Were the other Linkin Park members involved at all?
Joe Hahn has a guest appearance on the song “Slip Out The Back.” Also, Brad Delson, our guitarist, helped me with the direction of the album by being my A&R. That means he, with Jay-Z, helped me pick which songs should go on the record, and gave me his opinion on how to structure and arrange them. Some of his advice I took, and some I didn’t! (laughs) How did you approach this project differently than a Linkin Park project? The album started with me asking myself, “If I take the hip hop I used to do before LP, and add in all the songwriting and touring and world experience I’ve had in the past six years, what would I come up with?” That’s where it started, and here we are. Did the Jay-Z collaboration increase your fan base? I don’t know. We had already sold 35 million albums around the world before we did one song with Jay, so it’s hard to say how the fan-base was affected. But I know that as artists, we just keep growing and doing different things, and it was just as new for Jay as it
