Emily Armstrong: earning the right to sing someone else's songs

In an interview published October 10, she described the self-doubt that came with the job — specifically, the part where she had to sing songs that belong to someone else's voice.

"You're trying to give yourself every reason to just be like, You're not good," Armstrong told PEOPLE. She said she focused on making the songs her own while preserving their emotional impact for longtime fans.

That tension is the whole story of a legacy act changing singers. The catalog does not belong to the replacement. It belongs to the audience, and to the person who recorded it. Armstrong's approach — claim the songs without overwriting them — is the only workable answer, and she arrived at it while openly admitting how hard it was.

She was not a stranger to the material. Armstrong told Harper's Bazaar she discovered the band as a 14-year-old in Los Angeles, hearing Hybrid Theory on K-ROQ. "It was a no-brainer from this album that I'm going to sing, and I'm also going to scream," she said. She spent years as a fan before she spent any as the frontwoman.

The band's new documentary Unshatter, in theaters as of late September, follows the reunion, the introductions of Armstrong and drummer Colin Brittain, and concert footage from a São Paulo stadium show. Mike Shinoda has spoken about grief and anger after Bennington's death, saying nobody knew the depths of his struggles.

Audiences appear to be answering the question the band could not answer on its own. Linkin Park's From Zero World Tour sold 12,736 tickets to a March 18 show at Auckland's Spark Arena, breaking the venue's single-night attendance record since it opened in 2007.

One record does not settle whether a catalog survives its original voice. But it is evidence that a substantial number of people are willing to hear Armstrong try. Her own account suggests the hardest audience was the one she had to convince first.