Name: In Conversation with Tom DeLonge | Artist Signature Series | Fender
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T17:30:14.000Z
Duration: 6 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When you pick one of these things up, is there a specific song that you think of?

I mean, whenever I pick up this guitar, it's always...

It's like all these little riffy things were all on this guitar.

It's funny because I write them all on acoustic guitar.

I just have a little shitty acoustic in my house.

If I can make it sound good on that, I'm like, it's going to sound really good once it's on electric guitar.

So I remember I always pick this thing up and play the songs I wrote at home and I go, oh, fuck, it's rad.

It's not just like kind of cool, it's like way better.

The thing about rock and roll that separates us from kind of pop music is that like the authenticity of the people doing it, the story of where they came from, something that's really true to them that they're trying to emote and trying to like communicate it back for other people to like see your point of view on the world.

So we were like, we wanted to viciously attack with happiness and humor and energy and speed.

And so it was very much like forcing happiness with brute strength, you know, and that's what the band's always been about.

Our guitar riffs are no different than the way we write our vocal melodies and stuff.

And I used to always say it was like nursery rhymes on meth.

And everyone likes nursery rhymes because you can whistle it and usually you can go up with your two fingers and play it on piano.

And I think that's kind of like all the Blink melodies are that way.

And I think a really simple guitar kind of matches that.

Well, it was a really great time in the late 90s and early 2000s because obviously the internet was taken off.

So I just think as a whole, we remember that time frame.

It's something pretty cool and something pretty inspirational.

And everyone's like, oh my God, we're all getting connected to each other.

We can start to understand who each other are, you know, and Blink was popping at that moment.

We're kind of known and there's some nostalgia there for a pretty cool time frame.

I mean, just the fact that people still want this blows my mind.

Okay, so I remember when I was buying my first guitar and I was like, okay, I'm going to make this investment.

And they all had all these pickups and knobs and switches.

And I was like, well, what all these fucking things do?

And they're all, well, if you do this one, it's the pickup on the neck.

If you do this one, it's a, you know, it bucks the hum or whatever, like all this weird shit.

I'm like, well, can I just like turn it up and play?

So when I had a chance to make my own, I was like, well, just one knob and one pickup.

If I needed to sound different, I can like have a pedal or something, you know?

I don't need to be fucking around with all these switches.

I have plenty to think about when I'm playing live.

So that's where the simple idea came from because I was like, you're up on stage.

I don't want to be like clicking things or you hit it with your hand and it shuts off for some reason.

But then I was like, well, if I want it to be just mine, one thing the old, all the other Strats have were like that smaller headstock.

And I saw this one in some old photo, the 70s headstock.

And I thought it just like kind of made way more sense on the guitar, like balanced out the size.

We put in this old pickup, the Invader, because it was super overdriven.

And it was like, I was such a garagey punk rock player.

And it kind of hides a lot because it's so distorted.

And it just makes it really easy to play and just sounds good and big.

And so I think it's like kind of the best guitar for anybody that just wants something to sound good.

And you turn it on and play and it works kind of with everything.

The other thing, too, it's like the bright colors and like the fun California kind of thing.

I always like things that had like kind of timeless classic kind of bright colors.

And Alex was always such a strong supporter and such an incredible human.

And he knows everything about guitar, obviously.

He really helped me put together something that seems to have kind of stood the test of time.

Being able to bring them back is so exciting, especially with the return of Blink-182.

All the nursery rhymes were written on this guitar.

Whenever I write anything, I try to like figure out what's the most simple, repetitive way to play this.

And hopefully it's a little clever in some spots.

You know, a lot of people grow up, you're like, you'd be really good at guitar.

Or maybe you can like work your whole life, be a really great singer.

And I was like, maybe I could be decent at both because I just wanted to write my own songs.

And being the only guitar player in Blink, I was like, Well, if I just do like riffs and solos and shit, it's going to sound very empty.

If I just do power chords the whole time, then it's going to sound like some version of the Ramones or something, you know, which you can't make any better, you know.

So I came up with a way of playing that's kind of unique to us, which was kind of riff and chords mixed together a lot of the time.

And somehow it just seems to resonate with a very large group in a certain way that maybe a lot of the other guitar players don't, because maybe they're older, maybe they're too good, maybe they're too sophisticated, you know.

I think that a lot of artists forget that half of the art is being accessible to people that notice it.

You know, like you create all this stuff for you, but you're skipping over the fact that you're actually creating something that you want people to notice.

And so you really got to back yourself up and kind of go, I want to do all these things with my art.

What if I dial myself back a little bit and simplify things and make it a little bit more accessible?

Then you'll get more people interested and you can bring them on a longer ride, you know.

I still think we're writing our best songs.

I think our upcoming album is probably our best album we've ever made.

And the production that we brought on this tour is finally the first perfect, cohesive branding and symbol of everything that the band is about.

It's got the nostalgia in there and the history in there, but it's also got the fun and reverency and childhood, you know, kind of charm.

And it's got the rebellion, but it's got all the technology too.

So it's like this really cool rebirth of everything or the best of everything that we've done, but done the way people always wished we would have done it.

You know, like, you guys aren't half bad now.

I've never been a guy to collect guitars.

I've never been a guy to tell you what it's all about.

There are tools to me in the sense of, like, here's a flathead screwdriver.

You can use it to twist some screws, but you can also use it to open up a can of peanut butter.

But you can also use it to, like, poke a hole in something.

I mean, it's like, what do you want to use it for?

And guitars to me were like that, like, you know, what do you want to use it for?

Am I just going to turn it on and let it feed back?

I think people get so lost on how you're supposed to play it and what you're supposed to do with it.

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In Conversation with Tom DeLonge | Artist Signature Series | Fender

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