of themes running through the breadth of the record itself”. We hadn’t sat down with that as a purpose.

I think it was us pushing ourselves as far as we could in one direction and to see where it would take us creatively. With Living Things, again, our studio process never begins with the pre-determined destination. Maybe other artists are able to do that but we’re either not smart enough or talented enough to visualise the end result and then achieve it. The process in the studio is a little more wandering than that. It’s almost like the Australian idea of a walkabout – like you’re just kinda letting the music happen and seeing what you like and what you’re being attracted to, and what’s interesting to everybody. So almost like if we went out in one far direction with A Thousand Suns – we felt like we had already been there, so themes and sonically it naturally just moved on from what we had done.

There are tinges of country, almost folk on the album…?

Yes. Mike and Brad have been really interested in some of the earliest recorded American music. They got into recordings from the Smithsonian – around the 1915/20’s, that kind of era – and the songs that were recorded had been around for years and years and years. It wasn’t our attempt, by any stretch, to write that style of songs, but it was more about digging into those and seeing how the structure of them work – seeing how they were presenting melodies and ideas, just before the modern structure of songs was occurring, and then just plugging in the stuff that we do and letting that move us in a new direction. So there are definitely some different influences coming through.

If any rock band could do that, it’s Linkin Park. I think of your album with Jay-Z and collaborating with that genre…

For us, it’s always been like that from the get go. We’ve got a lot of guys in the band who all have a lot of different ideas, and grew up listening to different styles of music. That continues to this day, and it gets deeper and deeper the more that all six of us get older and are exposed to different kinds of music. There’s never a lack of ideas. It’s more about steering the ship, a question of organising them.

We can be all over the place but [producer] Rick Rubin does a great job with that. I see that as his main role on the last couple of records. He is the outside ear that can sit across so many different genres. The vast amount of music he’s worked on in his career span really lets him speak to what we’re doing – he can tell us what’s working, what’s not, and why we need to work on and re-address certain things. He’s not the type of guy who’s going to tell you how to get there. He’ll just tell you that you need to go somewhere else.

Is that the key to how he works – how he’s gotten to be one of the top producers of our time?

The key that I’ve seen with Rick is that he sincerely loves music and the creative process. It almost catches you off guard. You think that it must be an act; that there’s got to be a piece of him that’s pessimistic – about the industry itself, musicians, or being in the studio. But he just can’t get enough of it. He sincerely loves the creative process and it’s contagious. It’s a freeing mode to operate in. His history speaks for him, and we felt him out and learned our process with him early on. Now it’s a really fun working relationship.

Do you have a jaded bone in your body?

(laughs) Yeah, haha, see I have a ton of jaded bones! I couldn’t do what Rick does in that sense. But yeah, I work against it.

But it has to feel pretty good to know you’ve provided the soundtrack to so many people’s years of teenage angst; that your music has been a catharsis for so many?

It’s funny for me, because music was always my outlet to escape from the world. I started playing violin classically at the age of six, and it grew from there.

Every now and then I laugh at what I do now for a job. At that point I never thought I’d be doing music professionally. It was always just an escape – a funnel or vent for disappointments, a way to turn my anger into something positive. It was like that for probably 14/15 years – those formative years – and it wasn’t until we were finishing college that we then thought, “Hmmm, we’ve got some good things going with this music thing, maybe we should see how it goes…”.

Your Music for Relief organisation has been doing some amazing work…

There are so many layers to it, and I could talk about it for hours. We started it in 2004/5 principally as a disaster relief organisation, after seeing the places we’d tour being affected by natural disasters. We wanted to try and figure out a way to do something to help. That’s grown, so we still do that and various environmental initiatives too. In the last year and a half, we were approached by the UN to talk with them about ways that we might be able to help them with their energy initiative for all. There are some astounding stats – like, a billion people in the world are without electricity access.

We started working in different ways with different projects around the world, like the Power The World project, to hopefully address the huge issue – an issue I believe the next generation is going to have to tackle. It’s not that sexy to talk about energy access, people aren’t drawn to that, but when you start to hear the stories about babies being delivered by candlelight…we heard one story about a project we’re doing with an OBGYN in Uganda who has to deliver babies with a cellphone in her mouth to use the light at night. So it’s a way of finding solar-power generators to work in these medical clinics. Really cool stuff.

You revealed your album artwork on the Internet – how do you feel about new technology and where do you see it all going?

With technology and things like that, it’s a sprint more than ever. Things move so fast. It used to be that you release a record and then go touring for two years. If it’s a big record, it would be still kind of selling even after that, but nowadays, a record’s not new anymore if it’s been out for two weeks. The flip-side of that is that there are a lot more cool things you can do that are becoming more and more accessible for us to interact with fans, and for them to interact with each other. It’s really cool and it’s a unique place for being a band, or just being a fan of music. For us, everybody in the band has fun with it and so it’s easy to somewhat keep abreast of what’s going on. But by no means are we at the forefront of it all, we try to just see it as another outlet, another opportunity to get our music out there.

Catch Linkin Park live in Joburg on the 10^th of November at the FNB Stadium. 

By Nadia Neophytou
Images via Facebook/LinkinPark