Chester Bennington is one of two singers in the rapidly rising Linkin Park. He has a wife, two dogs and a pad in Los Angeles. Unfortunately he's only seen them three times in the last six months. This is due to his band existing in a tour bubble. Here's how he copes...

"A typical day for me on tour involves sleeping until two o'clock in the afternoon when I call my wife of four years. I'm from Phoenix, Arizona but in August, she and I moved to Los Angeles. Our dogs - an Australian shepherd and a Rottweiller / Labrador mix - don't seem to care where I live as long as they're around one of us - they're cool!

"I've barely lived at our new place since things have been happening so fast for Linkin Park. I recently had to fill out some paperwork for the record company and they asked me for my address. I had to phone my wife and ask her what our home address was because I've barely been there. I've actually only seen it three times in the last six months.

"On the road I hang out and try to take a shower. Breakfast takes place at two o'clock and usually consists of a cheeseburger or a hamburger because no one will serve breakfast at that hour it seems! I'm existing on a bar food diet, which is pretty disgusting. It's not a great way to take care of my voice, but unfortunately people don't take those things into consideration.

"Lately, we've been doing about two to three hours of press interviews each day. It's been intense. Sometimes I don't get my first meal until about 45 minutes before the show. If it's a good show that usually leads to vomiting immediately afterwards - right after that last song!

"I'm usually too tired to exercise. My exercise is usually the intense 45 minutes of cardio-vascular work that I do onstage. I don't do much in the way of warming up my voice for the show, I have to be awake at least for an hour before I start performing. I've been hanging out with the guys from (hed) planet earth since we've been touring with them.

"I've been reading the Anne Rice 'Vampire Chronicles' series on the bus lately. Brilliant piece of work. I've also recently picked up "Hannibal," the sequel to "The Silence of the Lambs", and it's an amazing book. It's definitely not something you want to read if you're into romance novels!

"Video games wise, I've become addicted to 'Tony Hawk II', the second Tony Hawk skateboarding game. I almost have to go to a Tony Hawk Pro-Skater Anonymous group once a week to give myself a crutch for my addiction! Living on the road makes one to feel like the characters in Anne Rice's books: You feel like you're spending your entire day until nightfall in a coffin, which is just another word for "bunk" on the bus!

"My daily routine is the opposite when I'm home. I get up pretty early because my wife and I really value the time we spend together, so we try not to sleep all day. I'll make breakfast for us, hang out and watch TV. I channel surf through cable to relax. I'm a fan of the Phoenix Cardinals football team, they're my boys! I'm not sure if I'm going to support the LA teams yet, even though I live there. The Lakers are cool, though. I'm a total sports 'whore': whoever's doing the best becomes my favorite team! That way, I'm always in the 'in' crowd.

"A good night out for me, back home in Phoenix, is to go to a place like Axis Radius, which is a really good place to get some good dancing in. Or Club Rio on Thursdays, for 25-cent draught beers. You can walk in there with five dollars and walk out more intoxicated than you've ever challenged yourself before! I don't go out to see bands very much at all. I'm so focused on my own projects. I was not much of a record or CD collector either until I met my wife. Because of her, we now have a real library.

"Being on the road makes you think about what's important. Me and my wife want to have kids some day. I don't think anybody is ever ready for kids, though, and if you try to prepare yourself for it then you're going to be let down. No matter how much preparation and effort you put into being a parent, you really won't know what it's about until you are one, so I'm not even going to worry about it now. I figure that it's the most natural thing in life, along with death: You live, you die, and somewhere in-between, you have children!"