North American Tour 2015

Introduction

The 2015 North American Tour for The Hunting Party was scheduled to be a nineteen show tour across the United States and Canada.

The band was set to play four shows in Canada for the first time on one tour. Many cities on the tour were markets the band hadn't played in a long time, echoed by Chester's statements when the announcement was made, "Rock music was born in these towns, and for some reason these places tend to get overlooked much more than they should. We want our fans there to know how much they matter to us."

Atlantic City, Brooklyn, Hershey, Hamilton, and Saskatoon hadn't been played by Linkin Park before, and other cities varied between 2000 and 2012 for the last time Linkin Park had visited.

Before the tour

Before this tour, Linkin Park headlined sixteen shows across Europe for The Hunting Party in November 2014, followed by two December radio festivals - LIVE 105's Not So Silent Night in Oakland, CA and KROQ Almost Acoustic X-Mas in Inglewood, CA.

Two days before the tour kicked off, the band played an intimate, acoustic set at Machine Shop Recordings in Beverly Hills, CA for staff. This set was just three songs - Burn It Down, LOATR/SOTD/Iridescent, and Final Masquerade.

Linkin Park was not able to perform a standard production rehearsal for this tour due to Amway Arena in Orlando, FL (the first stop of the tour) being booked before the first date of the tour.

Summary

In fall 2014, Mike said in an interview with AltWire that he wanted to add "at least one more song" to the live show setlist, leading fans to believe that this North American Tour would lead to a live debut. This statement echoed what Phoenix said earlier in the touring cycle about wanting to add at least A Line In The Sand or Keys To The Kingdom to the setlist. An Instagram post before the tour with "BBB rehearsing a new song" made many fans speculate that it would be the live debut of War because of the position of Brad's hands.

When the tour kicked off, no new songs ended up being added to the setlist. In the interview, Mike said the band would be busy during the break between Europe and that tour with family and the holidays, so they don't have a lot of time to work on new setlists. However, they did manage to change the setlists slightly for the tour.

At the first show of the tour, the band brought back From The Inside for the first time since 2012.06.10 Moscow, three and a half years prior. A Place For My Head was added to the setlist to open the encore. This was the first public performance of the song since 2014.06.22 Ventura, CA, though it was also played during the LPU Summit soundcheck at 2014.11.07 Amsterdam, Netherlands. Brad played a new guitar solo intro to the song.

A few other tweaks to song intros/outros like What I've Done, removing the "Wall Of Noise" outro from Waiting For The End, etc also occurred.

At the second show of the tour, a new version of Set B debuted... With You, Rebellion, Somewhere I Belong, and Until It's Gone were dropped, and From The Inside and A Place For My Head remained from the new Set A debut in Orlando. This was the first tour for The Hunting Party where Until It's Gone was removed completely from the sets.

The first two shows went off flawlessly with brand new lighting production and an energetic band. Before the third show at 2015.01.18 Indianapolis, Chester was playing basketball backstage with Of Mice & Men... he jumped up and landed on a water bottle, breaking his ankle and sending him to the hospital. At the LPU M&G, he was on a scooter but played the show on crutches and with the scooter. Mike painted his crutches black before the show started. The day after this show, the band canceled the next two concerts in Pittsburgh and Albany so that Chester could have his ankle properly looked at. After that was done, they decided that he needed surgery right away so the rest of the tour was unfortunately canceled.

In all, sixteen shows were canceled - the largest in the band's history. This was the fourth North American winter arena tour to have cancellations - 2004, 2008, 2011 and 2015. The 13th LPU Summit and only Summit for 2015 was scheduled for February 13, 2015 in Calgary, Alberta.

Linkin Park chose to not make the tour up later in the year.

Crew

Name	Job
Jim Digby	Director of Touring
Megumi Kusano	Production Coordinator
Ken "Pooch" Van Druten	FOH Engineer
Kevin "Tater" McCarthy	Monitor Engineer
Benjamin Chandler	Brad Tech
Marc VanGool	Mike Tech
Ted Regier	Phoenix Tech
Warren Johnson	Joe Tech
Brad Stonner	Rob Tech
Mark Fiore	Videographer