Mike Shinoda Shares Funny Story About Helping His Daughter Play Guitar
Mike Shinoda has three children with his wife, Anna Hillinger. As it turns out, their children do play various instruments, and one time, Shinoda helped his daughter play guitar, which lead to a hilarious story.
Shinoda shared this story on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. He explained that his children don’t have strong memories of Linkin Park performing because they were so young and due to the band being on hiatus for a number of years following the death of singer Chester Bennington in 2017.
Shinoda tells Fallon, “One of my daughters said, ‘Oh, you know, I signed up to play this song at this school festival type of thing.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s so cool. You know, what are you going to do?’ She said, ‘I’m going to sing and play guitar.’ This girl doesn’t know how to play guitar. She took two lessons at that point. This was a couple years ago. She had taken two lessons. And she goes, ‘I’m going to play guitar and sing.'”
He continues, “I guess it was probably like a week or two later, I’m listening and I’m hearing her doing her thing, and she’s got most of it. Like, she’s getting really pretty far, but there’s a couple things she’s not doing correctly. Like, one of the chords is wrong, for example.”
This then led Shinoda to approach his daughter to try and help her out with the incorrect chord and show her how to play it, but she pretty much shrugged off his help. The next day, Shinoda’s daughter approached him sheepishly and asked him to show her how to play the chord, and he obliged. However, there’s a funny reason why she asked him for help.
Shinoda explains, “I told my wife this story. Like, we were going to bed, and I was like, ‘Yeah, it was so cool. She came around.’ My wife starts laughing at me. She’s like, ‘That’s not what happened.’ She said, ‘I heard you two talking originally … After you left, I went into the room, and I was like, “Hey, like, you should listen to your dad.’ And my daughter goes, ‘What does he know about performing?'”
He continues, “My wife literally pulled up a video of Linkin Park onstage at Rock in Rio in front of 85,000 people. And my daughter goes, ‘Who’s that?’ … And now [my kids] get to be out here and see the real show.”
