Linkin Park‘s “In the End” was the fourth single from “Hybrid Theory”, and it’s the song that carried the band to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Mike Shinoda built it the way a producer builds a beat, with one piano phrase looping while the rest of the band moves around it. The official piano/vocal/guitar arrangement on MuseScore shows that loop plainly, and once you spot it, you’ll see it keep turning up in the score.
How “In The End” Came Together
The song came together in a rented rehearsal room at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Shinoda was on a roll there one day, so he shut himself in the windowless room and wrote through the night. The next day he played it for drummer Rob Bourdon, who he thinks was the first to arrive. As Shinoda told Rock Sound in 2020, “he was freaking out.”
Shinoda has been specific about how much of it came from him. “I wrote that piano line, the chords of the chorus, I did some raps, I did all of the programming for all the beats,” he said on The Howard Stern Show in 2023, as quoted by MusicRadar. He also knew going in that he wanted the vocals to trade off between him and Chester Bennington. “I knew I wanted to do the back and forth,” he told Stern. The recorded version was more of a group effort than the Stern account suggests. Shinoda told Linkin Park Web, as quoted by Blabbermouth, that Brad Delson came up with the verse guitar part, and that before recording, the band scrapped the verse beat Shinoda had written and had Bourdon write the one that made the album.
As for the meaning, Shinoda has said the song is really about “a weird battle with hopelessness and the ephemeral nature of time and our lives,” a line MusicRadar pulls from his Rock Sound interview. The band tracked “Hybrid Theory” with producer Don Gilmore at NRG Recording Studios in North Hollywood, and the album came out on October 24, 2000.
The Loop The Song Is Built Upon
The MuseScore arrangement is marked Moderately, with the quarter note at 106, and the first eight bars cycle twice through the same four chords: E minor, D, C major 7, then D again. In Roman numerals, that’s i-VII-VI-VII. The chord roots walk down from E to D to C, then back up through D to E.
That progression keeps coming back. The first eight bars of the verse use different chord symbols, but bars 17 through 24 go back to the intro’s four chords under the rap. The chorus starts at the segno in bar 25, where the chord symbols switch to power chords such as E5 and G5. The bridge, from bar 34, brings back the intro’s E minor, D, and C chords. MusicRadar describes Shinoda repeating the piano hook “loop-style throughout the arrangement,” and to my ear, that’s the producer in him showing.
This arrangement is written in E minor, with one sharp in the key signature. Against the record, it sounds a half step high, so use the Transpose control in the MuseScore player to drop it to E-flat minor, and the two will line up.
Linkin Park’s Vocal Back And Forth
The back and forth Shinoda wanted is right there in the vocal parts. His verse is written with x-shaped noteheads, which give you the rhythm of the rap without pitches. Bennington’s short answering lines sit on a separate staff below, starting in bar 9, and he takes over as lead at the chorus.
Bennington wasn’t sold on the song at first. “I was never a fan of In The End, and I didn’t even want it to be on the record, honestly,” he told Vmusic in 2013, as quoted by Louder. According to MusicRadar, he followed it up with “How wrong could I have possibly been?”
Shinoda has since pushed back on the idea that his bandmate hated it. “[He] didn’t hate it,” he said on Stern’s show, per Loudwire. “He just loved really heavy stuff.”
The Legacy of “In The End”
Shinoda hasn’t always told this part the same way. “It didn’t feel like a hit song,” he told Stern, but in 2020, he told Spin that the whole band loved it and “thought it was going to do well.” Louder reports that they still left it out of their early live sets for fear it was too accessible. Shinoda has explained, in comments quoted by Louder, that the band released “One Step Closer” and “Crawling” worldwide and “Papercut” only in Europe, then held “In the End” back as the final push for the album.
Brad Delson told author Steve Baltin that, live, the bridge “became the moment of the song.” He also told Kerrang! in 2020 that the band would stop playing during it while Bennington and Shinoda held their mics out to the crowd, and the lights came up.
The arrangement closes on three bars of piano with no chord symbols over them, slowing under a ritardando to a held final note. The single came out on October 9, 2001, and on top of its number 2 peak, it finished at number 7 on the year-end Hot 100. The video passed one billion YouTube views in July 2020, which made it the band’s second song to hit that mark, after “Numb.”
