Chester Bennington’s Dead By Sunrise bandmate, Ryan Shuck recently recalled having dinner with the late Linkin Park frontman’s mother, Susan. Over dinner, she told the guitarist about the time he started to sing when he was two years old.

“[We] all took Susan to dinner, I fucking love that we did that, because I was going downhill. So we went to dinner and we started talking. Susan was super grateful, she was like, ‘Thank you so much. I didn’t know that I needed to get out, but I did. I’m so grateful that we’re having dinner together, and grateful.’ That’s a concept, grateful. I started feeling happy as Susan started telling us stories about Chester when he was a 2-year old.”

She was telling me that he learned the entire Popeye movie at like 2 or 3 years old. He would sing and act out all the parts for everyone that came over to the house, the whole thing, and he would make them listen to the whole thing, he would make them sit. This is like little Chester, he probably weighed like 4 pounds, probably as big as a chihuahua. He was a little guy for a long time before he became [a big rock star].

We were all laughing at dinner, and we discovered something, that whenever we started talking about Chester, we couldn’t help but start laughing and having a good time. You can probably tell, I was pretty emotional when I came up, but as you start talking about him, you can’t help but start smiling. That’s what happened, and that gave me the direction to start writing something for his actual eulogy.”

During this past weekend, Dead By Sunrise and Grey Daze members honored Bennington with an acoustic performance at a special tribute event held at the Saxe Theater in Las Vegas.

Video of this event can be viewed below:

[via Alternative Nation]