Tom DeLonge Leaves Blink-182 Behind to Be Alt-Rock’s J.K. Rowling

(photo: Johnny Buzzerio)

Having spent the majority of the past year putting the pieces in place for more than a dozen science-fiction-based projects for his company To the Stars while at the same time being a doting father and loving husband, ex-Blink-182 co-founder and current Angels & Airwaves frontman Tom DeLonge has recently been pretty wiped out. And occasionally he’s spaced on important appointments.

This morning, he was supposed to drive a carpool for his 13-year-old daughter Ava Elizabeth and some of her friends, but he was so fatigued from working so hard, he overslept. “I had all these parents frantically calling me and I was gonna make all the kids late because I didn’t remember it was my day to drive,” he says the week of release of the new Angels & Airwaves EP, Of Nightmares. “I literally thought to myself, “What happened to the rock star guy that wanted to never work and that wanted to sit at home and do nothing?’ I was just tripping, going, ‘Everything that I think I want always makes me busy working my ass off as though I’ve never gotten anything in my life.”

DeLonge’s inability to stay still sparked his desire to constantly discover new avenues of creativity. And that, in turn, led to his departure from Blink-182. First, there was bad blood about a new Blink EP that was finished but never came out. Then DeLonge got busy with Angels & Airwaves and To the Stars, which has contracted to work with five authors on upcoming trilogies. The company already has released a short animated film and graphic novels for DeLonge’s priority project Poet Anderson and a full-length feature film called Love with two accompanying CDs of music, and the wheels are in motion for numerous other films and comics, many of which will be accompanied by an Angels & Airwaves EP and a line of promotional merchandise.

Related: Travis Barker Talks Moving Ahead With Blink and Beyond

When Blink-182 asked DeLonge to commit to a new album and tour, he said he was too busy with other projects that were already in motion, and couldn’t fully dedicate himself to the band. So Blink bassist and vocalist Mark Hoppus and drummer Travis Barker asked DeLonge to leave, and hired Alkaline Trio frontman Matt Skiba, who is currently recording with the band. DeLonge doesn’t want to discuss his dysfunctional relationship with his former bandmates. Yet he insists he’s not at war with Hoppus and Barker and shoots down rumors that Barker’s memoir Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums, which comes out Oct. 20, was timed to compete with DeLonge’s first young adult novel, Poet Anderson: Of Nightmares, which he wrote with author Suzanne Young, and which comes out Oct. 6.

“Those guys in Blink-182 are like my brothers, and brothers have their issues,” DeLonge says. “Travis has been working on his book for a very long time. And knowing the publishing industry like I know it – because I am a publisher – it takes a long time to finish a book. So when you have a book and you want it to come out, you have to think a year in advance. Eight months ahead of its release date is the least amount of time when you can have a book done. And then you go to Barnes & Noble and say, ‘OK, we’re ready,’ and they say, ‘OK, we’ll put you schedule for eight more months from now.’ So there’s no spite there. Travis’s book is going to be great. He’s got a wonderful story.”

DeLonge and Young have a wonderful story as well. Poet Anderson: Of Nightmares tells the story of two non-conformist brothers who closely bond together after their parents die tragically in a plane crash. In addition to relying on one another for strength, they share the ability to communicate through their dreams. When one falls into a coma due to injuries sustained in a car accident, the other must navigate the two through a landscape of nightmares and return to the land of the living.

“I’ve always been labeled a dreamer myself, just in the sense that I’m a very imaginative person,” DeLonge says. “So the idea of creating not only in art, but in science and medicine, is exciting for me. I think the mind is capable of a lot. There was a book [by Robert Lanza and Bob Berman] called Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe that came out five years ago, which described everything in the universe as being probability, and it takes the human mind to make it into something tangible and physical. So the universe doesn’t exist unless there are humans or intelligent life to observe it.

“That, to me, was really interesting,” DeLonge continues, “but it’s hard to put that concept into a story that everybody will understand. So I thought it would exist in dreams. And then I saw a documentary about research that Stanford was doing about how nightmares prepare you for real-world events. And that you learn survival skills by experiencing these different scenarios in your bad dreams. That helped me put the pieces of the story in place.”

The new Angels & Airwaves EP, Of Nightmares (out Sept. 4), features four songs, three of which are largely textural soundtrack music. All of the tracks will be included in the eBook and are intended to enhance the reading experience. “We knew that we wanted the music to be experimental and not get in the reader’s way,” he says. “But we also wanted it to be something you can listen to on its own. That’s why there’s only one big rock ‘n’ roll song and the other pieces are more electronic and atmospheric.”

Each future book To the Stars releases will be accompanied by an EP. DeLonge says he enjoys the format, since it takes less time to craft an EP than a full-length album and gives the artist more room to explore. “An EP is not as threatening as a record in terms of an impulse buy,” he says. “But the cool thing about EPs is that they are looked at as something that’s not the primary tip of the spear as far as art goes. So if you want to be more experimental and try different things, it’s OK to do it on an EP.”

As much fun as he has composing EPs for Angels & Airwaves, DeLonge is most excited about the long-term potential of Poet Anderson. Recently, he has secured financial backing for a film based on the first book. The movie should be out in the next two years, and the pop-punk entrepreneur thinks it will blow up like Harry Potter. “Poet Anderson is the darkness of Harry Potter, but it looks like Blade Runner and feels like Star Wars at times. And the main character is like someone in A Clockwork Orange. It’s gonna be amazing. The first film is a $100 million movie. It’s big.”

For DeLonge, the goal isn’t to be the next big-shot movie director or producer. He also doesn’t aspire to be the like Trent Reznor, who had enjoyed great success scoring for film and releasing his own albums. No, DeLonge wants more than that. And as the CEO of To the Stars, he can write a book, work with a renowned artist on a comic, make experimental music, or stretch his limits altogether into realms he has never before experienced.

“I have a dinner appointment coming up with a general of the Air Force Space Command,” he says. “That happened because I brought something up at the right time to the right person.“ DeLonge won’t go into detail about why he’s meeting the general and what project they’re going to discuss. “It’s for one of my franchises, and that’s all I can say about it. It’s literally something I can’t talk about. I’m serious.”

Despite hobnobbing with powerful people, DeLonge thinks of himself as an artist who’s taking the natural next step in his career. For him, making movies, comics, and music are all an interconnected part of an artistic experience. Moreover, he predicts it won’t be long before musicians who form bands will be thinking on an equally grandiose level.

“Music and art have changed a lot since I started out in a band,” he says. “Whether you’re in a big band or you’re an artist that’s just starting, you have to evolve with the times. And the same computer that allows you to write a record and record it in your living room is now allowing you to make a movie, write a book, or make a graphic novel all in the same living room. So what that means is a kid who’s savvy with that tool is going to be coming up with art pieces that are a blend of all of those things. I’m just doing it at a different size or scale. But it’s a reflection of what I believe artists are going to be doing over the next decade. They’ll go, ‘OK, I wrote a record that’s a backdrop to a novel that I wrote over the past few years and me and my buddies have a camera. We’re going to go out and film the story.’ It’s about not being tied down to one specific thing, like, ‘All I do is play guitar. And I sit in my room and write a song and we work all the time on that one song. And then we want to tour all the time and play that one song.’ It’s a different world now.”

While he’s disappointed that he couldn’t work out a way to be in Blink-182 while overseeing To the Stars, DeLonge is pleased that being off the road allows him to spend more time with his wife and kids. And delving into every facet of creativity that he finds enjoyable certainly has its rewards.

“I just didn’t want to keep repeating the same art that I had done for 25 years prior,” he says. “I feel like I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do as far as having a big band with big production. And with Angels & Airwaves, I’ve been able to write whatever song I wanted to in any kind of emotional backdrop. We did it all. So the best next thing is to merge all these different industries together. A lot of this started happening because of my frustration with putting out a record and hearing a lot of people say, ‘It’s been four months. We’re over it.’ So I went, ‘OK, I’m going to create something that lasts decades.’ And I’m really excited to find out where that’s all going to take me.”