Check out Tom’s interview in Germany for the Area4 festival.Watch it here

From: NBC
He’s a rock star and a businessman. And what Tom DeLonge is doing in Carlsbad could make a lot of the major music labels nervous[...]

LOSERKIDS.com will soon have a LOVE Vinyl LP, more information is coming soon.

Discuss the interview and performance on our forum!

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• A Tom DeLonge Epiphone Guitar Customized Personally by Tom
• A VIP experience at an Angels and Airwaves show including a guitar lesson with Tom
• An Angels and Airwaves merch pack

To enter click here!

From Spin.com

” Tom DeLonge is leading a double life.

The music world knows him as the perennially teenaged guitarist and vocalist of reunited pop-punk trio Blink-182, also featuring his longtime pals Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker. But in his spare time, he’s spending more and more time in a place you wouldn’t expect a guy with an arsenal of dick jokes to go: the boardroom.

Recently, DeLonge, 34, has been using words like “user-experience” and “monetize” to present his new company Modlife, a website that helps musicians control and profit from their image and merchandise while releasing their music for free.

“People just assume I’m some dumb punk rock kid running around naked,” he tells SPIN.

Hardly. And the latest release from DeLonge’s space-rock quartet Angels & Airwaves — a movie and album called LOVE — is Modlife’s key selling point. Modlife is helping the album (released for free on Valentine’s Day) recoup the $500,000 spent on its production, plus a portion of millions shelled out for LOVE the movie — a sci-fi epic to be released theatrically later this year. LOVE‘s concept is also an uncharacteristic venture for DeLonge. Rather than the playful lyrics of Blink, DeLonge is going deep, exploring love, emotion, and human interaction and connection.

DeLonge dishes with SPIN.com about Modlife, LOVE‘s concept, and Blink-182.”

Hey, Tom. You’ve become quite the businessman recently. Did you envision this for your career?
No. But what started as a hobby has grown into a real business with real people and families and mortgages. With Modlife, I’m hoping to help bands. So I’m very fortunate.

It’s like you’re leading two different lives. Is it awkward cracking nasty jokes after having become a family and businessman?
No, because I’m still that guy. My friends and I still go out, have some drinks and crack dick jokes and try to offend people. But then we talk about larger world concepts. It’s indicative of my generation — you’re smarter than people give you credit for but at the same time you don’t care if people give you credit at all.

Angels & Airwaves released LOVE as a free download. How are you making any money?
[Laughs] You know, if a band on a label sold a few hundred thousand copies of their record these days they wouldn’t make any money. But if a band can pump out 10 million copies of a record for free, and 50,000 of those fans come to the band’s website to watch pay-per-view videos or buy a t-shirt, that’s roughly $10 million in revenue per year. Modlife combines all these new revenues streams and that’s what financed our new album and movie — and we were the first band to use it. It’s a whole new economic equation and we’re trying to solve this music industry crisis from the inside, not from the top where the executives are.

Is there anything you’d like to tell those top executives?
It’s funny, as soon as Universal found out about Modlife they flew me to New York and had me present the technology to Universal Worldwide via satellite. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was all because Universal thought Modlife meant the end of their business. They were actually doing intelligence work — they’re scared to death.

What’s the concept behind LOVE?
We loved the idea of esoteric symbolism. Geometric shapes hold an energy pattern and scientists did some experiments, which say certain geometric shapes can affect matter around them. It’s simply because when a human looks at a shape, they instantly receive energy from their brain. So we reworked the geometric shape of the word “Love” (see here), so when people see that word it instantly provides energy. That was the foundation of how we built the album and the movie.

Heavy. Have you always been interested in this?
I’ve have. I’m interested in a lot of different things, but first and foremost I’m into the idea of human consciousness, and Angels & Airwaves is a byproduct of that. It’s an exciting time for a band like us, because I think young adults are interested in waking up to the world around them.

You’ve said that with LOVE you wanted to send chills down listeners’ spines. What music still sends chills down yours?
I’m a huge stadium rock fan, but I’m also a fan of everything from Massive Attack to Peter Gabriel, U2, the Police, Radiohead, and Coldplay. I’ve realized that I love all forms of music and get excited when any artist goes crazy and creates something that is an experience. As I’ve matured as an artist, I’ve realized how hard people work to deliver something like that.

Tell me about LOVE the movie.
It evolved into something much grander than originally planned — it blew our minds. The movie is meant to be a sonic and visual experience. The narrative crosses time and space. It’s a story of hope, love, and the interconnectedness between people. There are real actors and incredible cinematography. We recruited Oliver Stone’s editors, Darren Aronofsky’s sound designers, and specialists who worked on computer-generated imagery on Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. But we’re not competing with Avatar. It’s an independent film and it took us four years to film because the director built a space station by hand. It’s an art film that’s meant to further the ambition and message of the band.

Was LOVE influenced by your favorite sci-fi movies?
Oh, yeah. We’re huge Stanley Kubrick fans. The director of LOVE [27-year-old Will Eubank] used to be a cinematographer and he aspired to shoot scenes the way Kubrick would. So, LOVE has that Kubrick tonality to it, but this is not a Stanley Kubrick movie — there will never be another. At the same time,LOVE has a modern feel. For example: In one scene, these astronauts go through a wormhole sequence and you feel like you’re being slapped around inside your head by a sonic boom. It’s meant to have a juxtaposition from classic sci-fi movie to something more modern you might see in theaters now.

What’s the plan with Blink-182?
We have a lot of ideas and a lot of exciting stuff, but I’m so deep into the Angels & Airwaves stuff. There’s no news I’m going to release without the other guys.

During the recording of the first A & A album you were addicted to narcotic painkillers. How does it feel to look back at that time after coming so far?
I was going through a big change in my life, coming from a band that was gigantic to starting all over again. It wasn’t an easy thing for me and I said stupid shit in the press and made myself look like a moron. The only thing I can say is that, well, I am a moron and I do say stupid shit. I don’t believe that I’m better than anybody, but I do believe that I’ll try harder than most and I hope that people just join me for a little bit of a ride.

From Billboard.com

It will be all “Love,” all the time for Tom DeLonge’s Angels & Airwaves this year. With the new “Love” album just out — and being distributed for free online — a feature film of the same name and plenty of touring, DeLonge tells Billboard.com that “we’ll keep working this record forever. There’s no stop as to what we can do and what kind of deals we can make.”

That begins with the tours, the first of which commences March 27 at the Bamboozle festival in Anaheim, Calif., and wraps May 28 in Las Vegas. “There’ll be a couple different tours on this record,” DeLonge reports. “This first one is promotion for the launch of the album. The second tour will come out after the movie goes theatrical, and that will be the big tour where we basically couple everything together. But this first tour is going to be exciting and will hearken back to our old catalog. I think this’ll be a great experience, and it might be some of the last to have with this band in these [theater]-size venues, so I’m excited to go and do this.”

DeLonge says director Will Eubank is currently finishing work on the “Love” film, a science fiction epic whose span reaches from the Civil War to the International Space Station and the end of Earth as we know it. May is “the absolute finish date” according to DeLonge, who says he’s negotiating with four movie studios about distributing “Love” and also has interest from the Sundance and Tribeca film festivals.

“The film festival thing,” DeLonge notes, “it’s really cool, and I would be honored to be in it. But my goal is for people to see it. I never really think I need to go out and get critics to love anything. I go straight for the fans. At the end of the day, that’s how I’m going to maintain being an artist, is if I can connect with my audience.

“I know our ambitions leave us out there for people to poke holes on our boat, but… We’ve been working on the movie for four years. We’ve been working on the album for a year and a half. We’re just doing it so people can have a little bit of an escape, and if people give us that chance, then we welcome it.”

DeLonge says he’s been pleased with the early reception for the “Love” album, which was downloaded nearly 300,000 times during the first 48 hours after its Valentine’s Day release. Fans willing to “donate” to AVA will also receive a version of the track “Hallucinations” remixed by DeLonge’s Blink-182 bandmate Mark Hoppus, while AVA hopes to make its documentary, “Start the Machine,” which is currently sold at its web site, available for digital download as well.

DeLonge, meanwhile, says he’s learning how to balance AVA and Blink-182, the latter of which is reportedly working on a new album after a 2009 reunion tour. “I’m up to my neck in Angels & Airwaves right now, so I don’t have anything to tell you about blink,” DeLonge says. “It’s been a little bit of a juggle that I honestly don’t have down yet. I never really thought of having two big bands to deal with. It’s a good problem to have, but it’s also very stressful… But I know I’m a really, really lucky guy and I’m just taking it one day at a time.”

Los Angeles Times

On a rainy Tuesday evening in Angels & Airwaves’ suburban Carlsbad recording studio, singer Tom DeLonge pondered ice cubes. Specifically, the ice cubes made famous by the Japanese writer-mystic Masaru Emoto, who claimed that projecting positive vibes into water could make it freeze into more beautiful crystals.

“This guy taped pieces of paper with words like ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ to cups of water and froze them. When he looked at them under a microscope, the ones with ‘Hate’ looked chaotic, but words like ‘Love’ made them perfectly symmetrical,” DeLonge said. “So we thought, what if we could use our album to do that to people, who are made up of mostly water?”

Hence the epic, electronica-infused emo band’s new album, “LOVE.” Angels & Airwaves released it independently as a free download on Sunday, the latest in a string of multiplatinum rock bands — including Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails — to use new, free albums to build their brand and fans’ loyalty, instead of seeing them as profit-makers.

The album is just one facet of a larger business experiment for the band, which hopes to seamlessly incorporate pervasive social media and corporate sponsorships in ways that might make Naomi Klein shudder. But their approach could be a new avenue for self-sufficiency amid rock music’s commercial swan dive.

As appropriate for a band obsessed with science fiction, it’s all about trusting the Force. In this case, it’s the force of branding coupled with the allure of free content.

“We created this whole world around the band as a deep and philosophical adventure and immersed ourselves in it,” DeLonge said. “We personally went $500,000 in the hole on this album. But I believe music should be free. If I have to, I’ll go sell blood and sperm to make that happen.”

As the longtime singer and guitarist of recently reunited ’90s pop-punk titans Blink-182, DeLonge probably won’t have to hock his plasma any time soon. But it’s clear that Angels & Airwaves, founded after Blink’s breakup in 2005 in part as a healthful escape from DeLonge’s drug and personal problems at the time, holds his interest in different ways than his easygoing, frequently naked punk act.

“LOVE” is clearly a labor of such, where the planetarium-sized synthesizers of M83 bolster chiming arena-rock in the spirit of U2. The band members, including guitarist David Kennedy, bassist Matt Wachter and drummer Adam Willard, wear jackets emblazoned with the band’s logo while working in the studio. Lyrics like “Do you believe in hallucinations? Silly dreams and imagination?” purposefully invite the group’s young audience to join Angels & Airwaves in their stylized fantasy land.

But a walk around the band’s vast recording complex — which also houses the offices of DeLonge’s skate-shoe company Macbeth, and ModLife, a new social-media interface he co-founded — suggests Angels’ earnest music is balanced by a cool-eyed capitalist instinct. Once hooked, fans can invest in the band’s output at a variety of price points — from the free download of the album to pay-per-view concert streams to copies of their forthcoming feature-length film, a kind of “Event Horizon”-meets-”Avatar” CGI epic also called “LOVE.”

“I’m a businessman and I want this to be as big as it can be,” DeLonge said. “I felt we could do the business end of this better ourselves with new partnerships. We could strike a deal with Ford where they put a copy of the record in every new car and they use one of our songs in an ad. We can do anything we want, and I have no problem approaching this band as a venture capitalist.”

“Does a musician end up looking like a NASCAR driver at the end of all this?” DeLonge asked. “It’s up to them. I have no problem with corporations — I own two of them. It’s about letting the musician choose what’s best.”

From EW

Tom DeLonge is a busy guy. Last night around nine, the singer-guitarist (pictured, one from right) helped finalize the track sequencing for LOVE, the album that his band Angels & Airwaves will release online for free this Sunday, Feb. 14, as a complimentary Valentine’s Day gift to fans. This morning, he met with his other band, blink-182, which reunited for a 2009 tour after a four-year split, to talk about their plans. After that, he rushed off to meet with a few potential partners to secure a theatrical release for the sci-fi film, also titled LOVE, that Angels & Airwaves oversaw to accompany their album. (Trailers are viewable at Apple and the band’s website.) Oh yeah, and DeLonge also plans to “fix the music industry” via Modlife, the website he owns. The Music Mix got him on the phone to hear about all the items crowding his schedule.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How are you feeling about the new Angels & Airwaves album?
TOM DELONGE: I consider this, at this point, the pinnacle release of my life. There’s nothing that I have put more effort, more time, more heart, and more stress into than this release. It’s been a very long time since a band has attempted to make a motion picture associated with an album — not to mention have the album be completely free of any corporation, 100 percent independent. Artistically, I think this record has far exceeded anywhere I’ve been. So I’m just quietly anticipating Sunday’s release and hoping for the best.

How is this one different from the two albums you’ve released with Angels & Airwaves in the past?
Going into the writing of this record, we knew that the music was going to score the film, so we had to compose the songs in multiple movements. So when you listen to the record, it’s not orthodox by any means. There’s a lot of interludes and segues that draw you in and transition you to different levels of excitement. It’s by no means meant to be this mainstream, commercial record, or formulaic in any way. When you do it with a corporation like a major label, you have your songs start a certain way, the vocals come in at certain times, and it’s only two and a half minutes long. To be honest, Angels & Airwaves has never really been good at that, anyway.

Can the album be enjoyed independently of the movie?
Oh, absolutely. I write in a very melodic way, so that will never leave. I think my records will always tend to be approachable. I’m a little left of center, for sure, with Angels & Airwaves. But even when I get really weird, it’s not that weird. It’s not like some obscure Sonic Youth record or something. We don’t take it quite that far. But what we do like are crescendos, and we do like when a song catches you offguard and it gives you the chills up and down your arms. Those types of reactions in people are what we’re trying to create in our music. I think we’ve learned to do that pretty well.

What’s the movie Love about?
It starts in the Civil War and you travel through time and space. There’s a couple of different storylines. The main one is, a guy gets sent up to the International Space Station, and he gets abandoned up there. He doesn’t know why. So throughout his years of being stuck up there, he sees the Earth starting to collapse below. He ends up basically becoming the last person alive. And then decades later, he wakes up one day and there’s something outside of his spaceship, in low Earth orbit with him…The record and the movie are called Love simply for the fact that love is a symbol — when you write it out, it’s a symbol of lines and geometric shapes that has a very specific intention and energy with it. It’s the one thing that every near-death experience [has]: When people come back, they all try to describe the word love, but in a physical state. So we tried to attach that phenomenon, philosophically, with how we wrote about the context of that word.

How long had you been thinking about making a movie?
Well, we wanted to do one six years ago when we first started the band, but we never knew it was going to be like this. We started this film, actually, as a collection [of shorts]. But what happened was the film came back and far exceeded our expectations, so we decided to hunker down and reinvest in it, and take it across the finish line with a much more ambitious goal…And we’re completely independent. Literally, our band is doing all the music videos and the film and the album ourselves. Just the four of us and a few extra people on the fringes that believe in us. It felt amazing. When we were teenagers and we were going out skateboarding, we’d film ourselves. You’re trying to make yourself look cool. [Laughs] This is the same kind of thing. But it just so happens to be the greatest release of my life. It really is. I’ve never to date put as much of myself into anything. Not only monetarily, but spiritually and with my heart. Thank God my family supported me all along this path, because this has been a crazy few years.

Are you acting in the film?
Oh, no, no. That’s the first misconception. Everyone assumes I’m in the movie or something. No, the band’s not in the movie at all. There’s real actors. We have all these great people that came on because they loved the idea that a band was trying to do this again and that it was actually good. Our editor came from Oliver Stone’s camp. Our sound designer came from Darren Aronofsky’s camp. All of our special effects are done by a guy who did Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. So we have incredible people that are working pretty much pro bono to make this film happen. And at the end of the day, no, I am not acting in it, because that would probably ruin the film easily within the first five minutes.

Did you write the script?
No, the director did. The band set out parameters, with a very macro vision of how the movie needed to fit the philosophy of Angels & Airwaves. We had to plug in certain attributes that were hyper-stylized to what the band likes: The science fiction, the color palette, the storyline on a macro level. But Will Eubank, the director-writer of the film, was a prodigy. We found him at 23 years old. He’s now 27. He turned out to be the most perfect person to do this film. We’re really proud of it.

Are you planning to release the film theatrically?
Absolutely. To what degree we don’t know until we make our deal. This isn’t going to compete with Avatar, but I think this is going to be an incredible arthouse flick that has tremendous heart and soul to it. And it has an incredible message, and at the same time it has this science fiction acumen to it that I think will span different demographics. I think this is going to open up a lot of doors as to what people would think we’re capable of — but even more so, what bands are capable of if they just try.

Getting back to the album, how did you decide to release it for free?
We planned on a free record a long, long time ago. Years ago. It was always part of the plan. We always knew that our band would grow immeasurably by having a free album and by learning to monetize our band in a way. My company created a platform called Modlife, this prepackaged website that runs an artist’s website. If you go to angelsandairwaves.com, it’s sitting on a Modlife platform. It allows us to do pay-per-view there. It allows us to sell movies there. It allows us to sell music there. A whole host of things. We knew, if we had a free record, if a small percentage [of fans] came back and interacted on our website in a variety of ways, we would far outweigh the business model that we had with a major label. That’s how we’re trying to be a little groundbreaking. And at the same time, we learned a lot from Radiohead going out there and doing the model where [fans decide how much to] contribute. They did a huge thing that was very risky and very different, and we’re just trying to take that and step it up a bit. We think we’ve found a model that works to fix the music industry. I think we’re going to be a perfect case study for it.

How much money did you spend making this album that you have to make back without charging for the music?
Oh, well, the Modlife platform is a brand new revenue stream. It’s never existed in music before. That’s what financed our movie — one and a half million, two million bucks, whatever we’re into that for. The album itself, God, we’re into that over a half million dollars just for recording. The way we get our money back is not going to be through selling records. It’s going to be, for example, if on a Thursday night you want to lay in bed with your girlfriend and watch Angels & Airwaves live from London, you’re going to watch it at angelsandairwaves.com. When the movie comes out, you can go to angelsandairwaves.com and rent it or buy it. Or if you want advance tickets and early entry into the shows so you can watch the soundcheck, you can become a member of the site.

How’s the blink-182 reunion going these days?
It’s going great. We are just now outlining how we’re going to start the album and the next 24 months of the band’s career. I just left that meeting about 20 minutes ago. We’re just now getting back on track.

Have you gotten back into the studio, or is it still in the talking it out phase?
This is the talking phase. I mean, we started recording about a year ago when we first started. We have some stuff already in the works. But getting really into it formally will happen shortly.

When do you think we’ll see another blink-182 album?
That’ll happen probably a year from now.

What has it been like working with those guys again compared to the first time around?
Well, both of those guys [Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker] are extraordinarily talented, so it’s always a lot of fun to figure out how we can mesh together. We’re all so different in our musical taste that it’s really interesting to see how it all comes together. That’s always been the case. I think the most different thing is how busy everyone is. Everyone owns all these companies, and everyone has all these other side projects. It takes us five weeks to figure out how to get in a room for one hour. So it’s been hard.

Have you had a chance to think about what you want blink-182 to sound like in 2010 or 2011?
It’s too early to tell. I’d rather talk about Angels & Airwaves right now until I have something more to offer you for blink, to be honest.

Okay. Are you going to tour this album with Angels & Airwaves?
Yeah. We’re going to announce tour dates in the next couple weeks. We’re really excited about that. The Angels shows are really intense. We play for a couple hours at a time. They’re very theatrical and full of audience interaction and emotion. I’ve seen a lot of people crying and stuff. It’s a little bit like church, but it’s very secular.

Are you shooting any Angels & Airwaves videos aside from the movie?
We’re going to have the best video we’ve ever had [for new single "Hallucinations"]. We went out and shot it with just the band members and two friends of ours with handheld cameras, no lighting at all. While three members are pushing a car in neutral, a guy is sitting in the back with his camera out the window, and I’m walking. It’s going to look like we had a giant production, but at the very end of the day we’ll probably spend just a few thousand bucks. It’s going to look like we spent 400 grand on this video. It boils down to, once again, if you have great people and just a few of the right tools, you do not need to spend any money. We just go out and do it just like when we were skateboarding when we were teenagers. We’re laughing and sweating as we’re pushing cars, trying to make s— look cool. It’s so funny and so anti-rock star. It’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

Alternative Press

It’s a little more than a week until ANGELS & AIRWAVES release their third full-length, Love, on Sunday, Feb. 14 (for free, natch). The album will also be accompanied by a film that will see a theatrical release later this year, plus a deluxe edition of the disc for purchase. We did a quick check-in with AVA frontman TOM DeLONGE to see what all the Angels & Airwaves attention means for new BLINK-182 music. –Rachel Lux