Susan Eubanks, the mother of late Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, has written a piece in Rolling Stone sharing that she feels “betrayed” by the band’s comeback with new vocalist Emily Armstrong.
“They told me that if they were ever going to do something, they would let me know,” Eubanks writes. “They didn’t let me know, and they probably knew that I [wasn’t] going to be very happy. I’m very upset about it.”
“I feel like they’re trying very hard to erase the past,” she continues. “They’re performing songs that Chester sang. And I don’t know how the fans are taking it, but I know how I take it. And having [Armstrong] singing my son’s songs is hurtful.”
Eubanks says she found out about Linkin Park’s reunion online, and when she saw the band’s Sept. 5 livestream performance, she cried. She also claims that LP co-vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Mike Shinoda told Bennington once that if he ever left the band, they would replace him with a female singer.
“The fact is that now they did it,” Eubanks writes. “So, of course, all that comes right back into my mind. I had a talk with my son about this. I didn’t think they’d probably do it.”
Eubanks adds that she would be OK if Linkin Park had reformed with just Shinoda singing, but she’s “not OK with this, to have somebody replace him and try to do what he did.”
“If you were going to do this, this is the wrong way to do it,” Eubanks writes.
During Linkin Park’s recent show in Los Angeles, Shinoda told the crowd, “It is not about erasing the past, it is about starting this new chapter into the future.”
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