Tag: Mike Shinoda

For My Sunday Song #467, we are talking “Bleed it Out” by Linkin Park. The song is off their 2007 album ‘Minutes to Midnight and was the 2nd single off the album. The song went to #1 in the UK on their Rock chart and to #2 in the US and the Alternative charts (#3 on the Mainstream Rock Chart). It went 4x platinum in the U.S. which is crazy for a song that didn’t break the Top 40 on the Hits chart. The album was also produced by Rick Rubin, so they brought out the big guns.

The song was written by Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda with all the music composed and credited to the entire Linkin Park band. The original working title of the song was “Accident”. According to Mike, the song is about the struggles of writing a song. For this particular one, he was having so much trouble with it and worked on it for over a month. The opening line highlights the struggles, “Yeah, here we go fro the hundredth time”, referring to how many times he has re-written the song. The process was driving him nuts and he was losing his mind. He bleeds for these songs and then ends up throwing it away and starting over to make the song better.

Well, he eventually found the right words and made a pretty damn fine song. I also love the line that says “Half the words don’t mean a thing / And I know that I won’t be satisfied” as that is usually the case for most songs. The words are there sometimes simply because they sound good together. Def Leppard has confessed to that in the past. Still, so much time and effort is put into it to make it right and he ended doing great with it. Another great example of the meaning behind the song is “Go stop the show /Choppy words and a sloppy flow” as it refers to picking the correct words so everything flows (again, they don’t have to mean anything, just needs to flow right).