Linkin Park co-lead singers Mike Shinoda and Emily Armstrong recently sat down for an interview with ALT 98.7 FM to discuss the band’s new album “From Zero.” During their discussion, Shinoda revealed a few details about the making of the song “Heavy is the Crown” – which features Armstrong screaming for an extended period of time.
Shinoda explained that, out of respect for late Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, they specifically chose to keep Armstrong’s scream shorter than Bennington’s 17-second scream from the 2007 track “Given Up.”
“So on ‘Heavy Is The Crown,’ we had this idea for the scream in the bridge and it was going to be this long thing and for hardcore Linkin Park fans, I did time that moment. I literally pulled out the timer, I was like, ‘How long is this part? It’s about 17 seconds, okay,’ because that’s a thing, that’s a number in the lore of Linkin Park,” Shinoda explained. “So we did it and I should say, we wrote it and we planned it and it’s like, ‘Okay, here’s how the part goes.’”
Shinoda went on to admit that he didn’t believe Armstrong could do the scream in the first take. “Then Emily gets in the booth and she’s like, ‘I think I know it. I’m going to get this on the first take. I was like, ‘Okay, all right, go for it big guy [sarcastically]’ and she totally did,” he said. “We did a bunch of takes of it. We did like a whole bunch of takes but the verse one was the one. It was cool because it ended up being just shy of 17 seconds and it was like 16 and a half. When we went through the different takes the longer ones actually didn’t sound as good. It was weird when they kind of ended over top of the next vocal.”
“So one thing about keeping the shorter one is, that was nice. It was like, in a sense, it respects Chester’s 17-second scream. It’s like yeah that one’s still the long scream but by the way, she can kick ass too,” he added.
