Having abandoned the idea of completing a full new album as "too ambitious" before its upcoming tour, blink-182 will instead have one new song ready before it hits the road on July 23 in Las Vegas.
Guitarist Tom DeLonge tells Billboard.com that the track, titled "Up All Night," has "got a little bit of (Pink) Floyd, a little bit of Rush, a little bit of blink in there. It's crazy, but it somehow sounds exactly like where we left off (in 2005). It's an amazing song."
DeLonge says the tune is nearly finished, waiting just for Travis Barker to complete his drum tracks. Release plans haven't been determined yet.
The guitarist explains that he, Barker and bassist Mark Hoppus fully intended to complete an album but the success of the tour derailed that idea. "I think nobody realized how massive this tour was going to be," DeLonge says. "The tickets outsold what the promoters expected, three to one. So everyone's trying to play catch-up right now and really nail this tour to be the best it can be and get everything ready, so there's no studio time right now. Everyone's so busy just trying to make this thing happen, I think."
DeLonge says blink-182 fans can expect to hear plenty of hits in a two-hour set that will feature "massive production and arcs in the show that involve lots of bad words...The talks this morning were hot to incorporate the word 'fuck' in such a way that it somehow is parallel if not better than when it was lit on fire 10 years ago."
That, of course, poses an interesting conundrum for DeLonge and his bandmates, who did not have children in the days of the flaming Fuck sign.
"I remember on the very first song of some of these larger tours we did, when the big Fuck sign lit on fire, parents would stand up and walk their kids out," says DeLonge, who's also working on a film and movie project called "Love" with his other band, Angels & Airwaves. "Now I feel like that's what I'm gonna be doing, but to my own (six-year-old) daughter. I'm gonna have to leave the stage to go walk her out.
"A DJ explained it really good to me once; 'I tell my kid it's not bad if it's art. If you're not doing art, you can't say words like that.' I thought that was a really good way to handle it."
