Nobody's Listening

This song is about the pain and stress one must go through when writing music.

Mike Shinoda was going through his record collection when he got the idea to use a Japanese flute on this called a shakuhachi. Chester Bennington decided they had to make the lyrics go along with the flute, which was played by an outside musician.

This is a track on Linkin Park's second studio album, Meteora. In the album's booklet, the band explained how the song fulfilled one of their creative goals for the project: "One of the band's many goals in writing Meteora was to take their sampled sounds to the next level. However, in creating more interesting samples, a new challenge arose: To make the wide variety of sample-based elements feel like they belonged together. At first, this song's Japanese flute loop created a mood that was far different from any other song on which the band was working, and made the track feel too distant from the rest of the album. Mike and Chester decided that the singing vocals would have to somehow connect the song to the rest of the recordings. The following day, Chester's performance gave this seemingly incongruent song balance, transforming it into an essential track on the album."