Little is the new big. At least that was the vibe when alternative dream rockers Angels & Airwaves stopped by the Red Bull Sound Space at the world famous KROQ in Los Angeles to play a handful of songs and answer questions from fans. Known for breaking some of Southern California’s biggest rock acts, the radio station formed a partnership with Red Bull last year to create Sound Space, an intimate stage on which some of the world’s best bands could perform for 150 of their closest friends and fans. Following Falling In Reverse, The Fray, New Found Glory, and Sound Space debut performers Coldplay, Angels & Airwaves ripped through a five-song set that included songs like “The Adventure,” “Anxiety,” “Everything’s Magic,” “Hallucinations,” and fan favorite, “Surrender.” Lead singer Tom DeLonge waxed poetic about the end of the world, making doodles of naked superheroes, and why Angels & Airwaves and Blink-182—the multi-platinum pop-punk group he’s fronted since 1992—are two sides of the same coin. After the set concluded, ChinaShop got some extra time with DeLonge in KROQ’s luxurious mail room to dig a bit deeper into the mythology, beauty, and DIY DNA that is Angels & Airwaves.

KROQ is where I first heard Blink 182 back in the late ’90s, and then “The Adventure,” your first single with Angels & Airwaves, back in 2006. Why has this been such a special place for your music?

Tom DeLonge: Rock ‘n’ roll has had such a troubled history over the past decade or two. A lot of things were changing in the marketplace, so a lot of stations were changing their path. KROQ always stayed true to what it was doing; always playing hard rock music and cool alternative. [To have] someone that was supporting the kind of music that I loved and the kind of music that I was doing [and] to come back with another band so many years later and still be so relevant and important is really reassuring. It gives you comfort in the fact that rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t go away so easily.

It’s interesting to watch how your punk roots come through in this band’s format, especially with you not having a guitar in front of you the whole time. You can be a bit more of a showman. What’s it like to have that approach?

Tom DeLonge: It’s important for me and something I wanted to do with this band, but not specifically because I wanted to be out in front. Most bands do that where it’s like, “Dude, I wanna get rid of my guitar so I can get out there and be the frontman.” It’s nerve-wracking for me to have to do that because I’ve always been safe behind my guitar. In this band it allows me to concentrate a little bit more on singing and delivering that message. A lot of what we do in Angels & Airwaves has a message and a reason and a spirituality, so with me being able to come out without a guitar, I get to engage the audience a little bit more and I really enjoy it. When you’re always playing guitar, sometimes you can’t sing what you want; it’s the rubbing your stomach and patting your head thing. So it gives me a lot more freedom melodically.

With everyone’s schedules, how do you guys find a way to put out so many albums and work on so many projects?

Tom DeLonge: We’ve just hit our stride, and it’s really easy for us to do things and be ambitious. We’re all aligned, we delegate responsibilities really well, we communicate really well, and we support each other. I’m able to go off and try to get a movie in order while one guy is getting the show ready and another guy is working on fan club stuff. Everyone is always working, and we hang out every day at our headquarters. One guy could be sanding and spray-painting guitars, another guy could be building a drum riser. We take every minute we have to do something, and music is by far the easiest thing for us, especially now that we have a sound that we’ve identified.

It’s almost like an art project.

Tom DeLonge: It’s totally an art project.

And the albums are just the start. There are films and soundtracks and multimedia projects, but it seems like, given the subject matter of this band, it couldn’t have gone any other way.

Tom DeLonge: Yeah, and I knew it was going to take a long time for it to be digested. I think at first people were like, “What are you doing? What are you talking about? Love? Yeah, that’s cool.” But it’s love as a science fiction film, thematically paralleled with human consciousness and all these grand themes. I knew the investment it would take with a normal listener, but once they get it, they can spend so much time diving into it to understand the entire concept. We’re already working on two more films. The idea is every album with a film, plus the ability to have really interesting pieces of merchandise that are collectible and have a fan club that’s vibrant and engaged and have shows that communicate these themes with these properties we’ve created. Weird shit, man. We have so much stuff. It’s a very large collaboration. Angels & Airwaves is the band, but the company is called To The Stars. That’s our big art project.

It’s a slow burn, definitely.

Tom DeLonge: We’re trying to accomplish something a band would do in 34 years in 10 years time, but we’re also trying to have something that can pull in people from all different types of interests. We even have a conspiracy news site called StrangeTimes.com that’s all weird interesting alternative headlines from around the globe.

So what does that accelerated timeline mean for 2012?

Tom DeLonge: Now that we have our team in place and the film is being released regionally, the plan is to break apart the globe in regions and put the band on the mainstream map little by little and set up the next film, because that one is going to be way more ambitious. By that time we hope to dominate the world…not in a German way, but in a beautiful way. (Laughs)

The patches and iconography that you guys have on stage and are wearing for this album remind me a lot of what Zeppelin did on their fourth album.

Tom DeLonge: It’s funny. I wasn’t the biggest Zeppelin fan but I started really getting into them this year because Ilan, our drummer, is so into them. Zeppelin was never my thing. I wasn’t exposed to it. I was only into punk rock for so long. So when I saw that I was like, “They do that to? Fuck, I ripped them off and I didn’t mean to!” (Laughs) But there’s a lot of esoteric symbology with our band, and it’s all for a purpose. There’s a big world for fans to jump into, and different things resonate with different people.

They’re rooted in two different eras, but the tie that binds Blink and Angels is that they were—and are—both very DIY at their core.

Tom DeLonge: Super DIY. We did a video for a song called “Hallucinations” and I’m walking toward the camera and singing and it’s this beautiful shot, but if you look at the making of the video, David our guitar player and Matt our bass player are pushing the van, the engine is off, and I can hear the music coming out of a tiny computer. The director has this little handheld camera you can buy at Best Buy and he’s sitting on the back of the van with the doors open. It looks epic, but when you look at the scene, you see band members sweating and pushing this van by hand. We just go out the same way we did when we were kids with a skateboard and you say, “Let’s go off and film a skate video!” That’s how we do it, and it’s awesome and fun!

Words by Rich Thomas (@TheLandfill). Photos by Catie Laffoon (@CatieLaffoon).