Mike Shinoda People Quotations

I'd call it an organic hip-hop style, musically. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, people sampled a lot, and because of that these records had a feel. They weren't recorded in a computer with a click track. . . . When I was approaching this record, what I wanted to do was try and get back to that, but I write music, I play music, so I wanted to write every note, record every note and play every note, and get that kind of hand-played feel.

It's called Fort Minor instead of my name because there is a bunch of other people involved in the project. But I only wanted to work with family and friends; people who I feel are really close to me and we see eye-to-eye. Besides that, Fort has a militant meaning and Minor in music is a smaller, darker, sadder note, so the name is a reflection of the music.

We have people in the band who don't drink or do drugs... some of us like to go sightseeing.

The Fort Minor record is all about getting back to basics in Hip-Hop, both sonically and for me personally. And working with Jay-Z again has been phenomenal. We can't wait for people to hear the final product.