Who Are You Imitating?

When I was 8 years old my dad called me from a Linkin Park show. I was too young to go, but he wanted to me to hear my favorite song (Crawling from Hybrid Theory). I could hear Chester Bennington scream-singing the chorus from his guts. It was like raw emotion coming straight from the phone speaker into my ears.

That type of singing doesn’t just naturally occur. Like many great artists, he studied. He imitated other vocalists. Just like Bob Dylan imitated Woody Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen imitated Roy Orbison, Liam Gallagher imitated John Lennon, Bennington imitated others, too. As the band songwriter and producer Mike Shinoda says:

“You could say Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode, you could say Perry Farrell [from Jane’s Addiction], you could say Scott Weiland [from Stone Temple Pilots], and he could push in that direction very accurately. So when we were working together, I knew all of those levers to pull, and I could say, ‘Hey, you’re singing it a little like that person. Can you please try and sing it like this person?’”

His sound was a combination of all of the influences he had studied. In trying to sound like his heroes he ended up creating a sound that others wanted to imitate.

That’s What I Want To Do

In the early 2000’s, a young girl named Emily Armstrong was listening to that same Linkin Park album on repeat. Trying to imitate Bennington.

“I was in a band when [Hybrid Theory] came out. “One Step Closer” was the song for me, and I was just like, “Holy s–t, that’s what I want to do. As a singer, I want to be able to scream.” That album was everything — I’ve listened to it a trillion times. I would skate to it. I would mosh to it… It took me time to develop it, but I learned by listening to singers. I didn’t have training and stuff, so [Bennington] was somebody that I knew — and I was obsessed. All I would listen to was that album.”

24 years after Hybrid Theory was released and 7 years after Bennington’s sudden death in 2017, Linkin Park released their first song with a new lead vocalist: Emily Armstrong.

Talk to you next week,
Dawson