BLINK 182 FANS OPEN TO ANGELS AND AIRWAVES?

Tom Delonge has moved on from Blink-182, but at the Guitar Center drum off we asked him if his old fans can relate to Angels And Airwaves.

Tom Delonge left one of the most successful bands in the last twenty years, Blink-182, to form Angels And Airwaves a few years back, and the band has come into its own with its second album, I-Empire.

The music is radically different from Blink-182 and he was asked if the old fans have opened up the Airwaves to his new band.

“Yeah, I think so. We’re still… We all grew up in punk rock band, and we still have the same kind of sensibility. It’s a lot grander than the last band in the sense of the sonic landscapes and we have gigantic marching under a lot of the songs, and it’s just a huge rock kind of thing. It works really well from where we come from because not many punk rock bands have been able to make that transition. I think a lot of bands are getting influenced by big rock bands these days. My Chemical Romance is very much, they to a bit of Queen thing every once in a while. The grandiose behaviors of those punk bands are starting to show.”

We asked him if there was a different approach to songwriting these days opposed to ten years ago with Blink.

“Oh there’s a huge difference. When we start writing songs we do a lot of things. We started on the last record where we would surround ourselves with visuals that would emotionally put us in specific places. Images of war, some things were political, some things were aspirational (sic) like images of space and that gave us this idea of intense hope and optimism, and on the last record we would do the same thing. We also do a lot of stuff where we will take any kind of sound possible — it might be Atom recording his car door slamming or dropping a bunch of gears on the floor. I mean he would bring in car parts and he would throw them up against the wall or something and we would turn that sound into a percussive bit, and it would end up becoming the first ingredient into something we were doing. That’s something I had never done before.”

Angels And Airwaves recently played a gig at the Guitar Center drum off, where drummer Atom Willard added his celebrity opinion on who would be the grand prize winner of the contest. Delonge is featured in the magazine bizSanDiego, and he was named one of the most influential entrepreneurs in his hometown of San Diego.