Eco soundings

Mike Shinoda phones Hong Kong early one Sunday morning. His band Linkin Park are in Chicago getting ready to play one of the final dates of their annual Projekt Revolution multi-band tour and Shinoda spends the hour before showtime on the phone promoting upcoming gigs and pet projects. Lately, the pet projects take priority.

'We want to be a part of helping find solutions to people's wastefulness of energy and make our concerts more green,' Shinoda says. The band is helping Habitat for Humanity build homes in New Orleans and is donating proceeds from the sale of a Projekt Revolution art book to Music for Relief. They're the kinds of projects you'd sooner hear an activist talking about than a rock star, but it's a role in which Shinoda shines.

The 30-year-old guitarist has been called the glue that binds Linkin Park. He founded one of the world's biggest bands with Brad Delson, the guitarist he's known since seventh grade, and later with drummer Rob Bourdon and turntablist Joe Hahn.

They founded Music for Relief (www.musicforrelief.org), a non-profit organisation that asks fans and musicians to help the victims of natural disasters. It was established as the band's response to the 2004 tsunami and found its second project following Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans.

'Some time after that, we realised that global warming seemed to be potentially causing the disasters that we were cleaning up after,' Shinoda says. 'So rather than being reactive, we wanted to focus more of our efforts on proactive measures, such as planting trees, being more conservative about the way we use [resources] and spreading the word.'

The buses and trucks for the Projekt Revolution tour were switched to bio-diesel. And US$1 from every ticket sold for the concert was donated to American Forests (www.americanforests.org) with the hope of being able to plant a million trees. 'Those two projects together made the tour carbon-negative about 350 tonnes,' Shinoda says.

Music for Relief is still helping victims of Hurricane Katrina rebuild and is doing the same for people left homeless by fires that destroyed more than 200,000 hectares in southern California.

'The best [relief projects] I've been involved in are the ones that are more hands-on,' Shinoda says. After Katrina, he and his bandmates got donations of school supplies and athletic equipment. 'Major League Baseball gave us all kinds of equipment that we were able to deliver in person,' he says.

Hands-on involvement is not something Linkin Park have had much time for given the demands of touring. Part of the reason for the band's rise was that they worked at it. They played about 320 dates to promote their first album, Hybrid Theory. Shinoda is baffled by how they did it, but says it was made easier because they had only one album of material to play.

'We were headlining shows but our album was only 40 minutes long,' he says. 'We had to stretch it to 45- or 50-minute sets.'

Now with three albums of Linkin Park originals to draw on, their sets are 90 minutes or more, but the number of tour dates has been reduced, Shinoda says. Minutes to Midnight is Linkin Park's softest album yet and more reflective than their earlier head-bangers, Hybrid Theory and Meteora.

'It felt like doing a third album with a similar sound would have been redundant,' Shinoda says. 'There wasn't much excitement in the band for writing songs that sounded like that. If you keep milling around in the same style for too long it starts feeling uninspired.'

They produced more than 100 demos in the two years it took them to hone the album's sound. As a result, Minutes to Midnight is more of a true album than the collection of singles that made up their previous releases, Shinoda says.

Ten days before it was released last May, the album was leaked on the internet. The following day Shinoda posted a response on the band's website urging fans who had downloaded the songs to 'at least do us a huge favour and listen to them in the right order ... it'll be way more rewarding'.

The band was also recently involved in a six-track joint project called Collision Course with rapper Jay-Z. Shinoda is also frontman for his side project, Fort Minor, while producing the band Styles of Beyond and hip hop artist Lupe Fiasco.

It's hard to imagine that he or his bandmates get a chance to make much of a difference to global warming. But he's learning that the stage can also be a soapbox and the hour before he's a rock star can be used to be an activist making as many phone calls as he can. 'If there's any way we can spread this message and be active, we try to do it.'

Linkin Park, Nov 20, 8pm, AsiaWorld-Arena, HK International Airport, Chek Lap Kok, HK$388-HK$850, HK Ticketing. Inquiries: 3128 8288