Frank Maddocks
Mike Shinoda is this week’s guest on The FADER Interview podcast. The Linkin Park co-frontman joined The FADER’s Editorial Director Alex Robert Ross to discuss the making of the band’s 2003 sophomore album, Meteora, in advance of its 20th-anniversary reissue on April 7 via Warner Records. The main focus of their conversation was “Lost,” a fully formed and forgotten Linkin Park track made for Meteora but shelved last minute in favor of “Numb.”
Read an excerpt of Shinoda’s story of finding “Lost” unexpectedly, and listen to his full conversation with The FADER, embedded below and streaming via this link, or wherever you get your podcasts.
“We’d been writing Meteora and we had 40 demos or something, and you narrow down: ‘These ones don’t have any vocals yet. They’re not gonna be contenders. Get rid of them. These ones have vocals. They’re close. Keep working on them. These ones are keepers.’ Eventually, you get to the point where it’s like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna make an album of about 12 songs out of these.’ I remember that we did get to the point where we almost put “Lost” on Meteora. We realized that tonally, it was the same kind of emotion and energy as ’Numb,’ and ’Numb’ was arguably a better song. We liked it better at the time. So we were like, ‘Well, we can’t have two Numbs.’
“We didn’t know what we were gonna do with “Lost,” so we just shelved it and forgot about it. Finding it was like, ‘Oh my God, the song got all the way to the finish line. Fans are gonna love to hear this.’ It was so fun to hear where we were at — what we were about, why people were showing up in the first place.”
