When Linkin Park were first approached to appear on the soundtrack for Michael Bay's live-action Transformers, they were in the middle of a huge upheaval of who and what they wanted to be.
Their career up until 2007 had been defined by their position at the peak of nu-metal's powers. From the influential industrial grit that made up 2000's Hybrid Theory to the more refined by no less seething Meteora in 2004, they had gone from pissed off upstarts to one of the biggest bands in the world. Though when it came to piecing together their third full-length album, the tides were turning. The genre that they had called home was very much a thing of the distant past, and they knew it.
"We had exhausted that sound," Mike Shinoda admitted during the band's official documentary on the making of Minutes To Midnight. "It was easy for us to replicate, it was easy for other bands to replicate and we just needed to move on."
"What we were preparing ourselves for was to try and redevelop the sound of the band from every aspect, which is kind of a scary thought," Chester Bennington added, clearly shaken by the pressure that comes with a complete upheaval of everything that you have represented. The result of that searching led to a record that is as varied as it is volatile. From the crushing intent of Given Up to the tear-stained flourishes of Leave Out All The Rest, the party-starting thrills of Bleed It Out to the mournful atmosphere of Shadow Of The Day, it is a record that weights emotion, both sides of the spectrum, firmly on its sleeve.
And in the middle of all of that was What I've Done.
A song that despite how big it ended up being was actually the last piece of the album to be written and recorded. In many ways, it was born from frustration, a realisation that after a year of prodding and poking at the album's other tracks that something was still missing. Though pressure always produces diamonds and from Mike's home studio to a return to NRG Studios, following the previous bout of recording taking place at Rick Rubin's space in Laurel Canyon, the final piece was conjured in record time.
"We spent a long time on the other songs, and we decided we needed one more to round out the album and to sum up everything we put into this record musically," Mike explained during an episode of Stripped from 2007. "And that's a real challenge, to say, 'Everything you've done right, in the last year, every song that's taken 3, 6, 9 months to write... do another one in like 2 weeks.' It was a stressful, pressure thing. I feel like the guys stepped up and it came together in about a week and a half."
And off the back of all of this soul-searching, of summing up the feeling of figuring out exactly who they wanted to be moving forward, an opportunity came up that spoke to the kids they used to be.
