I first heard Angels & Airwaves when my wife brought home their initial offering, We Don't Need to Whisper. "Listen," she said excitedly, skipping to track four, "The Adventure," blasting it out and singing along with the chorus, "I cannot live, I can't breathe unless you do this with me," until I too was caught up in those passionate, urgent lyrics, picturing their author, Tom DeLonge, shouting them as if his life depended on that single truth. I have long believed that passionate music, which comes from the inside out, is the only type worth listening to. Still, I wondered, did DeLonge's sound carry any lasting importance, or was it just rock 'n' roll, all grown up with someplace to go? Time will tell.

Several months before wandering into the studio to make Whisper, a disappointed DeLonge sat at home, waiting for life to begin again and reveal a sense of purpose he hadn't known since breaking with Blink 182, the band he helped form. By then the cheering had faded, former band mates—friends since childhood—had moved on, and he sensed something dying. Typical of the cycle of life, as one thing died something else was being born, and painfully, slowly, the boy shed his childhood skin and slipped into that of concerned world citizen. Eventually thoughts took form, became lyrics, became songs, became recordings. Natural childbirth was never more difficult.

There's something forever young and mischievous in Tom DeLonge's face, like Corey Haim of The Lost Boys in adulthood, teetering around 6'2", with one full sleeve of tattoos. The new album launches off pain, and then takes a violent upswing into something worth living and dying for. The voice still rings with a desperate longing, only the rhythm and the message and the delivery have changed.

Risen Magazine: Does your music have a broader purpose than entertainment?

Tom DeLonge: It didn't when we first started. When we started it was like... All I wanted to do was skateboard and play guitar and our first songs had to do with every bad word you can think of and every bad act you can think of. We never really thought people would watch us, so we were just trying to make ourselves laugh. Then people started watching, and we thought, Oh, they must like who we are as people, not the music. So we just let that shine, and the personality got conflicted with the music a lot of the time. The music didn't have a purpose other than complete and total anarchy with ourselves and with our bodies. When I quit Blink, I found myself really depressed and music was the last thing I wanted to do. Soon I realized that I could either whine and complain about how cool it was when we weren't a big band, or create the biggest band in the world. I said, "Why don't I go for something like that? Why not go out and make my musical career much grander than it ever has been?" In doing that I had to figure out who I was and what I was going for and who I wanted to be. I found that my music needed to have total purpose, and Angels & Airwaves became like a point of therapy for me, where the music itself was going, an autobiographical timeline of the changes in my life during the course of a year. I knew that if this record was going to be a success, it would have the same effect on other people's lives too. So, the band ended up being the antithesis of Blink, which was the other side of myself. Angels became a crazy desire to make people improve their world by the way they see themselves in it.

RM: There must be a point where you realized that thousands of people are taking you seriously and sometimes basing life decisions on what you say. Is that scary?

TD: Yeah, you know it's interesting; in Blink we would be playing for ten to twenty thousand people a night. And it seems like us not caring is what people were living off of. They would come to our concerts and feel they could be completely irresponsible and escape from all the stuff that most kids hate. You can't really escape your four walls, or your parents, so I think Blink stood for all those little windows to look out of at all those types of scenarios that kids feel stuck in. I think Blink is an anomaly, cuz not many bands existed like that, where you could be who you want and have as much fun as you want, be as bad as you possibly can be. [Laughs] And it just kept getting bigger. [Laughs] In the end, we actually became really good musicians.

RM: You guys weren't bad like an Axl Rose type of bad.

TD: No, no. I think we really created a niche for kids growing up in the suburbs that were pretty bored and their lives aren't too bad, but they aren't good either. Keep in mind too that even in Angels & Airwaves there's a lot of humor; there's a lot more humor in this band than in the last few years of Blink, cuz things weren't going so well, the communication wasn't there. We were going through these identity crises. [Laughs]

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