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 says, “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.”
