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.

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”

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.