Same On The Inside (with Chester Bennington)

In 2013, Chester Bennington replaced Scott Weiland as the group's lead vocalist, which changed not only their performance dynamic, but also how they write songs. In our interview with drummer Eric Kretz, he explained how this song came together: "Dean [DeLeo] was strumming something on guitar when I walked in, 'Ah, let's go play that.' So he and I would just sit there and start going through the chord progressions and getting over all the jive feel, the jumpin' and jive feel of where the song was going. Chester would come in and suddenly start shooting melodies [snaps fingers], like, bam, bam bam! That was just so exciting as we were putting songs together. Within a few hours we were getting songs together, minus the lyrics. What Chester would do, as he would call them, is 'banana lyrics' where he would just sing, 'bananananana.' Those are his words, not mine. That gets the point across. He doesn't have specific words yet. He'll be writing stuff down on his laptop and sing out the vowels and we all go, 'Alright. The song's coming together.' It's a really exciting time to be in the studio and working with the band when it goes that quickly."

Chester Bennington explained the song's meaning to Artist Direct. "I think a lot of people find themselves trying to play some type of role in society and fit in," he said. "Sometimes, in their lifetimes, people don't feel like anybody else and they don't want to play by the same rules anybody else does. You start to find the glass half empty. You also start to find your own independence and point-of-view. This is a song about struggling with those things."

Bennington told Artist Direct the song is a step in a new stylistic direction for STP, but it still sounds like the band. "When I write lyrics, they're a little more to the point. It's a bit easier to figure out what they're about," he explained. "When I was writing for High Rise, I was channeling the spirit of Mike Shinoda to a degree. It's like when Luke Skywalker is talking to Yoda and he's already absorbed 'The Force.' I was pulling on those guys, Mike, Rick Rubin, Don Gilmore, and all of the people who pushed me when it comes to writing lyrics. I'd run it through what my brain reconstructed as those people in my mind, and they criticized the lyrics along with me. I was hoping I wouldn't just settle for something I thought sounded nice when I sang it. I would try to live up to what we do with Linkin Park in terms of having songs with meaning but also writing in a more poetic manner as STP has in the past. I tried to combine more of that poetic style into the lyrics."