Sometimes lightning is just simply caught in a bottle. To wit, Led Zeppelin had no idea of the significance of them writing "Strairway to Heaven"—it was just a new song for them at the time. Or, as bassist John Paul Jones wryly once said, "It's not like three wisemen showed up asking, 'Excuse me, are you writing "Stairway to Heaven"?'"
The same can be said, in some ways, about Linkin Park's smash hit "In the End," which Mike Shinoda wrote in one night, as he explained when he recently stopped by the Howard Stern Show for a chat—and clear up some misconceptions.
"My lyrics on the first version were different," Shinoda told Stern. "But by the end of that night I had written the words to the chorus. The next day I played it for our drummer [Rob Bourdon]… and he was like, 'Dude, this is the song that we've been waiting for, this is the best song we've got'."
You can watch the interview with Shinoda and Stern just below.
Still, Shinoda wasn't totally convinced of it yet. "It didn't feel big to me, it didn't feel like a hit song. I wouldn't know what a hit song felt like, I was too young. I was feeling despondent, like, we're doing all this stuff, we're trying to realise some kind of identity, or some kind of meaning, and it's not working."
Stern then asked Shinoda about the long-standing rumor that Linkin Park singer, the late Chester Bennington didn't like the song at all.
"He didn't hate it," Shinoda confirmed with a laugh. "No, no, no, no. That's actually a misconception. Some people think that he hated the song. He liked the song, he just loved really heavy stuff, and so when people were like, 'This should be a single', he was like, [shrugs], 'Ah, whatever!' It's not the one that he would have chosen."
In other Linkin Park news, the band announced their Meteora 20th Anniversary Edition on February 10 and launched a long-lost track called "Lost." By the end of that single week, the track had racked up 17 million streams on Spotify and 16 million views on YouTube. You can check the track out just below.
