Tom DeLonge on Blink-182 Separation: ‘It Doesn’t Consume Me’

We're now over a year removed from the tumultuous back-and-forth between Blink-182 members Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker and their estranged bandmate Tom DeLonge, with both the Blink members and DeLonge moving forward in their careers. But DeLonge says the communication breakdown with his bandmates does still bum him out.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, DeLonge states that the announcement that he was no longer in the band caught him by surprise and that things could have been handled better. At the base of the conflict was that Blink's Hoppus and Barker were looking to push forward with new music and touring, while DeLonge was involved in a number of projects outside of the band that would have taken up a majority of his time in 2015. So the band revealed that DeLonge was no longer in the group and that Alkaline Trio's Matt Skiba would be filling in for a previous commitment to play the MusInk Festival. As we now know, the band would continue to play more shows with Skiba in 2015, who is now set to appear on the next Blink album.

DeLonge says, "If they would have come to me and said, 'Hey, you're really busy right now. We really want to do something, maybe we should get someone to fill in,' or something, I would have probably been fine with it."

He adds, "I don't work on ego. It doesn't define me. Is it awkward and weird? Yeah. Does part of me get bummed. Totally. But it doesn't consume me. I'm doing some of the best stuff I've ever been involved in. People look in and they go, 'How could you walk away from something like that?' or 'How could you not get so pissed?' Well, because I'm more than that."

He goes on to state, "I love those guys. The only thing I think about is, I want them to be happy. [But] I don't want the legacy of the band to get f--ked with. I do care about that. I don't want an incredible legacy to be ruined."

As for a future with Blink, DeLonge notes that he was never officially fired or quit. He concludes, "I'm not opposed to it. I still would be interested, if people would just pick up the phone and call."

So, while Blink-182 inch closer to revealing details of their new studio album, DeLonge has spent the past year working on music, books and film. His latest offering is a book titled Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows, a fictional novel penned with UNC Charlotte Shakespeare professor AJ Hartley. The book, which DeLonge says while fictional does come from information he gathered from sources in the aerospace industry, NASA and the Department of Defense, centers on the idea that not only does alien technology exits, but the government has known about it and attempted to replicate it. The page-turner is currently available to order via Amazon.

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