Howdy! It’s Joey, back with more Fun Fact Friyay. Today’s fact might cause you to rock…with love.
The Linkin Park No. 1 rock hit “Faint” samples a scene from the James Bond movie From Russia with Love.
Every once in a while, I go down a rabbit hole of songs and music videos that I used to play regularly as a kid.
I’ll let you define “every once in a while,” but let’s just say it happened earlier this week.
Sometimes, I’ll choose the videos to cue up. Other times, I just let a YouTube auto-play algorithm be my guide. That’s how I wound up listening to “Faint” by Linkin Park.
My band, Burning Years, which has many original songs that you should totally check out on Spotify, Amazon Music, Bandcamp, or wherever you listen to your music, once played a set that almost entirely consisted of Linkin Park songs.
We loved it. The crowd apparently did not have the same appreciation for early-2000s nu metal that we did. I would change nothing.
“Faint” came out in 2003, the seventh track on Linkin Park’s second album, Meteora. It hit No. 1 on the Modern Rock charts (now known as Alternative Airplay). It still rocks today, over two decades later. But it wasn’t until 2025 that someone noticed the sample in the beginning of the song sounded somehow familiar.
In February 2025, a Redditor named Hgggx posted that they had found the sample from the beginning of “Faint.” The source: From Russia with Love, the second James Bond movie that was released in 1963.
The portion of the movie features a scene where Tatiana, or “Tania,” played by Daniela Bianchi, meets a character named Rosa Klebb, played by Lotte Lenya.
Mike Shinoda, Linkin Park’s rapper and guitarist, arranged “Faint” with co-producer Don Gilmore. He handled the sampling and discovered a lil’ track appropriately called “Tania Meets Klebb” from the movie’s soundtrack.
When From Russia with Love was released, the James Bond franchise was still in its infancy. Only two movies had come out! By the time Shinoda and the Linkin Park crew were working on “Faint,” Bond and Co. had dropped 20 films.
And in case you’re curious, the most recent Bond film during the making of “Faint” was Die Another Day, which came out in 2002.
Shinoda took the string section that appeared in the scene, reversed it, adjusted the pitch and tempo up a bit, and then layered it over a fantastic drum intro. The result: One of the more iconic rock intros of the 2000s.
See the sample in action below. It’s a great reminder that you don’t always have to completely invent a brand new thing to create something cool.