One More Light

Template:Infobox album One More Light is the seventh studio album by Linkin Park. It marks a departure from the heavy sound of The Hunting Party, the first time the band has written songs starting from the vocals, and the first Linkin Park album to be titled after a song.

Background

Linkin Park started to tour in support of The Hunting Party in May 2014 in Europe. This was followed by the Carnivores Tour in August and September, the Circuito Banco do Brasil shows in October, and the European leg of The Hunting Party Tour in November. Their show in Berlin on November 9 was recorded for a live DVD which remains unreleased.

Due to Chester Bennington breaking his ankle in January 2015, the band was forced to cancel the rest of the United States leg of The Hunting Tour after only three shows. During Chester's recovery, the band met at the studio to go through a few new demos they had already written, like "Spirals", "All Our Days", "Hands Itch", and "Last Straw"; and Chester worked with Stone Temple Pilots on new music. Linkin Park also released an acoustic version of "Final Masquerade" through their website to thank the fans for their support. By the end of March, Chester was fully recovered and went on a tour with Stone Temple Pilots, coming back to Linkin Park in May to play a few festivals around North America.

Fort Minor, Mike Shinoda's side project, officially made its comeback in June, after an almost 10-year hiatus. Mike released a new single, "Welcome", and performed a couple of one man shows as Fort Minor.

The Hunting Party Tour was resumed in July in China. Right before the first show of the tour, the band held a press conference in Shanghai, where Mike played a piece of new music he had been working on during their flight. The band went back to Europe in August for the final leg of the tour. Between the Linkin Park shows in Europe, Mike also performed a few Fort Minor shows. After the tour, Mike had sessions in London with an undisclosed artist (later revealed to be Justin Parker), and Chester went back to Stone Temple Pilots for what proved to be the band's last tour with him, as Chester left his position on the band in November. Chester, however, would do a one-off reunion show with the band in March 2016.

In early October, Linkin Park did a mentoring session with Zayed Hassan, the grand prize winner of the Stagelight Monthly Music Contest, at Red Bull Studios in Los Angeles, resulting in the song "Sailing Through The Clouds". After that, the band went back to their studio to work on new material and recorded a collaborative track, "Waiting For Tomorrow", with Martin Garrix in early November. That same month, the band would play their last shows of 2015 before returning once again to the studio.

While recording the album, the band also collaborated with many artists on non-Linkin Park music: "Like Riding A Bike", a Hot Karl song produced and featuring Mike was premiered in May a few days after Mike teased the song on his Snapchat account; Chester and Mike met with Mike Baczor of the band Her0 to collaborate on a song for his debut album that same month; a collaborative song recorded with The Lonely Island called "Things In My Jeep" was released on June 3; Mike did additional production in the One Ok Rock song "One Way Ticket" in August; and Brad Delson collaborated with his brother Greg in a song called "Willing To Try".

The album's cover art is a picture taken by Frank Maddocks (who has worked with the band on every studio album) at Venice Beach, a beachside neighbourhood in western Los Angeles, depicting the children of a friend of the band. Mike said, "Frank showed us this photo months ago, and it seems to continually raise its hand as an important photo with regards to the tone of the album. We kept coming back to it, which made it clear to us it would be the one that would end up on the cover. We're all family guys. The image reminds me of what it looks like when all of our families meet and our kids are together. For that reason there's a very personal connection between this artwork and the place the music came from. It reminds me of home."

Writing and Recording

The band had been writing and recording mostly in Los Angeles but also had a few sessions in London and Canada. In Los Angeles, they started working at the Larrabee Studios, but got a new studio headquarters at Sphere Studios because they wanted more space. The studio is located in a low-key area on the northeast side of Los Angeles, in The Valley. According to Mike Shinoda, the vocals and foundational songwriting was coming together in the main room, along with his beats and Brad's guitar. There used to be a lounge next to the main room which Joe turned into a second studio, so they were multi-tasking. Joe also brought a lot of his sonic toys and keyboards to the hangout room.

Starting on January 15, 2016 the band decided, for the first time, to open up their process to fans through social media by doing live streams, posting pictures and videos of their day by day in the studio, and sending studio updates to their mailing list.

Speaking to LPAssociation in early December 2015, Mike said he felt this was going to be an important album for the band, being something completely different from what they had done in the past, and saying the band doesn't really care about trends in music because their recording process takes too long to really grow on a song, and they simply don't care. They were trying a new approach to their recording process, working on words and melodies first before deciding the style of the songs, and they were looking at a late 2016 release for the album, with a 6 month hit-or-miss. According to him, the band goes to the record label not for what they think about the album, but for them to help get it out to the people. In a Q&A with LPU members, Rob Bourdon said the fans were the reason the band was motivated to create something new, but they didn't try to guess if the fans would like the new songs because it could obscure their process. They also didn't want to rush the process of the new album, regardless of delaying its release, because they wanted it to be as perfect as possible. In the end, their original goal of having new music out by the end of 2016 wasn't met because they slowed the process down to spend more time on the album and write a few extra new songs.

The idea of writing the melodies and lyrics first was something producer Rick Rubin had always told them to do years past and they never listened because they always started track first. While working with Justin Parker in London, Mike also learned a different approach to songwriting: to write without any sound in mind and, instead, write with meaning in mind. Instead of writing tracks piece by piece, the band wouldn't leave a session without having a song. It would all start as a conversation, and out of those the songs would build progressively from a chord progression to lyrics. Mike said they didn't know where the songs would end up since they change shapes over and over during the writing process, but they wanted completely flesh out the words and vocal melodies ideas before working out the music. Some songs were just one piano, keyboard, or guitar, and a vocal, and they were going to continue on this path until they felt like they've got more than enough material to begin the "sound" phase.

Mike said, "The one thing that I am super excited about, I really wanna like make the riskiest songs now, because I feel like we're at the point where it's like, “okay, we've handled so many things” and risky could be a lot of different kinds of risky. Risky could mean the most weirdest, the weirdest thing, weirdest chord progressions or whatever, or could be the poppiest thing that comes to mind. That we just got like we made that work like it sounds like us, it doesn't sound weird, it sounds like very cool, and I wanna make some songs where you go like “holy shit” That's where we gotta find that."

Very early in the process, Brad said there were very strong consistent themes in what they were writing. The band have spoken about how they wanted an album that was honest and raw and that genre didn't really matter, with Chester saying how personal and important this album was to him. Mike mentioned he wrote a song specifically for his kids for the first time and also assured fans that the album isn't political. Mike said, "the very first thing we'd do each day is we'd get into the studio and say, "What's on my mind? What do I want to sing about and write about" and that defined a whole different kind of writing." Mike took it upon himself to write down all the stuff they'd talk about as friends on a piece of paper and sometimes, just right in the middle of conversations about how they are dealing with (sometimes sad) things in life, he would start playing piano and ideas for verse, chorus, and bridge melodies and words would flow freely. They were able to record vocal ideas and lyrics the exact day the song was made, so it made the songs more emotional since Chester already knew the lyrics and meaning before he even came into the studio to lay down a track by reading it off a piece of paper. Chester added, "There are songs that don’t specifically talk about situations – they talk about a frame of thinking. This is shit that’s gone on inside my head, or this is something I’m dealing with. To me it tells a story but it’s also revealing as well in a different way – and that feels honest to me." He said that, along with the problems he was going through, the other band members in Linkin Park have had tough times in life recently and that served as inspiration for the album. According to Mike, what makes this album personal is the fact that the lyrics are more specific and puts the listener in a time and place. "We all have kids and stuff, and a lot of the stuff from the album was inspired by a lot of things that happened in our family."

The band started narrowing down to some of their favorite songs and recording "some keeper vocals" in mid-February. With a lot of material to choose from, they clearly had an album in there and decided to get votes from all six of the members to see which songs would make it. Mike made large documents in his computer with all of the notes/comments by band members on each song. After getting the vocals right, keyboards/samples and drums were high on the list. Mike said, "As we go, you're gonna hear them start to have a lot of layers, and maybe too many."

Mike believed that the album is totally different from all their previous releases and wanted to use more live drums instead of programed beats during the recording process. In June, he said the band had "narrowed it down recently to like under 20 hopefully." While he said guitars haven't really been worked on yet in the recording process, the band wanted this to be their best album yet and was taking a lot of time crafting the songs. According to him, the foundations of the songs were there and he wanted to "get into experimentation mode" and record more live instruments. Brad said, "I wound up putting a lot of guitar on this album. There’s a lot of layers and a lot of different guitars. The guitar work is nuanced and complementary to all of the other elements that we have put in there. I find guitar to be a dominant ingredient in any soup. The minute I put loud heavy guitars into an arrangement, I feel like it is a heavy colour. One of the goals of the production of this album was to do away with any notion of genre. We were looking at ways to juxtapose influences that we have in ways that you haven’t heard before. Building the guitar work into that was a fun challenge. I love the guitar work and tones that our engineer Ethan helped create with me and Mike [Shinoda] throughout this album. Even though you don’t hear guitar in the foreground in a heavy-handed way, there really is a ton of guitar on this album, and I’m really proud of it." By December 16, the recording was done and the band were moving out of the studio.

The mixing stage started that same month, with Chester saying they would be mixing for a long time because they had "a ton of songs." He only listened to all the tracks together for the first time on January 29 and said that this was his favorite Linkin Park record to date and he couldn't wait to share it with the fans.

The band worked with a wide variety of artists throughout the making of the album, which Chester explained by saying they were curious about how others work and wanted to expand on their education. Mike also said Linkin Park is more than capable of writing their own songs, but they wanted to change it up and write with others this time. They met with 30-40 songwriters, one at a time. According to Phoenix, anyone who they've enjoyed the work of in the past or who is interested in seeing what they're doing and how they work, they've invited them in and hung out in the studio, whether it meant hanging out and eating lunch in the studio or doing some music and writing together. Among the people who were seen with the band but didn't contribute to the album are Zane Lowe, Quincy Jones, and Kyle Lambert.

While most of the collaborators on the album were just songwriters, the band also brought in vocal producers because they wanted a different perspective on how to approach the vocals. Among the collaborators are Justin Parker,, Conner Youngblood, Jon Green, Blackbear, and Andrew Goldstein, Eg White, Emily Wright, Andrew Bolooki, Andrew Dawson, RAC, Corrin Roddick, and Ross Golan. American singer Kiiara also had a 7 hour session with Linkin Park to record vocals for a song written with Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, and rappers Stormzy and Pusha T contributed to the album with original verses. In the past the band had a different approach to collaborations as explained by Mike, "Usually it means we’ve finished the song but we’ll ask somebody to add something to the top of it," but this time they have embraced full creative partnerships. "Generally, here's how it would work: we'd get in the room with someone, and start on something from scratch with them. We worked mostly in the same way we always write songs, but with extra firepower in the room."

Composition

All the songs featured in the album were started with vocals first — which was a new concept for Linkin Park. They worked on the story first, hook second, then music. The band sampled their kids and put them in the demos, but they distracted from the songs so they removed them. For the first time in a Linkin Park album, the final song titles were there from the start because all titles are words in the songs. While touring in promotion of The Hunting Party the band worked on some music in their traditional "music first" method but those were eventually disregarded. A couple of early instrumental demos from those sessions, "Dark Crystal" and "Air Force One", were released in the LP Underground Sixteen album in November 2016.

A picture posted by Ethan Mates on Facebook in April revealed a folder titled "LP ALBUM 7 MAIN" containing 64 items, the visible ones dating from November 9, 2015 to April 7, 2016. All those files contained demos and ideas for songs being written for the album, but at that point the band was already narrowing them down to their favorites since February. Chester said focusing on the melodies and vocals first made this album process a lot more productive and fluid. They wrote over 150 demos. Around 50 songs in this process got lyrics and melodies and Chester said he could pick 10 of any of those 50 and be happy with the songs, but when the rest of the band looks at the songs, it becomes pretty obvious as a group which songs are the strongest once they vote on them. By May, they already had chosen around 20 songs. Engineer Josh Newell explained this process, "Vocals get cut, demo parts get replaced with keeper parts, structures change, and so on. Sometimes a song everyone liked would end up going off in a direction that people didn’t like so we’d walk it back to see what changes didn’t work. As that happened, the list of songs starts getting shorter and shorter as the stronger material becomes obvious, and then the band picked the top 15 or so for the album and finished those. It was a very meticulous process, to say the least. The album definitely wasn’t just thrown together." Mike said he would try to get demos and studio content that didn't make the album out to fans because there is some cool stuff.

Mike Shinoda mentioned there were several hip hop oriented tracks in consideration for the album — as well as some ideas and seeds for future Fort Minor songs, but he would be focusing on the Linkin Park album first. The final product, however, doesn't have much rap, Mike did more singing instead. He said the rap verses he recorded would "show up at some point" and expressed his desire to remix some songs from the album.

Mike is the lead vocalist on "Invisible," "Sorry For Now," and "Good Goodbye" with Chester doing the higher harmonies. Mike raps heavily on "Good Goodbye" and Chester raps on "Sorry For Now". Chester's vocals on the latter have been described by Mike as "singing rapping."

The sonic choices made on the album were intended to best support the song and create the best soundscape to get the idea across. Mike said, "In terms of the style of the record, it's one of the most diverse stylistically, there's more genres mashed into this album than anything we've ever put out. You don't hear a lot of super heavy guitars. There isn't any screaming on the record." There are, however, many guitars on the record, but they do not sound like guitars. As an example, Mike mentioned one of Brad's pedals which allows him to play the violin with his guitar, and in the background it sounds pretty electronic. He adds, "To some extent it is a very polished record. Stylistically we wanted to blend all of the sound and genres together in a way you can’t tell them apart." As to why they chose "Heavy" to present the album to the world, he told Billboard, "One of the reasons why we chose "Heavy" as the first single is because it is really the core sound of the album. This wasn't a scenario where the whole album sounds one way and the single sounds different. This is how the album sounds. So we wanted to go out with a song like that, where everybody can get a sense of the direction of this body of work." According to him, a lot of songs on the album can make you think of old songs by The Cure or Tears For Fears.

Describing his guitar work on the album, Brad said, "I love the acoustic work on Sharp Edges. I really like all of the layering of guitars on Invisible as well. There’s also a really unique presentation of the guitar in a way that I don’t think we’ve ever done on a song called Sorry For Now. That was one of the things that we were really excited about - it is wildly different to anything else that we have been doing."

Unlike previous albums, no one else besides the band plays on the record, but there are features and plenty of collaborations with songwriters. "Heavy" features vocals by pop singer Kiiara and "Good Goodbye" features verses by rappers Stormzy and Pusha T.

Releases

Physical

The album was available on Linkin Park's official website in 5 different "One More Light Packages": CD + LPU Membership, Vinyl + LPU Membership, CD Bundle, Vinyl Bundle, and The “Just Give Me Everything” Box Set. All offers were accompanied by an LPU Digital Membership.

Both the CD Bundle and Vinyl Bundle included an One More Light t-shirt and a silver Linkin Park logo enamel pin.

The Box Set was bound inside a special One More Light Super Deluxe box with a 48-page hardcover book featuring all the best photos from the album package and all the lyrics, an unique 2.4" x 1.8” instant photo of the band, and an gold enamel pin set featuring a Linkin Park pin, a LP Hex Logo pin, and a "OML" Logo pin. It also included both the CD and vinyl versions of the album as well as the One More Light t-shirt.

Track Listing

Standard Edition

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Length
1	Nobody Can Save Me	Bennington Chester Charles, Bourdon Robert G, Delson Bradford Philip, Farrell David Michael, Green Jonathan Ian, Hahn Joseph, Shinoda Michael Kenji
2	Good Goodbye (feat. Pusha T and Stormzy)		3:31
3	Talking To Myself
4	Battle Symphony	Delson, Green, Shinoda	3:36
5	Invisible	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Farrell, Hahn, Parker Justin, Shinoda
6	Heavy (feat. Kiiara)	Bennington, Cavazos Carin Julia, Delson, Shinoda, Tranter Drew Justin	2:49
7	Sorry For Now	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Farrell, Goldstein Andrew, Hahn, Musto Matthew Tyler, Shinoda
8	Halfway Right	Bennington, Golan Ross Jacob, Leary Michael Keenan, Shinoda
9	One More Light	Bennington, Bourdon, Delson, Farrell, Hahn, Shinoda, White Anthony Francis, Golan
10	Sharp Edges

Personnel

Live Performance

Songs Played Live

• "Talking To Myself"
• "Battle Symphony"
• "Invisible"
• "Heavy"
• "One More Light"

Tours

• One More Light South American Tour
• One More Light European Summer Tour

Promotion

In early January, the band started planning promotion and working on new merch for the album and did a photoshoot with James Minchin III on January 10.

On February 1, 2017, the Linkin Park Global Ambassadors was launched with the objective of spreading Linkin Park news and connecting fans around the world. Three pictures were posted to Linkin Park's Instagram account on the following day: a completely black screen representing a TV turned off; a picture of Rob edited to resemble static on a TV; and a picture with TV color bars and Linkin Park's logo on the 13th bar, indicating the TV is tuned and something would be coming soon. The third picture was also uploaded to Instagram by the Linkin Park Global Ambassadors and many other people related to the band such as Joe Hahn, Mike Shinoda, Chester Bennington, Phoenix, Lorenzo Errico, Adam Ruehmer, Jim Digby, Christian Tachiera, Tobias Fance, Frank Maddocks, Tal Cooperman, and Warner Bros. Records' official account.

From February 3 to February 15, the band released a series of 8 videos on their official website showing fans their process of creating songs for the album. The first video was posted on linkinpark.com/o and with the release of each new video a new letter was added to the URL (the exception being the last video which added a full word), eventually forming the album title.

On February 13, Linkin Park tweeted a blank grid and each of the Linkin Park Global Ambassadors tweeted a numbered image. When put together, the images formed the album cover. The lyrics of "Heavy" were unveiled on genius.com on the same day.

On February 15, each Linkin Park Global Ambassador changed their profile photos on social media to a flag of their country with the new Linkin Park logo which was unveiled for the first time.

On February 16, Linkin Park did a stripped down performance with Kiiara at NRG Studios which was broadcasted live on Facebook. "Heavy" was released that same day along with its lyric video and the album pre-order.

Reception

Gallery

• 

  Standard cover

• 

  Artwork with band name and title

• 

  Urban Outfitters vinyl. Limited to 2.500 copies

• 

  The "Just Give Me Everything" box set

• 

  CD case

• 

  Vinyl

• 

  Limited Edition hardcover book

• 

  Limited Edition hardcover book original idea

• 

  One More Light t-shirt

• 

  Silver enamel pin

• 

  Silver enamel pin

• 

  Mike Shinoda polaroid

Trivia

• Two titles were added in March 2016 to Linkin Park's song catalog at BMI: "Ricochet" and "What Are You Worth". Both credit the Californian producer Brian Howes as their sole composer and songwriter. It's unknown if the band actually worked with Howes or if this was a mistake by BMI.
• In an interview to Billboard, The Chainsmokers (American DJ duo) revealed they were asked to work with Linkin Park. Whether the collaboration took place or not is unknown.

External Links

Music Videos

• Heavy (Official Video): LPTV | LP FB
• Heavy (Official Lyric Video): LPTV
• Battle Symphony (Official Lyric Video): LPTV

Live Videos

• Heavy (Live at 102.1 The Edge): 102.1 The Edge

LPTV

• Studio Sounds (Good Problems)
• 360 Studio Tour with Mike
• A Message From Chester: Studio Update #7
• Studio Views
• Studio Moments: Bongo Band Jam
• Piano
• Honesty
• Lyrics
• Risks
• Drum Idea
• Female Vocal Idea
• Chester Vocals
• Heavy Teaser featuring Kiiara

LPU-TV

• LPU EXCLUSIVE - Mike Shinoda Tracking Vocals for "HEAVY"