Fort Minor is one of the greatest blips in rap history in my opinion. I remember stumbling onto Fort Minor my junior year in high school when Petrified (remember that??) dropped in 2005 and just being blown away. I was always a big Linkin Park fan so a new Mike Shinoda project was something I would have given a shot regardless, but this album was way more than I ever expected it to be. The one thing I always remember about the album Rising Tied was that Shinoda famously did *everything* on it.
“Shinoda told Corey Moss of MTV News that he imposed on himself a requirement to play all the instruments and write all the lyrics to the album except for the strings, percussion, or choir parts.”
And it still stands up FOURTEEN years later. Holy shit I’m old.
Something I never knew until just now though was that Jay-Z was an executive producer on the album, which makes sense after the massive success Jay and Linkin Park had on their 2004 mashup album, Collision Course.
Remember the Name is arguably the most popular track from Rising Tied, but Where’d You Go was a bigger hit commercially (it was their only single to crack the Top 25) reaching No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. This may not be the most talked about album, but I still have it in rotation all these years later. It even turned me onto indy rap groups like Styles of Beyond.
Unfortunately for whatever reason this was a one time thing as Fort Minor never made another album again. So for all the uninformed, below are a few of my favorite Fort Minor tracks AKA just about the whole album.
The 300s 