LINKIN PARK – Rare Demo Song Posted

One of the rarest tracks to be featured on LINKIN PARK’s newly released 20th anniversary edition of their 12x multi-platinum debut album “Hybrid Theory” is the track “Pictureboard“. Versions of the song have circulated around the net over the years, but this marks the first proper release of Chester Bennington‘s demo of the track.

Originally recorded as part of the band’s earlier incarnation as Xero, the demo turned out to be a pivotal one, serving as one of the first songs the band’s late frontman Chester Bennington would record vocals for with the outfit. As the story goes, clearance issues prevented its planned original release roughly fifteen years ago.

The band’s guitarist Brad Delson recently told Kerrang! of the track:

“We had made a bunch of demos and at that moment we were looking for a vocalist, and someone… a friend of a friend, had worked with Chester in Arizona. Chester’s story – which I’m certain is true – is that he left his own birthday party to go to the studio and record his vocals on the tracks he had sent. That’s how excited he was.

He’d been in bands for years in Arizona and had basically hit the point where it was harder to get noticed out there, which was frustrating, and by that point he’d got a 9-5 job. And then he got this demo, left the party, recorded the vocals, and the rest is history.”

Speaking of his own reaction to hearing Bennington on the track, Delson offered:

“It just blew my mind. He sounds like two different people on the same song; the verses sound very, very, vulnerable. That song shows you all of his range: it’s got the tiny, tiny, vulnerable verse, which we were able to channel on songs like ‘Leave Out All The Rest‘ or ‘Breaking The Habit‘ or ‘One More Light‘… and then it’s got the big, melodic, almost screamy but still melodic chorus that you’d hear on ‘Crawling‘. It had all those elements there and it was like fireworks.”

Source: ThePRP