Barb Caffrey's Blog

In case you haven’t heard yet, Linkin Park has a new lead singer, or probably better explained as co-lead singer along with singer/rapper Mike Shinoda. They needed someone because their iconic lead singer Chester Bennington died seven years ago by his own hand, and most of Linkin Park wanted to play together again. (The exception was their original drummer, Rob Bourdon.) So they’ve hired a woman, Emily Armstrong, who fronted a group known as Dead Sara, to sing the parts that Chester would’ve sung had he still been alive.

Note that I did not say “to replace Chester,” as there’s no way to replace Chester Bennington. But Linkin Park wanted/needed someone to sing those parts, and Emily Armstrong can sing melodies and then scream in a heartfelt way. My guess is that Emily A. sings in a similar range to Chester, or at least is close enough that with some minor arrangements (perhaps changing the key signature and/or mode — as lots of groups use modes like Mixolydian, Lydian, Dorian, etc., in addition in order to better reflect a mood or feeling), Linkin Park’s songs can be rendered well enough for fans to appreciate them.

This is a big controversy because of two things. One, you can’t replace Chester; he had a unique set of skills, including an emotional awareness that was almost uncanny, that could never be reproduced by anyone else. Two, one of Chester’s sons, Jamie, is very unhappy about this. Jamie pointed out that September is International Suicide Awareness month, which seems disrespectful to him as his father Chester died by suicide.

That raises a good point: as Linkin Park had been working with Emily A., quietly, for months, why didn’t Linkin Park wait another month to drop this news? Or why not move it up into August? Why court this sort of drama when you don’t have to?

See, there was someone else, a musician — I can’t remember the guy’s name right now — who had reported about four, maybe five months ago that he’d heard that Linkin Park had hired a new female singer. Mike Shinoda and other Linkin Park members pooh-poohed this and said if there was any news to report, they’d report it themselves, thank you.

But the guy who reported this was a fellow musician. I knew at the time, being a musician myself, that something was undoubtedly going on even though the guy who’d said he’d heard Linkin Park had a new lead female singer backtracked pretty quickly once Mike Shinoda, et. al., basically said the man should mind his own business. Still, from that report, I figured Linkin Park was probably rehearsing, trying to lay tracks in the music studio, and figure out if a combo with some woman — who we know now to be Emily A. — was commercially viable.

That’s exactly what was going on, as we now know.

My thoughts on this are a bit mixed. First, it is hard for me to conceive of anyone singing the parts Chester sang so well and so distinctively. Chester Bennington was an integral part of Linkin Park, and as I said before, I do not believe he can ever be replaced. But second, as a musician, I know that the members of Linkin Park wanted to play again. It’s been seven years since they last played a concert in public, and most of them (Rob Bourdon, original drummer, aside) were itching to get out there and to perform.

I can’t blame any musician for wanting to perform, OK? That’s kind of what we do, providing we’re healthy enough to do it. Every performance, even of a well-known song like Linkin Park’s “In the End,” is a little different, because the energy of the crowd may be different. Or maybe one or more of the group members is feeling especially emotive. Or there’s some extra tenderness in a quiet musical interlude. Or the bombastic, up-tempo stuff seems to have extra fire one day, while the next, while still fun to listen to and hopefully fun for the group members to play, doesn’t quite meet that level of intensity.

This is true of any human music group anywhere in the history of time. Live music has variables to it, and can be extremely good one night, good the next, a bit off the third (though probably the audience won’t recognize it, the members of the group assuredly will know and feel like they let themselves down), and back to good the fourth night. It is just the nature of the beast.

As I’ve said before at my blog, there are such things as post-concert highs and post-concert lows. For example, I believe famous singer Chris Cornell may well have been dealing with a post-concert low before he called his wife and sounded so odd just a few hours before he took his own life. Audience members, from what I can recall at the time as he passed a couple of months before Chester did, said that Chris seemed frustrated, maybe a little unhappy, and his performance was not necessarily up to par. Again, some of this is the nature of the beast, and every musician worth his/her/their salt knows it. But it can be hard to remember, in the moment, that as wonderful as music is, and as wonderful as it is that some people get to live their dreams and make a living from music, that being a musical performer is not the sum total of everything we are.

I’ve had both post-concert highs and post-concert lows. They can be disconcerting, but the lows are worse by far than the highs. On those nights, I wonder why I even bothered to take up an instrument. (I don’t sing in public and am glad I don’t.) My hands felt a little off, maybe, or it was very hot outside and playing an outdoor concert was uncomfortable and unpleasant. Either way, it affected my performance for the worse. Because of that, I felt like I’d let down the audience, let down the group I was playing in, let down myself too, and just wished the ground would swallow me up, whole.

At any rate, getting back to Linkin Park and their new singer Emily A. — I think we should give the new-look and new-sound Linkin Park a bit of time to see how things go. I also think that as open-hearted as Chester B. often was, he’d not want to keep his bandmates from making music with someone else (even if it doesn’t feel easy for fans).

Finally, Shinedown’s lead singer Brent Smith posted on social media that he believes Linkin Park is doing what’s right for them. It sounded to me like Smith also believes fans should give the new version of Linkin Park time, and at least be open to listening to Emily A.’s vocals. (He spoke in a quite complimentary manner of Emily A., too.)

I think that’s a good position to take, and it’s one I can live with.

So, while I still wish that Chester was alive, singing his heart out, and playing/singing music to his heart’s content, I’m at least willing to listen to the new version. I make no promises yet as to what I think…but I will at least listen, and hope all goes well for them.