Somewhere I Belong

“I want to heal, I want to feel
Like I'm close to something real
I want to find something I've wanted all along
Somewhere I belong”
— Somewhere I Belong, 2003

I first heard Linkin Park in the fall of 2001, my freshman year of college. It was weeks after 9/11, and I lived with my best friend, Simon, and a third random roommate who had been assigned to our makeshift dorm room– the school was short on housing, so our room was the lounge of the dorm.

The roommate had burned me a CD, a white Memorex CD-R, with the words “Linkin Park, Hybrid Theory” written in red Sharpie.

I put it on driving down the hill in Ithaca, and my life was transformed. I had never heard anything like it. The searing guitars, the visceral emotion of the duet vocals, the rap and electronic sounds, the crystal clear production. It was the grunge of my early teen years come back with a sheen that made my eyes pop out of my head. I was hooked.

That year I was in an all male a cappella group that wore navy blazers and sang Scottish hymns, and I made them perform In The End.

I joined the LP Underground fan club. I had a black and white photo of Chester Bennington above my bed.

Simon and I would play an acoustic version of Crawling with tight harmonies. Our band covered Pushing Me Away.

Then over the next few years, once Simon and I had started VoiceStream, our college a cappella group that is still going strong 22 (!) years later, we performed and recorded elaborate versions of Papercut and Faint, screaming and all. Highly irregular choices for a cappella. Simon had the solo on Papercut, he was Chester. I rapped on Faint and did the production, I was Mike.

Before I would perform, or any time I needed to get pumped up before speaking or before anything, I would blast Hybrid Theory. That tradition lasted for many, many years into my adulthood.

In 2003, when Meteora was going to be released, we refreshed the website incessantly to hear this one little teaser clip over and and over and over again. We couldn’t get enough of it.

The day the album came out, we waited for Best Buy to open and sat in the car in the parking lot and listened front to end without speaking. There were many pivotal albums that we listened to like that.

After graduating, when we both lived in the East Village/LES, before Simon moved to Hawaii, Minutes to Midnight was set to be released soon. Simon found a leaked copy online and brought it over. We sat on the couch and listened front to end.

We hated it! It was so soft– so much piano, so many earnest harmonies. We had come to rely on LP for the heaviest, craziest, hardest blast to our skulls we could imagine. (Although in retrospect, what about tracks like Given Up...) Was this a joke? We actually thought that maybe it had been a hoax, a planted fake album. But no, it turned out that really was the album.

Of course, in time, I came to love and appreciate it, and to understand how much more LP had to give us. Their breadth of styles and emotions over the years is unparalleled, just like the versatility of Chester’s voice itself. It was so beautiful, so fragile, so pitch perfect– almost inhuman in its purity. And then, all at once it was raw rage and self-hatred, blood-curdling. I’d never heard a vocalist like that. You can feel every note.

I got to attend an intimate show at the Apple Store Soho in 2008 where they played for a tiny crowd, and I got to meet the band briefly after. Mike and Chester were both so nice, so easy to talk to.

Around that time, a girl I knew asked me once if I was wearing my Linkin Park sweatshirt ironically. I was so taken aback, so hurt. I felt ashamed. Linkin Park was far from whatever the cool Brooklyn hipsters were listening to.

Throughout the years, I would weave in and out of LP. I was deep in my work, I got married, had kids– my years of walking aimlessly in the brisk NYC air  with giant headphones or driving alone blasting music seemed to be behind me.

If I was Mike, then we were to both have something horrible in common.

In 2017, Chester committed suicide. It was a blow. I felt like I knew him. It felt like a loss.

I found myself listening more and more to LP, and I followed Mike’s journey as he processed his experience through writing and performing.

Last year, when Simon died, I came to know real loss. 

Linkin Park was one of the places I went. So many songs about death, and about not being able to handle life– exposing a darkness that we all have but few sing about openly.

“There's something inside me that pulls beneath the surface”
— Crawling, 2000

They came from that place beneath the surface, and I found myself there too. The power of just blasting their music– like being hit with the raw decibels, mixed with the intimacy of the vocal and the potency of the lyrics. Like some sort of exposure therapy, making contact with this music is healing. A catharsis.

In the past weeks, with the loss of another dear friend, Arie Abecassis, I had been listening a lot to Waiting for the End off A Thousand Suns. Just an insanely beautiful song. Chester’s voice is so pure, so exposed. That this group of people is able to connect with me in such a deep way, through the speakers in my car, is a miracle.

“The hardest part of ending is starting again”
— Waiting for the End, 2010

I was thinking about loss and about how sad it was that this band would never play again. Sad for me and their fans, but mostly I thought about how sad it was for the rest of the band. For Mike and Joe and Brad and Phoenix and Rob.

And then, out of nowhere, they announce that they’re back together, releasing a new album, and playing a surprise livestream show. With their new singer… Emily Armstrong. A woman! And she sounds, sort of like Chester? Not identical, but it’s as if her voice was derived from the same genes in their DNA. It is incredible, truly, to hear her voice on these songs. It is joyous.

What an amazing choice for the rest of the band to make, and as I feverishly researched and listened to every interview I could, just how organic it all seemed. They had not set out to find a new singer, or even to reform the band, but it just happened, naturally.

I’ve been playing The Emptiness Machine over and over again. It’s just mind-bending, to hear what is so distinctly a Linkin Park song, but with this voice that is at once Chester-esque and also completely unique. Bursting with new energy and new hope. My daughters love it. I have a brand new Linkin Park single, with a female singer, on repeat in the family car for my three young daughters. How freaking amazing is that.

I’d been going back and forth with my sister about the comeback. She had been in 7th grade when I brought Linkin Park home from college. All those experiences I had, for her, were even earlier and deeper into her childhood. That loop on the Meteora site. Instantly she was brought back to that time, and to her own connection of Linkin Park with Simon.

Then the six shows were announced: LA, NY, Hamburg, London, Seoul, Bogota. When is the NY show? In less than 2 weeks.

I rejoin the LP Underground to get pre-sale access, I’m 40,000th in line on Ticketmaster. But somehow, I get my chance and score 2 tickets. Carolyn is flying in from Denver and we’re going. To see Linkin Park.

The concert is hard to describe. Each and every song carries so much weight, so much meaning. Hearing Emily in person, she’s just, beyond amazing. The versatility, the range. Her vocal in Waiting for the End started, and I just closed my eyes and took it in.

19,000 people singing every word to every song. We all knew how to anticipate every hit, every drop, every scream. Singing together en masse, words we could never say alone.

“I only wanted to be part of something”
— The Emptiness Machine, 2024

The band was having such a good time. I feel so happy for them. Like, how amazing. Emily is not a replacement, but a new beginning. A path forward for all of them, full of joy and promise. All while celebrating Chester and honoring their past. That’s what I wish for myself. And for Simon’s family. And for all of us.

When they came on stage, I knew the first song would be Somewhere I Belong. And it was. We were all there for that exact reason.

Carolyn bought me a new Linkin Park sweatshirt, and I am proud to wear it. It is my heritage. I am starting again.