Sunrise on Fire found a great interview that the
Australian Herald Sun did with Chester. Read it all
here!
"People will get a little bit more of a personal glimpse into my life and maybe see the kind of songwriter I am," he says.
It's not about being honest for the first time - he's always done that.
"I've always been pretty up front, especially lyrically, with my music. I think that's the one real similarity between LP and Dead By Sunrise."
On this album, Bennington is a cathartic kind of songwriter. The band's name and the album's title refer to his descent into, and his eventual rise out of, a period in which he was doing - as he puts it in PC terms - a lot of partying.
He was self-destructing, he was addicted to booze and various other substances, and his first marriage was falling apart (he divorced in 2005).
"I've seen the devil in a smile, I've found salvation in a vial, my happy ending exists only in my dreams," Bennington sings on My Suffering.
"When I was going through it, I was actually trying to hide it - at least in my mind I was trying to hide it. I don't know if I did a very good job of hiding it," he says. "But I didn't want everyone to know how bad I'd really gotten. So a lot of the more revealing stuff was written afterwards, looking back, like 'OK, I'm cool with this now, I can handle being more open about my experiences over the past couple of years'.
"So that was really freeing for me. It was really interesting to look back and have that kind of perspective."
But some of the songs were written he says "while I was going through all the craziness . . . stuff that had nothing to do with that downfall, the downward spiral kind of thing".
Nowadays, of course, Bennington is happily remarried with a "litter of children".
The four kids in his house not so long ago became five - "One of my nieces moved in with us, which is pretty cool. So I guess I did acquire a 14-year-old girl somewhere along the line . . ."
It makes one wonder what his wife, Talinda, makes of all the darkness on Out of Ashes.
"At first it might have been a little disarming," Bennington says of his wife's reaction. "Like, 'Do you really want everybody to know all this stuff?'
"Honestly, what do I really have to hide?
If I can't be honest about what I'm experiencing and about my life, then what am I going to write about? Make up stuff?
If you do it tastefully and you do it in a way that's not like pornographic, if it doesn't come across as being dirty and kind of creepy, then I think that's OK."
But was it ever coming across as being dirty or creepy?
"No," Bennington says with a laugh. "I'm totally 100 per cent pure, never done anything wrong or weird in my life."
Though tearing out his heart in his Dead By Sunrise songs unburdened him, Bennington says it wasn't what saved him.
"The biggest epiphany for me during this period was realising how much value I had put into the stuff I had. That was the hardest part for me, discovering I had actually associated my success with the things I had accumulated, like money and cars and houses, things like that.
"When that's all gone, when that all disappeared, I kinda felt like maybe I was no longer successful, and I felt like a failure. And that was really tough to feel that way.
"That was really the beginning of the cascading downfall of my mental state for a little while. Then I got my s--- together and pulled myself out of it, with the help of my friends and my family and my beautiful wife."
These days, Bennington counts success as just living. "Success is if you can make it through life - you've figured something out, you know what I mean?" he says with a laugh.
"I'm still doing what I love to do, I get to be with my family as much as I want to be, I get to work whenever I feel like working, and I get to stop working when I'm over it.
"I don't have to get up and go to a job I hate every day, like a lot of people have to do to pay the bills. So I'm totally fine with that."
"I'm just starting to put all this stuff together and figure out how I can work on Linkin Park and tour with Dead By Sunrise and manage to be home enough to spend time with my kids so they don't feel like I'm a big jerk who always leaves the house."
