Powerless

Album: Living Things (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • Linkin Park close their fifth studio album, Living Things, with this track, which finds Chester Bennington singing regretfully to someone, who is intent on self-destruction. That person could be either a friend or lover.
  • The song plays over the end credits of the 20th Century Fox film, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012).
  • The band started working on this during the sessions for their previous album, A Thousand Suns. It was originally a much longer song that had track "Tinfoil" as its intro but, according to singer Mike Shinoda, "was trimmed from a seven-minute epic, given a more compact arrangement and, on the last day of recording, filled out with live drums."
  • Shinoda explained the album title to NME: "We chose the album title Living Things because it's more of a record about people. It's more about personal interactions. On the last few records we've had an interest in global issues and social issues and those things are still around, there are certainly traces of them, but this record is far more personal."
  • On his blog, Shinoda explained how all of the sonic explorations from the band's previous albums came together on this album: "For me, it's all about getting back to the real 'hybrid theory' - not the album with that name, but the idea that the six guys in our band have drastically different tastes in music, and the blending of all those sounds into one is exactly what we built our band upon."
  • Living Things is Linkin Park's fourth full-length album to debut at #1.

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