ShockHound Interview

New interview with Chester on ShockHound! Check it out here. Thanks to Allison!

SHOCKHOUND: What's the most personal song on this album for you?

BENNINGTON: Every single one of them is pretty personal, but I think the most important one for me is "Give Me Your Name.” I wrote that one for my [new] wife. We danced to that song at our wedding. I didn't write the song with the idea that it would make the album. I actually wrote it to play at our wedding, but it turned out to be a great song. "In The Darkness" is another one that is very personal for me. It's not necessarily about anything personal, but it's my song about making love and how that feels. At the same time there are songs like "Condemned" and "My Suffering" which talk about my love affair with feeling like shit, so to speak. There's a weird juxtaposition between some of the songs. Some of them have more of a deep, emotional thing, and some of them are directly about specific things like relapse or learning not to repeat the mistakes of your past relationship in a future relationship. Then there are songs that I tried to mess with a little bit lyrically because they dealt with the God and my personal feeling about God. Those were "Fire" and "Too Late". Some people kind of get squirmish when you're dealing with that subject matter, so I changed it up a little bit lyrically to make it more about a relationship between two people rather than a relationship between myself and my God.