Composition
In an interview featured in the March 21, 2012 issue of Kerrang! magazine, Bennington stated that the band has returned to more 'familiar' territory on their new record, saying "with this album, we've incorporated a lot of guitar work with big choruses and the heavier electronic stuff to give it that really big wall of sound feeling without getting too metal. This will be more familiar to people than A Thousand Suns was, where we were like 'Fuck it, we're just going to go bonkers." Bennington also said that the new album's lyrics would be personal and avoid being political, adding "We've been writing a lot about relationships." Bennington and Shinoda echoed similar statements during an interview with Spin, with the former commenting that "We now know we have the skills and the tools to take those ideas and make them into what we're actually looking for, as opposed to getting into it and discovering that it just sounds really nü-metal. That's always going to be gross to us, but we can take elements of that and reinvent the vibe, make it new and fresh." The two previewed five songs from the album, as well as announced that they had collaborated with Canadian musician Owen Pallett. The vocalists also stated that they have adopted numerous influences and topics for the album, particularly about people.
Bennington told Live 105 that the band is "embracing everything that have done in the past," taking the "best pieces" of their previous four albums and "smash them together into this new record." Shinoda explained in an interview with NME that the album would not return to their nu metal sound, however they assured that the record "gets back to our roots and it's captured a feeling that we haven't gone after in many years." He also spoke similar statements to Bennington about combining elements of all four albums, saying, "We've learned so much from all the albums we've done, so we've taken everything we've learned and mixed it all into one." Shinoda stated that the album is more "rap-centric" compared to their previous two albums. Shinoda told Musique Mag that the band wanted the album to be "more energetic song-based", as opposed to their previous album, A Thousand Suns, which was more of a concept record.
The band had numerous influences and inspirations for Living Things. Shinoda told Rolling Stone that "Skin to Bone" and "Roads Untraveled" contained folk music influenced by the works of Bob Dylan, as well as the inspirations of Dylan. In the seventh track "Victimized", which Rolling Stone described as "the band's most aggressive track in years", was influenced by punk rock bands such as Pennywise and Dirty Rotten Imbeciles. Shinoda noted the minimal content of numerous punk rock songs attributed to the short length of "Victimized"; bassist Dave "Phoenix" Farrel noted that the song's working title, "Battle Axe", "which to me is..what that song is; it's just this big 'crack' and then you're out." Like the band's first two albums, the penultimate track ("Tinfoil") is an instrumental. Brad Delson, the band's guitarist, has vocals in the tenth track "Until It Breaks", which was Delson's idea.
Read more about this topic: I'll Be Gone
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“There was not a grain of poetry in the whole composition of Lord Fawn, and poetry was what her very soul craved;Mpoetry, together with houses, champagne, jewels, and admiration.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)