Blink-182 and Angels & Airwaves singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge, has had his hands full over the last year, creating and curating an intricate multi-media project wrapped around A&A’s forthcoming fifth studio album, The Dream Walker, that also includes an award-winning film and a graphic novel. According to DeLonge it’s an “ambitious” undertaking, but one they’ve been committed to from the start.
“When we started out we always said we were an art project, not a band,” he explains. “But it took us a few albums to prove that, get a foundation, create an infrastructure so we could put out these trans-media projects.”
“On this one we’re kind of firing with all cylinders.” For this ambitious project DeLonge has assembled a team of talented artists to tell the same story and communicate the same message, across a variety of media. One such medium included an animated film, Poet Anderson: The Dream Walker, which already has picked up an award for Best Animation at this year’s Toronto International Short Film Festival, as well as the new album and an original graphic novel series entitled POET, due out in 2015.
“I want to surprise people and I want people to give it a shot. But I was able to wrangle really, really great artists, ” he explains. “All these guys are better than me at whatever it is they’re doing and I just want to be surrounded by guys I can learn from.”
“The thing that’s been hard is that it’s really expensive and it’s really time consuming and it’s really stressful because you’re putting everything, including every dollar, into something that’s going to roll out over the next coming year and it’s never been done before,” admits DeLonge. However, the message behind the project, that of “being the master of your own experience in life”, is something he hopes will inspire others.
“What we’re doing now is really, really big,” he says. “I mean it’s really ambitious and not everyone is going to be able to do this kind of thing. But, I do think it will give people a lot of ideas of what’s possible.”
Listen: Music Feeds Podcast Episode #129: Angels & Airwaves
http://youtu.be/Hbazcehjqsk
