July 19, 2025
Linkin Park just revealed that the song One More Light live is "too sad to play” and won’t perform it again.
The title track of the band’s album is the final work they did with late legendary vocalist of the group, Chester Bennington, who committed suicide in 2017.
Mike Shinoda, the group’s co-founder, explained to The Guardian newspaper: “[It was originally written] for a woman at the label that we worked with who passed away. Then after Chester passed, the world decided that it was about him. And so that’s just too sad to play.”
After Chester passed away, Mike took the time away from Linkin Park to cope with the grief of losing his pal and wrote the solo album, Post Traumatic.
He explained he “wanted to make Post Traumatic as a diary of how I felt for myself”, [but also had the urge to play live] “to provide an area for fans to commune and go: ‘Oh, Mike is still here. We didn’t lose everybody.’”
While Mike found the tour helpful, “in the beginning”, he could not wait to end it as it started to get “exhausting.”
He said: “And then towards the end it was exhausting. I had started to … I don’t want to say move on.”
“‘Move on’ to some people means not looking back and forgetting – that’s completely not how I felt. I felt like I was coping well and I was able to get up in the morning and not think about it, and I was evolving from the terrible stuff that had happened,” the Numb rocker confessed.
“Then I would go to the show and spend 90 minutes with half the crowd crying. And I’m like, this is f****** exhausting. You know how therapists see patients all day and help them, but then they need therapy themselves? That’s how I felt,” the member of Linkin Park, Mike Shinoda, concluded.