| Interview: TOM DELONGE on ANGELS & AIRWAVES - preview. |
| Written by Sarah Mudgway |
| Sunday, 08 January 2012 18:41 |
 It's been a busy year for pop-punk legend turned entrepreneur TOM DELONGE. Between the release of Blink-182's album 'Neighborhoods', touring the U.S., and ANGELS & AIRWAVES' seemingly endless array of endeavours - 'Love' the film, 'Love: Part Two' the album, and 'Strange Times' the website, just to name a few - it's hard to comprehend just how busy DeLonge's 2011 was. With an Australian tour coming up in February and March of 2012 as part of SOUNDWAVE FESTIVAL, it was a great honour and privilege to get Tom DeLonge all to ourselves for fifteen precious minutes to talk all things Angels & Airwaves, a dash of Blink-182... and of course, if he will ever return to New Zealand. COUP DE MAIN: You're playing Soundwave Festival in Australia with Angels & Airwaves next year! Are you excited for that and do you foresee any New Zealand shows in the near future? ANGELS & AIRWAVES - TOM DELONGE: Oh, absolutely! I’m really excited to make my way down there with Angels & Airwaves, we haven’t been down there for years. Now, this is the year where we can start to focus on travelling the globe and going everywhere multiple times and I would love to come to Auckland. That’s a place I’ve been quite a lot with my other band so I’m very much looking forward to it. CDM: Speaking of the other band, a lot of people want to know if there would ever be a chance that BLINK-182 will make it down this way at some point? TOM: Yeah, I think there is a chance of it. We’re looking into boats and different things for 2013, so we’ll see what happens.  CDM: Your latest album 'Love: Part Two' was recently released in New Zealand as a two-disc set with 'Love: Part One'. For anyone who hasn’t heard the album yet, would you care to tell us a bit of back-story? TOM: Well, when we started Angels & Airwaves we knew we wanted to do movies, we knew we wanted to do different forms of media and use different mediums to communicate our art. We started a film a number of years ago and decided to release it with a double album over a three year period - 'Part One' was available as a download off of our website for free. The movie came out at international film festivals and then [the album] 'Part Two' came out as the package with everything together. The movie is currently getting set up for distribution down there in Australia and New Zealand. It’s a science-fiction film which communicates the attributes and definitions of love alongside of human consciousness, which is a little bit different to how it’s communicated on the album. So this is a very big project for us to try and do something ambitious and much larger than just an album. CDM: It has been suggested that in this digital age, people are becoming increasingly isolated... do you think this era of people sitting in front of a computer as a means to connect with others may negatively impact this fundamental need of human life, or at least redefine what it means? TOM: Well, I think that the needs in human life will change and grow and evolve. I do think that that the importance will always be grander than you would ever believe them to be. I think that one of the reasons that we chose the word 'love' as the subject is because your human connection and how you affect everybody around you, you’ll only understand the gravity of that as you pass later on in life. I think as artists it’s our ability to communicate that in certain ways. CDM: Through your exploring of the topic, do you think that one is ever really able to comprehend love? TOM: I think that people feel they know what love means... it’s probably one of the most used words in the world but has the most completely different definitions from one person to another. I think that you can say you love somebody like in a relationship, but I also think that to feel love for somebody else or for another human is more about a living being to a living being, a totally different thing. I don’t know if people will ever totally understand what that word means until we die. CDM: The idea of ‘Dreams’ also features on the album a few times. What is it about dreams that capture your attention, and do you personally believe that dreams hold a meaning in the conscious-world? TOM: I think dreams hold a lot of meaning. I believe that if the universe is truthfully infinite then there are infinite possibilities for dreams to be happening somewhere out there. There are possibilities that dreams are our little windows upon a parallel timeline. Dreams are things that could potentially be treating you as a pupil to teach you things so when you wake up, you’ll be able to handle certain elements from those dreams in a better way. I think there are a lot of different things that dreams do for the individual and they’re fascinating because it’s not totally known what they do, but we have some science that is opening the door to a new world as we speak.  |
