Content warning: This article discusses suicide, depression, addiction and childhood abuse.

There are certain voices in music that you recognise almost instantly. You don’t need to see the name of the band or even know what song is playing. Chester Bennington had one of those voices. But there was something else about it.

You could hear the pain in his voice.

Not just when he was screaming, either. Even when he was singing quietly, there was something underneath it that made you stop and listen. I think that’s a big part of why so many people connected with Chester.

If you were a teenager struggling with anger, anxiety, depression, relationships or simply trying to work out where the hell you fitted into the world, hearing somebody else put those feelings into words could be incredibly powerful.

Suddenly, you weren’t the only one.

And that’s what makes the story of Chester Bennington so difficult. On 20 July 2017, Chester died by suicide at the age of 41.

By then, he’d achieved pretty much everything a musician could dream of. Linkin Park had sold millions of records, played enormous shows around the world and become one of the defining rock bands of their generation, who even just days before his death was pictures smiling.

Chester had a family, friends, money and millions of fans. So how could someone who seemingly had so much still be struggling so badly?

Well, that’s where things get complicated.

Before Linkin Park

Chester Charles Bennington was born in Phoenix, Arizona, on 20 March 1976, and music became an important part of his life from an early age. He was influenced by bands such as Depeche Mode, Stone Temple Pilots and other artists from the darker side of alternative and industrial music.

But away from music, there were things happening that would stay with him for years.

Chester spoke openly later in life about being sexually abused as a child. His parents’ divorce and his teenage struggles with drugs and alcohol added to what was already a difficult period.

It’s very easy, when looking back at someone’s life after their death, to take all of these things and join the dots together.

Well, that’s why it happened.

But I’m not sure that’s particularly helpful. People aren’t equations.

Trauma doesn’t automatically lead to suicide. Addiction doesn’t automatically lead to suicide. Depression doesn’t automatically lead to suicide.

These things are part of Chester’s story, but they aren’t a neat explanation for what happened to him. What they do tell us is that he had been carrying some incredibly difficult experiences for a very long time.

And music became one of the places where he could put some of that emotion.

Grey Daze

Before Linkin Park became one of the biggest bands in the world, there was Grey Daze, the Phoenix band Chester joined in the early 1990s.

If you’ve never gone back and listened to those records, they’re worth checking out. You can already hear the beginnings of the voice that would eventually become so familiar.

Grey Daze eventually split, Chester moved on, and eventually he auditioned for a band then known as Xero.

You probably know what happened next.

Xero became Linkin Park and, in 2000, Hybrid Theory arrived.

Linkin Park

It’s difficult to explain now just how big Hybrid Theory became. If you were around in the early 2000s, you couldn’t escape it.

And to be honest, why would you want to?

One minute he could sound almost vulnerable. The next he was screaming as though he’d finally reached the end of his tether.

Songs like One Step Closer, Crawling and In the End became enormous. But I think their real appeal was what those songs actually said to people.

They weren’t telling you that everything was going to be fine. They weren’t pretending that being angry, confused, depressed or frustrated was something you could simply switch off.

Instead, they seemed to say:

Yeah, sometimes life feels like absolute shit, and you’re not the only person who feels that way.

For a lot of teenagers, that was important.

You could sit in your bedroom with your headphones on and hear somebody screaming about feelings you hadn’t quite worked out how to explain yourself.

It was cathartic, but it was also comforting.

Listen to the isolated vocals

This is something I’ve always found particularly interesting about Chester’s voice.

If you listen to the isolated vocal tracks from some of Linkin Park’s songs, the experience is completely different. Take away the guitars, drums, electronics and all of the production and you’re left with one human voice.

Suddenly you can hear the breath between the words, the strain in his voice and the little cracks that can disappear when they’re surrounded by a wall of instruments.

Then there’s the scream.

On the finished record it sounds huge, but when you hear it isolated it can sound incredibly vulnerable. Almost desperate.

And I think that’s why those vocals connect with people in a way that goes beyond simply being a great rock performance.

You’re not just hearing a singer doing his job anymore. You’re hearing a person trying to get something out.

There’s something incredibly intimate about that.

When you’re sitting alone with headphones on, hearing Chester’s isolated voice can feel almost like he’s singing directly to you. That’s probably why so many people found comfort in Linkin Park.

It wasn’t necessarily because the music made them feel better straight away. Sometimes it was simply because somebody else seemed to understand exactly how they felt.

But surely success should have changed things?

This is where Chester Bennington’s story becomes particularly important.

By the time Linkin Park had become a global success, he had everything we’re often told should make somebody happy. Money, fame, a successful career, a family and millions of people who loved his music.

But depression doesn’t care about any of that.

Mental illness doesn’t look at your record sales and decide you’ve got nothing left to be unhappy about.

Chester spoke openly about depression, addiction and the destructive thoughts he’d experienced throughout his life. That’s something I think gets lost when we talk about successful musicians who die by suicide.

We sometimes imagine that there must have been no warning signs. That everybody thought they were perfectly happy and that the death therefore came completely out of nowhere.

But Chester had talked about his struggles.

His music talked about them. His interviews talked about them. The people close to him knew he’d had difficult periods.

Knowing that doesn’t make his death easier to understand, but it does remind us that mental health isn’t something you can necessarily see from the outside.

One More Light

Then came One More Light in 2017.

The album divided Linkin Park fans because it was a very different record from Hybrid Theory or Meteora. There were fewer huge guitar riffs, more pop influences and a much more vulnerable sound.

Some fans loved it. Others absolutely hated it.

But listening to the album now is a strange experience because we know what happened afterwards.

Chester was singing about difficult emotions at a time when he was dealing with some of those emotions himself. But he was also talking about hope and getting through those periods.

He had spoken about reaching a point where he wanted to fight for the life he had, and about how his family, friends and bandmates could help pull him out of destructive thought patterns.

That’s one of the things I think we need to remember when we look back at his final months.

We know the ending.

Chester didn’t.

He was living his life, making music, making plans and trying to deal with whatever was happening inside his head.

Hindsight can make everything look like a warning sign, but real life isn’t a documentary where all the clues are neatly laid out for us.

Chris Cornell

There’s obviously another part of the story that’s impossible to ignore, and that’s Chris Cornell.

It’s an incredibly painful coincidence and, understandably, people have spent years trying to find meaning in it.

But this is where I think we need to be careful.

We don’t know exactly what was happening inside Chester’s head, and it would be wrong to say that Cornell’s death caused his.

Suicide is rarely that simple.

What we can say is that Chester had lost somebody he cared about enormously at a time when he was already dealing with his own struggles.

Beyond that, we’re entering territory where nobody outside Chester’s closest circle can really know the answer.

So how did nobody know?

That’s probably one of the first questions people ask after a suicide.

How did nobody know?

But Chester’s story actually gives us a more complicated answer because people did know that he struggled.

He talked about it. He sang about it. He had discussed his experiences with depression and addiction publicly.

That doesn’t mean the people around him failed him. And it doesn’t mean there was some obvious solution that everyone somehow missed.

Sometimes we desperately want there to be one because it makes an awful situation easier to understand.

If there was a warning sign, then surely someone could have spotted it. If there was one conversation that could have changed everything, then surely somebody should have had it.

But that’s not necessarily how suicide works.

This was days b4 my husband took his own life.Suicidal thoughts were there,but you'd. Never kmow. #fuckdepression pic.twitter.com/2IPXxXJxmT

— Talinda Bennington (@TalindaB) September 7, 2017

Someone can talk about their mental health and still be in danger. Someone can have a good day, make plans for the future, laugh with their family and genuinely want to feel better, while still struggling with thoughts that can become overwhelming.

That’s why checking in with people matters even when they look fine.

Not because you can magically prevent every tragedy, but because sometimes simply knowing that someone is there can make a difference.

The voice remains

There’s something strange about listening to Chester now.

You know what happened, but put Hybrid Theory on and suddenly he’s young again. He’s shouting, singing, laughing, screaming and sounding completely alive.

That’s one of the strange things about recorded music. It freezes people in time.

Chester will always have that voice, and when you go back to those old records you can still hear the ridiculous range he had.

He could go from almost whispering to a scream that sounded like it could tear through a wall.

But for me, it’s those quieter moments that have become more interesting over time.

Listen carefully and you can hear the person behind the frontman.

The little breaths. The cracks. The moments where the voice sounds like it’s struggling to hold itself together.

Maybe that’s why his music still connects with people who weren’t even teenagers when Hybrid Theory came out.

You don’t have to have lived through the same things Chester did to recognise the emotion in his voice.

You just have to have experienced that feeling of not knowing what to do with everything going on inside your own head.

What can we actually take from Chester’s story?

I don’t think we should turn Chester Bennington into another example of the tortured rock star whose suffering somehow made him a better artist.

We’ve done enough of that.

There’s nothing romantic about depression, addiction or suicide, and his death shouldn’t be treated as the thing that completed his story.

His music mattered before he died.

It mattered because people heard themselves in it.

Because somebody could put their headphones on, hear Chester scream about something they were feeling and think:

I’m not the only one.

That’s an incredibly powerful thing for music to do.

And if you’ve ever had a Linkin Park song hit you at exactly the right—or wrong—moment, you’ll know what I mean.

So perhaps when we talk about Chester now, we should spend less time trying to understand the impossible and more time remembering what his music actually gave people.

A voice for anger. A voice for frustration. A voice for pain.

And, perhaps most importantly, a feeling that somebody else understood.

Chester Bennington’s voice made millions of people feel less alone.

That’s a hell of a legacy.

And it’s one worth remembering.

If you’re struggling yourself, or you’re worried about somebody else, don’t assume you have to deal with it alone. Talk to someone. Check in with your mates. Ask twice if you think somebody isn’t being completely honest when they say they’re fine.

Sometimes you don’t need to have the perfect thing to say.

Sometimes you just need to listen.

And if Chester’s music taught us anything, it’s that sometimes being heard can mean more than we realise.