He’s arranged the tracks mostly in the order he wrote them, beginning with “Place to Start,” which ends with some of the condolence voicemails he received, and goes on to describe the Bennington tribute show the band played (“Over Again”), his inner struggle with grief (“Hold It Together”) and his anxiety to get through it (“World’s on Fire”) before ending on a hopeful note (“Can’t Hear You Now”). Where Linkin Park once sang about existential (and some autobiographical) pain, many of Post-Traumatic’s songs sound like diary entries. It’s the fastest he’s ever made an LP, and the music sounds like classic Linkin Park – and indeed he’d written some of it previously with the band’s 2017 LP, One More Light, in mind – but the unfiltered, almost freestyled lyrics make it feel like something new. “One of the harder things I’ve gone through this year is that everything I do gets read through the lens of the year,” he says.Īlthough he feels most comfortable obscuring his feelings in his visual art, Shinoda confronts everything he’s gone through during the past 10 months in gritty detail on Post-Traumatic, his first-ever solo album. How True Is 'Respect'? Fact-Checking the Aretha Franklin Biopic But that’s not necessarily how he would like you to see him. Mostly, though, he looks small – like the big, bright room could eat him up. When he speaks, he makes eye contact and smiles a little – even when the subject matter makes him uncomfortable – and he looks around the room as if he’s trying to capture the right words. Although there’s a big plate of pastries in front of him, he’d rather nurse a coffee. It’s a hot, sunny May morning, and Shinoda looks serene in a white T-shirt and black ball cap, as he leans back in the booth of an empty SoHo hotel restaurant. “If everybody knows that you’re going through a rough time and you just draw a stick figure, they’ll overanalyze it.”
“What I’ve been doing has been a little less figurative and a little more abstract,” he says. One recent painting shows what could be a variety of robot faces and skulls blending into a background of sea-foam–green squares.
But it’s most evident when he puts a brush to a canvas.
In the months since the death of his foil in Linkin Park, singer Chester Bennington, the rapper, producer and visual artist has found himself approaching all of his creative pursuits differently. Mike Shinoda is painting differently these days.
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