"Somewhere I belong" is about someone who feels out of place and alone, with nothing to say due to his own fault.
This started out as a sample of Chester Bennington playing acoustic guitar. Mike Shinoda took the sample, replayed it, effected it, flipped it backwards and cut it up into four pieces, creating the main sample of the song. By the time it was finished, almost a year later, the band had rewritten most of the music around the sample.
Mike and Chester wrote over 30 finished choruses for this song, each time scrapping the last one in search of something better. They ended up recording the final version one week after the rest of the album was finished, in the studio where they were mixing.
Mike Shinoda explained:
"The first thing you hear in the song is a sample. Now, the sample sounds like keyboards but what it is really, is a guitar progression Chester played. It just shows the evolution of parts. The guitar part that Chester played had a cool progression to it but the sound of it was too acoustic guitar. So what we did was, we flipped it backwards. We effected it. I cut it up into four pieces and instead of arranging it 1-2-3-4, I arranged it 4-3-2-1 because it had been reversed. So it evolved into this thing with the different manipulations in the computer. It evolved into this thing that it is now. In fact, you can hear an early version of that on our Party At The Pancake Festival DVD. There's a version of that towards the end of the DVD that's playing. You kind of get an idea of what it sounded like in the second stage of it's lifetime and now it's at it's third when we finished it. So that song is cool for that reason. Another cool thing about it is that it's really the first time you hear some optimistic views, some optimistic lyrics from us. I think that lyrically this album is a little older, a little more mature hopefully."
Lyrics
(When this began)
I had nothing to say
And I'd get lost in the nothingness inside of me
(I was confused)
And I let it all out to find
That I'm not the only person with these things in mind
(Inside of me)
But all the vacancy the words revealed
Is the only real thing that I've got left to feel
(Nothing to lose)
Just stuck, hollow and alone
And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own
I wanna heal, I wanna feel what I thought was never real
I wanna let go of the pain I've felt so long
(Erase all the pain 'til it's gone)
I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm close to something real
I wanna find something I've wanted all along
Somewhere I belong
And I've got nothing to say
I can't believe I didn't fall right down on my face
(I was confused)
Looking everywhere only to find
That it's not the way I had imagined it all in my mind
(So what am I?)
What do I have but negativity
'Cause I can't justify the way, everyone is looking at me
(Nothing to lose)
Nothing to gain, hollow and alone
And the fault is my own, and the fault is my own
I wanna heal, I wanna feel what I thought was never real
I wanna let go of the pain I've felt so long
(Erase all the pain 'til it's gone)
I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm close to something real
I wanna find something I've wanted all along
Somewhere I belong
I will never know myself until I do this on my own
And I will never feel anything else, until my wounds are healed
I will never be anything 'til I break away from me
I will break away, I'll find myself today
I wanna heal, I wanna feel what I thought was never real
I wanna let go of the pain I've felt so long
(Erase all the pain 'til it's gone)
I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm close to something real
I wanna find something I've wanted all along
Somewhere I belong
I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm somewhere I belong
I wanna heal, I wanna feel like I'm somewhere I belong
Somewhere I belong
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