Linkin Park’s landmark second studio LP, Meteora, celebrates its 17th anniversary on March 25. In a 2003 SPIN cover story, Mike Shinoda explained the arduous process of coming up with the hook for the hit single, “Somewhere I Belong.” In the interview, Shinoda opened up about their writing process and the difficulty with that particular track. “We tried 40 choruses,” said Shinoda. “It was just agonizing—you can’t even imagine writing 10, and we were writing the 10th one, and in our minds, it was done.
And people would come in and say, ‘Yeah, it’s cool.’ And that’s not the response you want. You want, ‘That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard!’ In our heads, we were thinking, ‘Damn it—we gotta go on writing.’” The hook they came up with is
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