"Session" - Song by Song, Let's Talk Linkin Park

Moving onto "Breaking The Habit"!

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This one is the ninth track on "Meteora" and is the album's biggest curveball. Rapid, glitchy drums and lofi keyboard loops mesh with clean guitar and gorgeous live strings to produce a song unlike anything Linkin Park had ever made up until that point. In this 2008 Kerrang! feature, Shinoda was quoted saying that "Breaking The Habit" is a key example of how "Meteora" differs from "Hybrid Theory" in that the band was trying new things.

While promoting "Meteora", Shinoda spoke a lot about this song's origins; he had originally come up with the beat idea intending for it to become an instrumental interlude, but his fellow band members ("Meteora"'s liner notes specifically mention Brad Delson and Joe Hahn) encouraged him to try and write lyrics and vocal parts for it.

Lyrically, "Breaking The Habit" was a bit of a departure from the typical Linkin Park song up until that point; the song's protagonist is yearning for change and each chorus shows progression in their resolve, giving the song an edge of optimism that you might say was not present in any other Linkin Park song at that time. In the Shoutweb article, Shinoda also briefly goes into what the lyrics are talking about, albeit with his trademark Linkin Park vagueness:

Many fans theorised - and still continue to theorise - that the lyrics talk about Chester Bennington's history with various addictions, but the fact that Shinoda mentions that he had been attempting to write on these themes for "five years" or so suggests that he would have begun trying to write a song of this nature before Bennington joined the band. Regardless, Bennington is said to have connected deeply with the lyrics, and went on to write openly about his own addictions on his Dead By Sunrise album a few years later.

A prominent aspect of the song's instrumentation is the use of live strings, possibly the only instance of live strings on "Meteora". Shinoda explained briefly how they came to be while speaking to Billboard:

As a result of this suggestion, a ten-piece orchestra lead by David Campbell was called in to take string parts that Shinoda had written and bring them to life. Footage from the string recording session is included in "The Making of Meteora". In addition to having come up with a complete live string arrangement based on what Shinoda had come up with, Campbell also had the string group try out a few extra variations - eventually, rather than settling for any one, all of these recorded variations were layered atop one another, "making ten people sound like forty people". This is a large part of what gives the song its sonic depth and further distinguishes it in the context of "Meteora" as a whole.

"Breaking The Habit" was the first song completed for Linkin Park's second album. In this interview and others, band members have stated that it set a benchmark for the rest of the songs they were trying to create.

In 2004, "Breaking The Habit" was used as the fifth and final single to promote "Meteora". The ambitious music video that the band created to accompany the song involved a lengthy and arduous process. The video consisted entirely of hand-drawn animation, some of it rotoscoped performance footage of the Linkin Park members. The fact that it was to be animated was revealed before the song choice, as mentioned in this article.

The process behind the video's creation was explored in a documentary, "Making of Breaking The Habit", which was given a special release on a DVD called "Breaking The Habit"; a similar release had been done for "Crawling" in 2001. The DVD also came with a 40-page manga booklet that provided insight into the plotlines and design aspects of the video, among other things.

Following the band's performance shoot, the rotoscoping and other hand-drawn animation aspects were handled by an animation studio called Gonzo Digimation Studios, based in Japan; the animators were overseen by Kazuto Nakazawa, who is best known for the animated segments in "Kill Bill Volume 1". Additionally, Patrick Tatopoulos contributed designs, marking his third collaboration with Hahn and Linkin Park. Nakazawa and Hahn collaborated to create the rest of the video's look and feel. The resulting video is similar in some respects to Linkin Park's other emotional plot-driven videos, although Chester Bennington plays a role in the plotline as well as the band performance side of things, ultimately tying those two sides of the video together.

To launch the promotional effort for the single, linkinpark.com was heavily redesigned with a new look built around elements from the new video, featuring wallpapers, a desktop widget and various other "Breaking The Habit"-related things, and Warner Bros. put out this press release:

Alongside the music video and the documentary that takes us through its creation, the "Breaking The Habit" DVD also contained an alternate music video for the song which features footage from a band rehearsal in late May of 2004.

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"Breaking The Habit" was first performed live at a festival show in November 2003, at which point the band were already well into the "Meteora" touring cycle. It has been suggested that Bennington's intense emotional response to the song, which "reduced [him] to tears", was the main reason why the band didn't perform the song live when they began touring to promote "Meteora". At this show, it was prefaced with a piano-based intro where Shinoda and Chester performed the first verse and chorus before the song was re-launched with the full band; the band would continue to introduce the song this way for many subsequent tours. Since then, it has been played pretty regularly. Shinoda plays piano and string parts on his keyboard for live renditions of the song.

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In 2009, a demo version of "Breaking The Habit" was released on that year's Linkin Park Underground CD. The demo carries the song's original working title "Drawing" and is entirely instrumental. The track runs three-and-a-half minutes long and the glitchy drums are considerably glitchier, thus contrasting even more strongly with the smooth keyboard strings floating over the top.

"Breaking The Habit" continues to be touted by the band as one of their collective favourites from their now-extensive catalogue, as well as the song that kicked off the idea that Linkin Park were capable of more than just their trademark rap-rock hybrid fare. It has been cited frequently as the song which lead to Linkin Park being more daring with stylistic departures on later albums such as "Minutes To Midnight" and "A Thousand Suns". In 2004, Delson was quoted in this article saying:

 

I just want to say that, before moving on, "Figure.09" is one of my favorite songs off of Meteora. I think in a lot of ways I can really relate to the lyrics, and I've always been a fan of when Linkin Park alternates between Mike rapping and Chester screaming. It just always strikes me as something cool.

As for "Breaking the Habit," easily the best song off of the album. It has perhaps the strongest and yet most relatable lyrics. It is an emotional songs that builds through to the end despite conventional song structure, and it honestly just gets me every time. It is definitive of what Meteora really could have been as an album.

 

As with many others, I first heard "Breaking The Habit" when I listened through "Meteora" for the first time. I didn't feel one way or the other about it in terms of how different it sounded to the other songs on the album. To me, it just fit. For a long while, it was my favourite song on the album because it was so easy to listen to. I appreciate the song more now when I consider how the song already sounds so different to other LP songs in terms of the focus on electronic beats and melodies but, then, there are also several layers of live strings. There are so many ways in which the song differs from most of the other Linkin Park songs at the time.

I first saw the "Breaking The Habit" video on TV, on a music video programme that I was watching. I remember that, before one of the ad breaks, they said that a new Linkin Park video was going to be shown for the first time. I loved every second of it. In hindsight, it's pretty obvious but no-one could've imagined at the time how well a dark and stylised anime-esque look would work with that song. At the time, I considered the decision to have a 2D animated video to be ingenious and my opinion there hasn't really changed. Once I was able to, I watched the making-of-documentary just as much as I watched the video itself. I think that it's one of the most entertaining and thorough documentaries the band have ever released. To be fair, though, it only covers one video and not a whole album-making process.

To this day, I say that the singles from "Meteora" spawned a consistent set of great music videos (with the possible exception of the first one). It's not my favourite video from the era but the fact that "Breaking The Habit" was the one to close out that cycle of videos is fitting because it's arguably the best of the lot; at the very least, it's certainly the most ambitious.

Later in 2004, I bought a copy of the "Breaking The Habit" single CD. After that, I bought one other single CD a couple years later and, then, they really died out. Anyway, at that time, single CDs were really exciting and, as a marketing tool, they worked well. There was no single that I was more excited to buy than that one because an awful-resolution QuickTime copy of the music video was included as Enhanced Content. Back then, that was super-exciting, that I was going to have a copy of the video that I could put on whenever I wanted. Plus, there was the edit of the song which included that fade-in at the start, which was cool. I really liked the cover art for that single as well.

In my opinion, there's hardly a better example of how Shinoda's songwriting and Chester's singing could come together so fantastically. Chester's performance on "Breaking The Habit" is certainly one of the very best on "Meteora". I used to find myself wondering sometimes if it could have been improved with a reduction of vocal effects but I guess that the live versions have that covered. At the same time, I don't particularly like live versions of "Breaking The Habit". The band does the song well and all and it translates just fine live but, more than usual with other songs, I greatly prefer the album version.

I remember being really excited when I heard that the band had begun playing "Breaking The Habit" live and, a long while later, they released a recording of the song being played live at Rock Am Ring on the fourth LPU CD. I thoroughly enjoyed that performance (and the rest of the EP, which remains one of the best LPU CDs to date) but it didn't take long for me and everyone else to get sick of live recordings of "Breaking The Habit" appearing on so many LPU CDs and other releases.