Blink-182 have shared their new song “Built This Pool” on YouTube. I think they meant to release the lyric video this time since the song’s available for free download on their website.
Also, did you know this song is like six years old?
Blink-182 have shared their new song “Built This Pool” on YouTube. I think they meant to release the lyric video this time since the song’s available for free download on their website.
Also, did you know this song is like six years old?
Fuse spoke with John Feldman about working with Blink-182 on their new album:
It gave me goosebumps on the spot. I thought, “This is it.” In my mind I knew I had the job. Then he started playing bass chords and I was like, “Fuck, I’m in love with this guy.” That was the first song we did together as a group. [Matt] Skiba came in, he’s the new guy, he liked that Mark liked it. He wrote the whole second verse. He came in and sang it in one pass, he’s that kind of guy. He crushed it in one take. At the end of the track Travis asked, “Why don’t you give me one minute of click and let me just play whatever the fuck I want?” which is how the ending of the song becomes this big crescendo of Travis Barker with these strings and Matt Skiba gang vocals.
NME interviewed D*Face, the artist behind Blink-182’s latest album artwork:
“But those first ideas that I sent, they said ‘nothing’s really doing it for us.’ [see above and below for the rejected album artworks] There was an illustration, however, that I’d worked on about a year and a half ago that I’d parked up and not got round to finishing. I looked at it and thought how California, to me, is about driving, the birth of the hot-rod and that whole lifestyle – so it made sense if it had a car in it. So that was the first checkpoint for me where I realised it was working. I sent that idea over and Matt [Skiba] and Travis were like ‘that’s the one. That the shit!’ But, to be honest with you, Mark [Hoppus] was like ‘I’m not so sure…’ – so it wasn’t straightforward, let’s put it like that!”
Seeing some of the rejected art ideas is pretty cool, but I’m definitely more of a fan of what they ended up with.
Blink-182 continued their media blitz yesterday with Live 105’s Kevin Klein. Mark Hoppus talks about how Tom DeLonge’s Facebook post came as a surprise and how he hadn’t spoken to Tom in over a “year and a half,” how he is really just focused on this new album, and how great it’s been to work with Matt Skiba.
According to Mediabase, Blink-182’s “Bored to Death” was last week’s most added song on alternative radio. It tripled up number two: Young The Giant’s “Something To Believe In.”
I can’t figure out what’s really “exclusive” about this ET Online interview with Blink-182, but this tidbit about “Teenage Satellites” seems to be the most new information:
“One of the last songs we wrote, called ‘Teenage Satellites,’ it was one of the last days of recording, and it was another song that came together really fast,” he recalled. “I got to the studio early and I was literally just hitting one chord on the guitar over and over again. John [Feldmann, the album’s producer] walked in, and he’s like ‘What’s that?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, it’s just something I made up.’”
You can also find an audio interview with Travis Barker on 101 WKQX-FM below.
Read More “Blink-182 Talk with ET Online, Travis Barker Audio Interview”
Alex Melton has done a cover of Blink-182’s “Bored to Death” where he tries to emulate what it would sound like with Tom DeLonge doing vocals as well. Gotta say, as a long impersonator of Tom voice, this is pretty damn impressive.
I was curious to know what the new Blink-182 single would sound like if Tom was still in the band, so I recorded a version doing my best Mark and Tom impressions, and just trying to get a passable attempt at Travis’s ridiculous drum parts.
The world has been interviewing Blink-182 over the past week (the label’s mad at me for posting that the video went up on YouTube, so I’m probably s.o.l), the latest is from Forbes, discussing the new beginning for the band and giving a little more detail on some of the new songs:
Well songs like “Rabbit Hole,” that have this big anthemic gang vocal at the end of it. There’s a song called “No Future,” there are a lot of really energetic, anthemic, angst-y fun rock songs I can’t wait to play live. This album is really rich with sing-along melodies and sing-along choruses. When I go to a show I want to sing along with the band. I still have that energy of going to see Bad Religion at the Palladium and wanting to sing every single word and I think this album has a lot of that for people.
SRC Vinyl have posted up their pre-order for Blink-182’s California. They also have a new blue version of Enema of the State (out June 17th) up for sale, and their versions of Untitled, Dude Ranch, and the live album are all still in stock.
Fuse sat down and talked with Blink-182 about their upcoming album, California. The band liked the other songs that didn’t make the album enough that they may save them for another album:
There weren’t any that we started where we were like, “No, that song’s not good.” Some were better than others, and obviously we put the best on the record, but we have so many more left over that we want to continue working on them and either use them for the next record or maybe do an EP.
They also discuss in more detail the title of the album and the themes found throughout:
It wasn’t a deliberate choice, but when we started writing lyrics and coming up with song titles, we were in the valley of Los Angeles. It was a perfect California winter, and it was sunny and hot every single day. John’s studio, it’s basically indoor-outdoor with palm trees everywhere. We were writing songs called “San Diego,” “Los Angeles,” “California,” and shouting out all these California punk-rock bands, lyrics to songs, and it just had this theme of California, this beautiful, endless opportunity with something weird or twisted underneath it. All the songs kind of have that. It’s a really catchy album, a really melodic album. There are all these hooks everywhere. It has an edge to it, a darker side. It just seemed like what California means to the three of us.
Travis Barker was on Radio X this morning talking about Blink-182 and the band’s new single “Bored to Death.” He talks about having no “bad blood” with Tom DeLonge and that the label were the ones that picked the first single. He described the album as a mix between Enema of the State and Untitled. The full audio can be found below.
Rolling Stone were at the kickoff “Karaoke Bash” for Blink-182’s new album and tour and the article has some new information peppered in.
“It goes in a lot of different directions,” says Hoppus. “We have some songs that sound like Blink-182 from 1999. … We have some songs that are like nothing we have ever done before. We have a ballad called ‘Home Is Such a Lonely Place’ that has clean arpeggiated finger-picking guitars with strings underneath it. We have super-fast late-Nineties-punk-rock-sounding songs. … We tried to capture the energy and not worry so much about all the knobs.”
Tom DeLonge has taken to Facebook to comment on the current Blink-182 situation. You can find the entire post below, but one excerpt stood out to me:
For one, I think partnering with a song-writer on the Blink album (Feldy- 5 Seconds of Summer, Good Charlotte) was too far a change, but something they desired, and that in itself may be an indicator of some of our current artistic differences that are difficult to overcome. I guess I’ve always just liked the song-writing we did together. But, at the end of the day, I support their desires. And if they are happy, then that’s what matters.
I think kinda throwing John Feldmann under the bus here is a dick move, but more so I continue to hate the meme that shows up from time-to-time that writing music with an outside source is inherently inferior. If you sit down to write music and bounce ideas around with a friend, that’s seen as totally legit. But the moment you give that friend credit on the song, or give them money for their work, somehow that’s now seen as less. I think that mentality is silly.
I’m glad to see Tom is working on his own projects and is finding happiness in all of his art and different endeavors. I also think Blink-182 is better than ever. I think it’s ok for both of these things to co-exist.
Ed Christman, writing for Billboard, looks at how Blink-182’s new label, BMG, and their distribution deal with the Alternative Distribution Alliance will be challenging RED as the largest indie distributor in the U.S.:
According to sources, BMG’s record label operations is already generating about $100 million globally, and about one-third of that is in the U.S. While BMG began its revival in 2008 by first pursuing music publishing opportunities, after it completed the sale of its music assets to Sony Corp., it actually held back about 200 album master recordings from the Sony deal. But it wasn’t until 2013 when it acquired Sanctuary and Mute as part of the divestiture’s the Universal Music Group made in order to keep the EU Commission’s regulatory agency happy about its EMI Recorded Music acquisition, that it began aggressively pursuing a recorded music strategy too. Since then, it has also acquired Union Square, Infectious, S-Curve, Vagrant, and Rise.
All these labels and deals and acronyms sure gets messy fast.
It’s exciting to be posting about Blink-182 again. It’s even more fun when the music coming out is undeniably catchy and there seems to be this buzz hovering around the band again in a way I haven’t felt in years. Hell, I even had to give myself a Blink-182 avatar in the forums. So, today the band will be visiting KROQ once again to announce some news and probably talk a little more about their upcoming album, California.
We’re expecting pre-order information and probably the announcement of their massive tour as well. I’ll be listening live and then updating this post with news as it comes in, that way there will be one central location for everything you need to know about what happened today. If you’d like to join in on the conversation you can click the little quote bubble on this post to jump to the comments section or, as always, join our large official thread in the forums.