Samantha on The O.Brown Show

Samantha was on the O. Brown Show. There are pictures at their facebook page. I have also uploaded them here.

Linkin Park Rocks Staples Center

“This song is dedicated to my son who is here tonight for the first time with his friends,” Chester Bennington (vocals) announced prior to their anthem “Iridescent.” -NeonTommy.com

Last night Sanmantha posted on her facebook that she was going to take Draven to the show. Later Chester tweeted about how amazing the show was: "Best crowd we've ever had in LA tonight! Thank you!!!".

Out with the old, in with the new

samanthabennington

Posted 8 minutes ago

via Echofon

Sam & Draven pictures :)

Sam has posted on her twitter picture of her and Draven:

here's another one as well because i dont remember if we posted it already.
To see more pictures go HERE. Thanks to pat b for letting us know!

Twitpics: Draven in Wonderland

Samantha posted a bunch of pictures on twitter. Looks like fun! I love Alice in Wonderland sooo much.

Quotes and pictures from Samantha's twitter

Here's a quote from Sam on her twitter.

Laughed our a**es off at chesters interview!!! Hilarious .., we totally get it. I totally get it. I thought u guys would like 2 hear this.



about 17 hours ago from Echofon

And here are some pictures of some gorgeous shoes!

And here are some replies to our twitter:

@LinkinLady oh btw Im a size 6 in shoes. Lol getting married in santorini greece this June 2010! Can't wait!


10:39 PM Dec 19th from Echofon


@LinkinLady love the site! I think it's awesome the interview. It's so amazing how happy we all are! We r blessed! All of us! So happy


10:38 PM Dec 19th from Echofon

ShockHound's interview with Chester

Read more at ShockHound.com...

"Every single one of them is pretty personal, but I think the most important one for me is "Give Me Your Name.” I wrote that one for my [new] wife. We danced to that song at our wedding. I didn't write the song with the idea that it would make the album. I actually wrote it to play at our wedding, but it turned out to be a great song. "In The Darkness" is another one that is very personal for me. It's not necessarily about anything personal, but it's my song about making love and how that feels..."

Revolver Interview with Chester

There is online exclusive interview with Chester at the Revolver magazine website. He talks about the drugs, the divorce and Talinda. You can read it all HERE.

I know I talk a lot about it, but the reality is, I came out on the other side. I made a great record with Linkin Park, made a good record with Dead by Sunrise. I’m good dad, I’m a good husband, I have a lot of friends.

102.1 The Edge interview/review with Chester

Here is a "Out of Ashes" review with interview quotes from 102.1 The Edge:

The debut album from Dead By Sunrise, called Out Of Ashes, features some of the most personal lyrics ever written by singer Chester Bennington. A number of the songs were inspired by Bennington's struggles with his own psychological demons as well as drugs and alcohol. Bennington told us that his addiction to alcohol reached its peak after a divorce from his first wife left him emotionally and financially drained: "I lived on alcohol. It was either beer, or Jack and Coke, or Jack Daniels in a pint glass with ice. And then it got to the point where my wife said to me about seven months after we got together, she goes, 'I don't think there's been a day since I've known you that you haven't drank.' And I was like, 'What are you talking about? That's crazy' -- as I'm drinking a Jack and Coke. That was where my life went."

Bennington told us that during the divorce proceedings, he went from living in a mansion to a 700-square-foot apartment, and that all his money was wiped out.

Thanks again to Sunrise on Fire. ;)

Herald Sun interview with Chester

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."

The Aquarian interview with Chester

Here are parts from this interview with Chester about Dead By Sunrise.

The record is so well rounded; you really get something new from it with each listen. The sense of darkness and deep disappear is immediately striking, but there’s also the pure rock elements, the anger, a few great love songs, and acceptance. What contributed to that, were the songs written over a long stretch of time and so you had all these emotions to draw from?

The record was written over a long period of time, because when we started the record it was late 2005 or mid-2005, so I started writing it then and we worked till end of the year. Then I started working on Minutes To Midnight. So I took the next three years off basically from working on the record [Out Of Ashes]. After that, I started picking it back up again after we finished touring for Minutes To Midnight.

I had a bunch of new songs, I wrote other new songs in the process of recording with Howard Benson. So there are phases of writing in different periods over the last four years. A lot had happened in that time, you can imagine, a lot of things have happened to yourself in four years, so there’s plenty of stuff to draw from. Some of these songs are about when I met my wife and fell in love with her. That’s where the love songs come from. At the same time, I was having tough times in the middle of a long, drawn out divorce that was draining and pretty much put me on a downward spiral just because it was so…there was so much going on during that period of time, that you get songs like ‘My Suffering’ and ‘Condemned,’ and the heavier, darker stuff was all derived from the phases of that experiences. But yeah, there was a lot going on.

Yeah, because an outsider looking in on you could say, ‘Oh, Chester is in Linkin Park, and he has Club Tattoo, his life must be a dream.’ So the depths of despair on the record are shocking.

My life is a dream, but unfortunately, I am an asshole sometimes. I can be very selfish or my perspectives can be off, but there were a lot of really stressful things that happening over that period of time. Like waking up one day and having a lot of money and a big house, and a year later, not having a single dime and living in a seven square foot apartment in Santa Monica. That can make you go, ‘Okay, none of this stuff is actually going to be here for very long.’ That freaked me out, and that spun me into a place of like drinking every day. Kind of like, ‘How did this happen? All I did was not want to be married anymore and now, I have nothing.’

It was kind of crazy, but the thing that kept me going through the whole process was that I did fall in love again. I did find myself, because I knew that I had a lot to live for. Like you were saying, I do have this really blessed life. I do have Linkin Park, I do have Club Tattoo, I have a beautiful wife and a beautiful family, and all this great stuff. I put too much focus on the materialist things in life like money and houses. Yeah, families, everybody has got one and some suck, I kind of have a mixture of both, but I really consciously understand how much value I had placed on things that didn’t really matter. It was pretty tough and that’s what the record was inspired from. It was a combination of all those things.

That’s (Fire) my favorite song on the record.

That’s my favorite song on the record as well. That one and ‘In The Darkness,’ those are my two favorite songs. Those are both written with love about the relationship I have with my beautiful wife. So I wrote that for her, and we danced to that at our wedding.

How did you meet (Talinda)?

We met through a friend, and we never actually crossed paths. Ryan was friends with her for many years. Almost for as long as I have [been friends with him], and we had known of each other for the same amount of time, but I have never met her for some reason. If she was at a party, I didn’t make it. We had never met and eventually, after I had split up with my ex-wife, we met at a party.
We hit it off right away, like instantly. Ever since we met—I think it was like four or five days before we’d see each other again, and we have been together ever since. I think she moved in with me about a week-and-half after I met her. We met, and that was it.

'Out Of Ashes' Fan Reviews

Here are bits from fan reviews that DBS posted here.

5. Let Down
I finally get to hear the studio version of this song, after the 2005 acoustic version. I love the synth lead. The chorus delivers so well, naturally. Very rocky but keeping the mellow touch. Amir plays an amazing, seemingly complex solo. Once again, amazing harmonies and backing vocals.
9.5/10

6. Give Me Your Name
Acoustic mixed with overdrive in the intro. Sounds like an obvious love song, but so different from your typical love song. The bass fills the hole, it feels satisfying. It's like your expecting it, and it fills that gap with a little something extra adding in. Acoustic ending is brilliant.
7/10

12. In The Darkness
Sounds like there's some "beatboxing" in this song, or humming, as part of the drum beat. This makes the drums feel somewhat "tribal" VERY briefly. A nice end to the album, relaxing but with fitting energy. A Julien-K styled ending with drowning echos makes this album have a happy ending.
8/10

Track five -' Let Down' - is a little slower in comparison with the previous tracks, with a softer vocal from Bennington. This perfectly matches the nature of the song which speaks of love and the hardship of being let down – referring to Bennington's painful divorce. Speaking of the fear of going down the 'same old road' again in a new relationship, it offers an insight into Bennington's past and the difficult decisions which are made from broken trust and broken hearts. You may have to listen to this track a few times to completely take it in, in order to fully appreciate its beauty

.

One of my personal favorites from the album is the beautiful 'Give me your name', a song about being in love. Something about Chester's soft voice as he begins 'Give me a smile/Give me your name girl' seems to completely emulate the dreamlike quality of meeting somebody 'perfect' for the first time; the feeling of butterflies and the strong urge to smile constantly. It continues in this way throughout and is almost like a lullaby that entices you to join this fantasy world, to feel this same wonderful emotion that he is feeling. It's a track which is rather different to other songs on the album both lyrically (the majority of other songs are darker) and musically and I think it's perfectly placed delicately in the middle, almost like a ray of sunshine after a storm. Hopefully this is a song that'll be played acoustic sometime in the future too.

“In the Darkness” brings us to the last track on 'Out Of Ashes' which ends with as much power as it began. Deciding to end on a lighter note the track opens up with an acoustic guitar and a slower tempo ready to document the very personal “act of making love with someone you feel deep love for” - as described by the man himself. He speaks of 'aching at the sight' of the one he loves in a beautiful display of affection and you can't help but smile at Bennington's frank lyrics. I really couldn't think of a more perfect song to end the album on; after a 12-track journey through the highs and lows of Bennington's recent years it really does make you glad to see the last track echo the album title as Bennington rises from the ashes with his new love.

Samantha's twitter

On following each other on Twitter:

@SamBennington hi! Can you answer me this: If you and Chester and Talinda are friends, why don't you follow each other in Twitter?
@lilimarcia we used to. Just boundries r better. I'm not really interested in being over the top & I have my own life. It's all good

About Tony:

@TheLPFreak Tony has known me since I was 12. My son, family, friends, his son are all loving supportive & happy! I'm blessed
TheLPFreak yes we have picked a month & talk about it all the time.. Even more kids. We r thinking of a lil girl. He has a son & so do I.

When things are slow, turn to twitter

Since updates are bit slow these past few days and I have been away a lot, I thought I'd check the ladies twitter accounts and do a little post. Samantha went to Vegas to see LOVE so there isn't anything new from her at the moment (although on her facebook she did upload a few pictures so if you are her friend, check them out).

Elka uploaded a cute picture of Abbi to her twitpic. Sadly, her husband Dane was laid off from his job (we know how that is) but Elka said it well; God just has a better plan for him.

Meanwhile the Bennington's had a bunch of fun at Disney Paris! Talinda had also nice things to say about St. Petersburg. Glad to see she is able to enjoy herself while still dealing with her pain!

Samantha's twitter picture :)

"My little bro just got home from college & bought Draven a duck. His name is scotter."

Sam & Chester's wedding

Here are pictures from Samantha&Chester's wedding in 1996 posted by Sam herself on ebay:

Samantha's Twitter

Samantha Bennington joined Twitter today and you can follow her @SamBennington. Maybe we'll get a chance to hear from her more often now. But please, don't follow her to be rude or anything, here at Linkin Lady we all love Samantha!.

Chester and Sam on Holly's myspace

Lissa pointed out the fact that there is an old picture of Chester and Samantha hanging out with Holly Brook and other friends at her myspace.

Samantha Bennington

Birthday: December 1st
Sign: Sagittarius
Ht: 5' 2
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Brown
Shoe: 6 1/2
Dress: 1 or 2
Hometown: Born in Detroit, Pacific Palisades & Palos Verdes
Nationality: Greek & Italian
Occupation: Full time mom, once part owner of Club Tattoo, founder of Rhythm Kittens, Life Coach, Real Estate, Meditation Tapes and Singer on DJ Kyle Hendrix's new cd.

Favorites:

Food: Mexican, Italian, & Sushi
TV Shows: Sopranos
Movies: Scarface, Outsiders, & The Notebook (She likes mafia, vampire and comedy movies but hates horror)
Music: Nikka Costa, Outkast, & The Killers
Clothes: Lisa Michelle & True Religion
Hobbies: Dancing, Traveling, Shopping, & Men
Books: Anne Rice books. She has collected them since she was 13.
Quotes: "Anything worth having takes effort" and "Who do I trust? Me!"
Food: Italian and Mexican.

Facts:

She has 4 tatoos. 2 Wild Orchids (her favorite flower), all her tattoos have meaning. Hip tattoo: Lotus/new life . Fire/sagitarious. Cherry blossoms/name Cherri. Bows/burlesque

Samantha was adopted at birth so her biological maiden name is Cherri Norma Loukas and her adopted maiden name is Samantha Olit.

She met Chester at a venue with many bands playing, she'd never heard of Grey Daze before that day.

Samantha and Chester got married on October 31, 1996.

When Chester married Samantha they didn't have enough money for wedding rings - so a friend tattooed their fingers for free. By the time Chester was in his early 20's, he and Samantha owned two homes in Arizona and were working at a local real estate market.

Chester and Samantha rented the house that was on MTV Cribs. They couldn't afford to buy it at the time.

Chester had a lip ring - but he removed it at Samantha's request - while they were retaking their wedding vows in Hawaii.

Samantha and Chester have one son, Draven Sebastian , born on April 19, 2002.

She has two dogs, a Golden Retriever named Buddy and an all black German Shepherd named Akasha.

Samantha filed for a divorce from Chester in early 2005. Read the article here.

Samantha started a group of female dancers called the Rythm Kittens in 2005 but decided not to launch in Vegas so that Draven could stay close to his family.

One of her favorite Linkin Park songs is "Papercut".

She never wanted to sing but did it when asked because she wants to live saying she's tried everything.

She kept the last name of Bennington so she can have the same last name as her son (Draven).

Speaks some Spanish but not much.

She has brothers and sisters.

Has naturally wavy hair and Olive skin.


More Samantha on Linkin Lady:
♦ Articles about Samantha
♦ Interviews about Samantha
♦ Quotes by and about Samantha
♦ Encounters with Samantha
♦ Samantha's Closet