Music: Too many 'Minutes' with Linkin Park

Let me put it bluntly: Even when they're on the phone at the same time, Mike Shinoda and Chester Bennington are two of the most boring rock stars you could ever interview.

Co-leaders of the world's preeminent we're-not-a-rap-rock rap-rock band, Linkin Park, they kept a couple dozen rock journalists on the verge of sleep in a teleconference interview last month. Although they are easy to tell apart onstage -- Shinoda coolly, aggressively raps, Bennington hyperactively whines and screams -- they were almost indistinguishable as they talked at length about their music with the droll, unexcited energy of two computer engineers discussing gigabytes.

Of course, bands are not judged on their interview skills (not even by music critics). Since its 2000 debut, "Hybrid Theory," Linkin Park has consistently stood up as one of rock's top-selling bands. The California sextet's latest and best album to date, the Rick Rubin-produced shape-shifter "Minutes to Midnight," sold a whopping 600,000 copies in its first week and remains a hot seller.

The band still fills arenas, too. Its show Wednesday at St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center is about three-quarters sold out.

An act this big and resilient deserves our ink, even if it's dry before it hits the paper. Here are some heavily whittled excerpts from the interview.

Q I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the digital souvenir package that fans are going to have an opportunity to get on the tour.

Bennington: You can basically opt in when you buy your tickets online for the digital souvenir package. What will happen after that is you go to the show, enjoy that, come home, and in your e-mail in-box you'll have a link to the show, to the MP3s of our set. In other words, you get to take home the hopefully memorable concert that you went to.

And the best part about it to me is that our live mixer, our official mixer who mixes our show every night at the front of the house position, he finishes his night with us, then goes back to his hotel or bus or backstage and mixes the show for you.

Shinoda: Another thing that I think is cool ... our sets change. We play songs maybe one night that we don't play the next, and so if you want to get those songs, we encourage our fans to go on and trade them and kind of get to know each other.

Q You had a very public contract battle with Warner Bros. a couple years ago, and now people are wondering all the more if record companies are a thing of the past. Why did you stick with Warner Bros., and how do you look back on all that now?

Bennington: We worked things out, and we came to kind of a common understanding or a mutual understanding of how we wanted our albums to be treated, how we wanted our fans to be treated. We kind of made up.

Obviously, they've done a great job on this record. I guess we crossed the double-platinum mark last year, and we actually crossed the 45 million mark with all of our catalog by the end of last year. I guess we should say kudos to Warner for doing a great job in making that or helping make that happen.

Shinoda: Are labels a thing of the past? I think there are a lot of positive things that labels provide artists. I do believe, though, that it's very important for the old model of the record industry to be [forgotten]. The business model is dying.

Q You guys have talked about wanting to be a band that can't be so easily categorized. You had your share of people calling you nü-metal or rap-rock. How do you think "Minutes to Midnight" has helped get a little closer to that goal?

Bennington: We kind of opened our minds up to writing music that just felt right. We went more towards how the songs themselves made us feel and how we responded to them rather than what we thought we should create, what we thought our fans would want us to make.

In doing that, we wrote a lot of different styles of songs, and we worked on a lot of songs that maybe were a little off the task for us -- songs like "In Between," "In Pieces" and "Little Things Give You Away," songs that probably we would have thought were cool, but we weren't sure if we could pull them off.

Shinoda: I think the big question that was posed at the beginning of the "Minutes to Midnight" studio sessions was: Are we going to change -- are we going to change the sound so much that people are going to think we've gone off the deep end, it's weird, it's too different, and they're not going to like it? Well, look what ended up happening. It's easy to look back at it now and say, yes, of course. It was a hit and everybody loves it. But if you look back to the day before we turned it in, the day we finished it, we were pretty nervous because who knows if the fans had grown up in the same direction we had.

Q What was the spirit or group mood going into the recording of "Minutes to Midnight," realizing you had just come out of what was a fairly tumultuous time with Warner's and heading into an adventure working with Rick Rubin and new sound possibilities?

Bennington: I think where we were at was we were really hungry to make a record. We had taken [time] to be with our families. Once we got ready to make the record, we were very ready to make a record.

When we started talking about producers, we knew in our hearts that we wanted to make a record that was going to be a turning point for us and kind of revamping the band creatively and intellectually and all that kind of stuff.

Rick Rubin is a master of that. Rick was very vocal about if he was going to work with us that he didn't want to make a record with us that sounded like "Hybrid Theory" or "Meteora."

Shinoda: That was one of the things that was so appealing to most of us about sitting down with Rick for the first time. He asked us, "What kind of record do you want to make?" All six of us were like pretty much, "Something totally different." He was like, "Good, because that's what I was thinking."

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658