Time to get crazy. HYBRID THEORY (37:45 > 31:21) 1. Papercut 2. One Step Closer 3. Crawling 4. A Place For My Head 5. So Far Away 6. In The End 7. She Couldn't 8. Pushing Me Away 9. My December (Hidden/Bonus Track) Yes, I'm making an 8 track album with a hidden track. With the time constraint, there will be 38 seconds of silence bringing the "real" running time to 31:59. What I'm going for here is a variety of interplay between Mike and Chester's vocals. You obviously have your Mike verse Chester chorus songs like Papercut, APFMH, and ITE. You have solo Chester songs in OSC and My December. You have a Mike-centric singing song with Chester on harmonies in So Far Away. You have the vocal trade-off in the pre-chorus of Pushing Me Away, and you have a Chester verse Mike chorus in She Couldn't. You also get a variety of instrumentals that make it truly a hybrid. As much as I wanted to put High Voltage in here, I couldn't justify removing My December for it. METEORA (36:35 > 28:14) 1. A.06 2. Lost 3. Lying From You 4. Faint 5. Breaking The Habit 6. From The Inside 7. Massive 8. Session 9. Numb 10. Healing Foot (Hidden/Bonus Track) We all know how much I dislike Meteora, so yeah, I got it down to 28:14, which means I can get 3 MINUTES AND 45 SECONDS of silence before Healing Foot starts. Anyways, I gave Meteora a proper non Foreword intro track that leads into Lost, and more or less takes the same journey with some delightful omissions that I savored a bit too much. Don't Stay? Yes, please go. Somewhere I Belong? You don't belong on this album. Hit the Cutting Room Floor, more like. Easier to Run away from this album? Yes it is. Figure.09? Who needs it when we have Figure.02-Faced? Nobody's Listening? Yep, Nobody's Listening to this god-awful track. Add in Massive and Healing Foot and we're set. MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT (43:29 > 31:28) 1. No More Sorrow 2. Leave Out All The Rest 3. Across The Line 4. Chance of Rain 5. Valentine's Day 6. No Roads Left 7. In Pieces 8. The Little Things Give You Away I'm absolutely stealing No More Sorrow as an intro because fuck yeah this is a great intro. When I saw them live they used NMS as an opener and it works so well. With that, I'm making some controversial cuts here, such as Given Up, Bleed It Out, and What I've Done. You might notice a theme in which I include B-Sides or LPU material from the era where Mike sings lead. This means of course No Roads Left gets added. I've also added Across the Line and Chance of Rain. A THOUSAND SUNS (47:49 > 31:02) 1. Empty Spaces 2. When They Come For Me 3. Robot Boy 4. Jornada Del Muerto 5. Waiting for the End 6. Primo 7. The Catalyst 8. Symphonies of Light Reprise 9. The Messenger This was by far my hardest album to cut. But fortunately, I was able to keep my perfect child Empty Spaces in, and even better, it's now the intro to the album! I cut The Requiem through Burning in the Skies and was able to keep that perfect 5 song length of Empty Spaces through WFTE intact. From there, I made the absolutely tough cut for Blackout, and that sacrifice was so that I could include Primo on here WHERE IT FUCKING BELONGS. Primo takes the place of Iridescent, then I remove Fallout so that I can have a proper The Catalyst > Symphonies of Light Reprise > The Messenger closing that ATS deserved. If I'm being honest, the absolute hardest cut here was Fallout, which was originally slated to stay along with Blackout before I decided Primo needed to be here. But there's absolutely an alternate version of this alternate album that replaces Primo with Blackout/Fallout. And asking me to decide between those two version is like asking me to choose my favorite child. LIVING THINGS (37:03 > 31:57) 1. Holding Company 2. It Goes Through 3. Castle Of Glass 4. Roads Untraveled 5. Skin To Bone 6. Devil's Drop 7. The Last Line 8. Three Band Terror 9. Tinfoil 10. Powerless Have I mentioned I really prefer the folksy part of the latter half of LT? Well, here it is. A full LP folk album. We drop the first 5 tracks of the original and replace it with the full 5-minute instrumental Holding Company as the intro. You may remember Holding Company as the demo that eventually became LITE, and I think the world is worse off for having LITE instead of Holding Company. The second track of the album is It Goes Through, which as far as we know got its start during the LT sessions. While definitely more electronic, there are folksy elements to the verses that make it clear it was a fit for the latter half of LT. Anyways, the three-song stretch of COG-RU-STB remains intact, at which point we pull from the Mall soundtrack yet again with Devil's Drop, which was a demo from the LT sessions, and The Last Line, which was worked on during MTM, ATS, and the LT sessions all. From there we go into Three Band Terror, the 2 minute demo that originates the ending of Until It Breaks. Yes, give me 2 minutes of Brad singing on the folk record. From there we go into Tinfoil into Powerless. This is my new actual preferred tracklist for LT, unironically. Incidentally, I accidentally made the most Chester-free album in that the only track where he takes lead vocals is Powerless. Oops. THE HUNTING PARTY (45:16 > 28:46) 1. White Noise 2. Rebellion 3. Mark the Graves 4. Drawbar 5. Final Masquerade 6. A Line In The Sand 7. Final Masquerade (Acoustic) (Hidden/Bonus Track) This was difficult in that it was really hard not to just eliminate everything but Final Masquerade. But then I wanted to add the acoustic version, and having a studio version and an acoustic version as the "album" felt unfair. So I added ALITS as a buffer between the two, then added Drawbar as the intro. Then, after much ado, I re-added Rebellion and Mark the Graves between FM and ALITS and thought I was done, until I was working on the compacted LT and remembered the Mall tracks. White Noise is from the THP sessions and is a better "album opener" than Drawbar>FM, so I made it the intro and just went for normal track order for Rebellion through ALITS before using FM acoustic as a hidden track. All this to say that I actually put a lot of thought into this despite it being White Noise + the last 5 tracks in order + an acoustic version. ONE MORE LIGHT (35:22 > 30:29) 1. Nobody Can Save Me 2. Invisible 3. Friendly Fire 4. Heavy 5. Sorry For Now 6. Halfway Right 7. What Are You Worth 8. One More Light 9. Sharp Edges Honestly, this one took the least amount of time. I really enjoyed Friendly Fire and What Are You Worth from the OML sessions, and the best way to incorporate those in is to drop Good Goodbye through Battle Symphony, though I am pretty bummed about having to drop TTM. Nothing really special happening with the track order aside from where I inserted FF and WAYW.
I’m actually super curious to try out that Meteora mix. But that LIVING THINGS album is absolute chaos.
Honestly I was in between (heh) having Lost where it is or further down the album. I originally had no A.06 with Lost as an opener but A.06 was a last minute decision and I like it there. In isolation A.06 > Lost feels disjointed but I feel like in an ideal situation there would be interstitials blending each track together. A.06 > Lying From You might be better, then I guess Lost goes either before or after Massive. Which runs the risk of being seen as "I threw the non-album tracks next to each other". Also, my LT album is fucking immaculate.
You said b-sides were acceptable, and all those are from the LT sessions. Holding Company became LITE, Three Band Terror is a part of UIB. 7 of the 10 tracks are from LT itself or earlier versions of LT songs, and 3 are songs that didn't make a cut. 70% is more than 45%. Percentage-wise, there are more LT tracks in my LT then there are Meteora tracks on my Meteora, which you like
Especially like the look of the MTM tracklist here, it has moody melodic quality to it, and navigates smoothly between "the loud and the quiet". No rapping on that album, but Mike gets a full song I guess.
I wouldn't call LPU demos or Mall tracks B-sides. My December and High Voltage are B-sides. They were released with the One Step Closer single. Then there are officially released songs from expanded versions of albums like Across the Line, Lost, or She Couldn't. You could call them "B-sides" I guess. I'd even go as far as to include the 5 additional songs that made it to the end stages of mixing for MTM even though it's not really technically fitting of the term. But any song or demo from the writing sessions wouldn't qualify IMO. That's stretching "B-side" too far.
Yeahhhh it's a bit of a stretch of the definition. When I mentioned the b-sides thing I was thinking more along the lines of My December, High Voltage, No Roads Left, Across The Line, etc. But I guess I wasn't specific enough. Do what you guys want, but when you're chucking out half the album tracks it kinda makes the final product quasi-unrecognizable.
It's really shaky ground drawing a line on what counts as "officially released." All the LPU albums are purchaseable on the official LP store as a digital download or as physical copies (albeit locked behind an LPU membership, but it's there. https://store.linkinpark.com/products/lpu-15-cd) They're all under the Machine Shop label. The Mall soundtrack got a physical release and is on streaming platforms. What makes any of these not officially released? Do we draw the line at physical releases? Because everything I've added is on an official Machine Shop distributed CD that can be found in the LP store. Do we draw the line at if something is available on Spotify? Does this mean De La Soul released 6 albums on March 3, 2023 and all the CDs, vinyl, and tapes of those albums being over 2 decades old are unreleased? The way I see a song as being officially released is if the artist purposefully distributed the song. Friendly Fire wasn't officially released until Papercuts. If you want to say that Friendly Fire, which wasn't finished during the OML era but was worked on by Mike and Brad during the FROM ZERO sessions, released on a compilation that is not a OML anniversary boxset is allowed to be on OML, then you are saying that a song that was mostly written during that album's initial sessions should count, regardless of where it was physically or digitally released. Like the tracks from the Mall soundtrack.
Sorry, let me clarify: my point wasn't about "officially released," it was more to emphasize that those other tracks were included on expansions of the relevant studio albums as finished tracks, promoted with the anniversaries, etc. I might have gone too far on the "B-side" definition and gotten pedantic. This is an exercise for fun, and just I'm pointing out that your approach—to me at least—seems a bit disjointed with the intention. Can we disagree with the decisions to cut demo tracks? Oh absolutely. Primo was done dirty. Three Band Terror is lovely. But my point is more that for the purpose of this exercise, it seems rather not in the spirit to "compact" an album by replacing songs with demos that were specifically cut (or repurposed toward another project in a different medium entirely) and didn't get featured as additional studio tracks with the album cycle (as High Voltage, Blackbirds, No Roads Left, Not Alone, etc were). At the end of the day, we're just having fun. Probably not worth arguing over. I just find it funky personally.
Minutes to Midnight - Compact Fireball Edition (31:50) 01. No More Sorrow 02. Shadow of the Day 03. What I've Done 04. Leave Out All The Rest 05. Bleed It Out 06. Given Up 07. No Roads Left 08. The Little Things Give You Away NMS has one of those intro riffs that, IMO, serves well as an intro track. Shaved off the final 30 seconds of SOTD Kept the transition between LOATR and BID Had to choose Given Up over In Pieces to fit the time constraint. No Roads Left was a must-have TLTGYA may be a little dated but was such a departure for the band then. Great closer. Hands Held High got bumped by NRL. In Between and Valentine's Day were easy cuts.
^ I like you kept the transition from SOTD to WID and LOATR to BIO. It's hard to get around those without having the transitions feel clumsy. Like we can always have "in theory" tracklists where the transitions would have been different, but it's great when those remade tracklists work smoothly as a playlist, it creates the illusion.