[CENTER][QUOTE=drpdrp97;1348841]The post on The Catalyst is the light that ain't never comin'.[/QUOTE]

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"Fallout" is the thirteenth track on [I]A Thousand Suns[/I], and the album's final, sixth interlude. It segues in directly from "Iridescent" and leads right into the anthemic lead single "The Catalyst". The lyrics of the song are the taken from the third song on the album, "Burning In The Skies". The track has Mike Shinoda singing, using auto-tune and pitch shifting effects to make his voice sound robotic. Towards the end of the track, his actual voice begins to appear, providing an interesting contrast to the previous interlude on the album, "Wisdom, Justice and Love", which does the opposite. It's almost like the return of humanity, after which the battle between our humanity and technology begins on "The Catalyst".  The instrumental of the song is not a particularly exciting piece of audio to listen to, being composed out of mainly dark, brooding synths and a few bass drops. Don't get me wrong though - it provides an incredibly dark, movie score-like feel. Fun fact, in the booklet for A Thousand Suns, the lyrics to "Fallout" are wrong. They contain the first chorus of "Burning In The Skies", so they say "it's in the blackened bones", instead of "the blame is mine alone".

And it leads right into...

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"The Catalyst" is the fourteenth track on [I]A Thousand Suns[/I], and it was used as the lead single from the album. Running for over 5 minutes, it is an upbeat, electronically driven banger with a synth solo in the middle, and layers upon layers of various electronic elements. It was the bands longest lead single until "Guilty All The Same" premiered in 2014. On July 9, 2010, the band announced a new contest - "Linkin Park Featuring YOU", which allowed fans to download stems from "The Catalyst" from MySpace (loool), and make their own song without hearing the original first. It was first partially released as part of the Medal of Honor x Linkin Park "The Catalyst" trailer, which I'll talk about more later. The song premiered on August 2, 2010 on Zane Lowe's radio show segment entitled [I]The Hottest Record in the World Today[/I], after which Zane had an interview with Chester, which you can hear [B][URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHcIheWAsaA"]here.[/URL][/B] The band tried out several song titles for the song, such as "Violent Lullaby", "Hopeless Lullaby" and "Pagan Lullaby", before deciding to go with "The Catalyst". In chemical reactions, the catalyst is the substance that increases the rate of the reaction, just like the song is the fastest, fiercest on the album, and it really gets things going, even though the album is nearing the end. It feels like a final battle. The song recieved generally positive reviews from the fans, but the fans were split. It peaked on #27 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, and was the first song in the history of the Rock Songs chart to debut at the top spot. Phoenix spoke on the song with MTV, particularly explaining why the band chose the song as the lead single, saying:

[QUOTE=Dave Farrell]We wanted a track that represented where the album was going to be and how it was going to work, and this was really the track to do that. It's a risk, but [it's] worth it. We've known [the album is] going to be different, and if fans were expecting Hybrid Theory or Meteora, they're going to be surprised. It's going to take people some time to figure it out and know what to do with it.[/QUOTE]

Lyrically, the song has multiple meanings which are all nicely tied in together. The first important thing to note in the song are religious references, as the band calls out "God" several times, something they rarely did through their career. Despite what people thought at the time of the song's release - no, the band did not become born again Christians during the process of making the album. The second important element to the song are some of the most straightforward references to nuclear wars on the entire album. The track deals with the sins we've commited against ourselves, mostly centering on the invention of the atomic bomb, which is a running theme through the entire album. It's certainly one of the band's best works lyrically, and has some amazing quotes. "When I close my eyes tonight/to symphonies of blinding light" is most likely referring to a person who closes their eyes to shield their vision at the time of a bomb going off. Another favorite of mine is "where oceans bleed into the sky", which could refer to seas literally evaporating at the end of the world, or a metaphor for the end. "Lift me up/let me go" is most likely a prayer (nicely complements to "close my eyes tonight") or a way to beg the leaders of our countries to end the wars, and not blow each other up. Fun fact, the band didn't include the words "a thousand suns" into the song because they were the album title. They came up with the line "let them burn inside the fires of a thousand suns" (which was altered a bit later), and after googling the line found various appearances of the words that eventually became the album title.

Parts of lyrics from the song were used in "The Requiem" and "Jornada del Muerto", while in the latter they were translated into Japanese.

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Two LPTV episodes were dedicated to the making of the song, both of which I embedded above. The first one documents Chester recording vocals for the song in Mike's LA home studio. Perhaps the best thing about the episode is the repetition of the word "fuck", and we find out Chester's true passion is nothing else but fucking. Sorry, forgot to say spoiler alert. The second one documents Mike and Chester coming up with lyrics for the song, aswell as deciding on the song title aswell. They went through three potential song titles, "Violent Lullaby", "Hopeless Lullaby" and "Pagan Lullaby", before almost settling with far and away the most creative, and most imaginative song title ever - "Chester's Lullaby". Also, "poop out" is a synonym for "fade". Who knew.

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A music video for the song was directed by Joe Hahn. The video is one of the bands most abstract and chaotic videos, relying on heavy use of smoke and occasional glitch effects. But it's useless for me to try to explain the video. I'll just post the text from the large board that explained the video on set. Not everything can be transcribed, but here it goes.

[QUOTE="The Catalyst" video concept board]A THOUSAND SUNS.
A TREATMENT FOR WARNER BROTHERS RECORDS BY JOE HAHN
The inspiration for this video comes from J. Robert Oppenheimer's reaction to the world's first nuclear explosion in New Mexico.
In an effort to verbalize what was then indescribable, he quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Vedic text:
"If the radiance of a thousands suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One. I am mighty, world-destroying Time"
When an atom splits it releases other neutrons, and he was quick to realize that under the right conditions those neutrons could go on to split other atoms in a chain reaction.
This would lead to one of two things: a steady generation of energy in the form of heat or a huge explosion.
If each splitting atom caused one released neutron to split another atom, the chain reaction was said to be "critical" and would create a steady release of that energy.
But if each fission event released two, three, or more neutrons that went on to split other atoms, the chain reaction was deemed "super critical" and would rapidly cascade into an almost instantaneous, massive, explosive release of energy.
My goal with this video is to encapsulate the sentiment of the next LINKIN PARK album and our new direction; we will not perform in (undecipherable....) ... in videos of the past.
This video will show the power of the singular vs. the power of the multitude. The Intention of splitting an atom was to generate nuclear fission. Inspired by the power of a single atom splitting can emit the power of a thousand suns. The beauty of destruction.
We will show this graphically by distorting images playing between high resolution and low resolution. We will break down pictures to metamorphosize a recognizable form into beautiful imagery.
We live in a world of technology. The advancement of man has allowed us to live in luxury. The flipside is that the more laced that everything has a consequence. [/QUOTE]

On the other hand, Mike Shinoda had his own explanation of the video.

[QUOTE=Mike Shinoda]The concept to the video: If you could imagine when nuclear fission was invented, or a moment in time when something can be used for positive or negative. Something can be beautiful or it can be destructive. Or even if you've ever seen a dangerous fire from far away, it's devastating up close, but from far away, it can be beautiful. Those are the kind of themes that run throughout the album, and they're also themes that you see in the video.[/QUOTE]

A particularly fun element of the video is when the band throws colored powder at each other. Joe Hahn spoke on the inspiration for this, saying:

[QUOTE=Joe Hahn]The irony of making the video was that the inspiration for the colors came from the Color Festival in India called Holi. People collect these pigments throughout the year to release them in this festival as a celebration of life and tribute to Vishnu. When it came time to shoot these scenes, there wasn't much celebration. So participating in the scenes would sacrifice the quality of the record, because the powder would affect their proper respiration. I guess that may have added to the emotion of the piece. But once the powder started being flung around, it wasn't so bad. Also, needless to say, there wasn't any injuries during the filming of this post-apocalyptic visual clip, and we were able to complete the album with the intended quality.[/QUOTE]

Not a particularly fun experience for Mike and Chester who were singing while this was going on. The second day of the filming had Chester in a small pool, drowning and singing. Why?

[QUOTE=Joe Hahn]On day two of the shoot, I shot scenes of Chester under the surface of water. I have a tendency of illustrating Chester under excruciating situations. Mainly because it matches the music so well. He wasn't very thrilled about the idea of singing and water going up his nose. When you watch the video, the pain and agony is genuine. I guess the good thing is that the water from day two acted as a cleansing agent of any powder left in the sinus from the day previous.[/QUOTE]

All in all, a pretty fun video.

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But it wasn't the only video shot for the song. The song had premiered as part of a Medal of Honor trailer, for which Joe Hahn directed a totally new video. Why? Well, I got Phoenix here to tell you.

[QUOTE=Dave Farrell]When we were talking with EA and being familiar with the 'Medal of Honor' title I think the song made a lot of sense. The song itself has got some dark undertones and it's got a lot of energy in it. It kind of just fits with the subject matter.[/QUOTE]

The video contains footage from the game aswell as live action footage filmed in a small village in Afghanistan. The actors in the video are the actors that the characters in the game were modelled after. You can watch the making of the video aswell, embedded above. It's honestly not a mindblowing experience, but... it's a part of song history so I mentioned it.

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Remember the "Linkin Park Featuring YOU" contest I mentioned earlier? The winner was Czeslaw 'NoBraiN' Sakowski from Świdnica, Poland. Czeslaw got a few video chats with the band and got to meet them aswell, in addition to working on the outro to "When They Come For Me". His remix was avaliable on the BestBuy edition of the album. The remix is weird to say the least. He combined the stems from the track with his own work effortlessly, turning the banging electronic power ballad into an even more synthy, emotional experience. His first video chat with Mike was documented in an LPTV episode embedded above. And no one else but the Linkin Park Association we're on right now managed to get an interview with Czeslaw, which can be read [B][URL="http://www.lpassociation.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31729"]here.[/URL][/B] Speaking about his decision to enter the contest, Czeslaw said:

[QUOTE=NoBraiN]Q: Describe your decision to enter the contest. Did you have confidence in your musical abilities?
A:When it comes to remixing I do it from time to time. The decision to make a remix comes suddenly I just feel like it and that is all. When I found out that myspace and indabamusic were having Linkin Park Featuring You contest I entered it immediately because at that time I just felt like remixing.

Before uploading my remix I hesitated though, because there were so many of them already. But it is better to try than to regret not trying.

Q: Describe how you went about making your winning entry. Did you map out an idea in your head or just start trying different effects?
AThe thing that triggered my idea was this electro drum loop provided by the band in the stems. Immediately I knew that I wanted to make a dynamic track with sudden unexpected changes, glitches and other effects. Generally when I make a remix I always try to put the artist in a totally new environment; an environment in which he or she would never go. For me that is one of the principles of remixing. [/QUOTE]