boxelder

i will say, they recently did a collab with oxford pennants, and despite the price, it's some of the cutest blink merch i've seen in years.

i don't think he's necessarily on the spectrum; his joke about the dogs being dead is just the type of typical dark humor you find in a lot of gen x-er's. as for the +44 winter tour anecdote, i feel like he was just trying to capture just HOW lost he felt. two years before, he was touring arenas and guesting on MTV. now he couldn't he count on travis -- he was stuck in germany, with some bandmates he (barely) knew playing some pretty negative songs. as for the soundcheck memory, i definitely know what you're saying -- he was super all-business as i recall, when they let fans see them at soundcheck. but the thing is, i feel like if i were a musician, it would be super annoying to have fans there when you're just trying to get the volume/mics right. they're all expecting a performance and engagement but you're just trying to get something done. it turns performing into a multi-part affair, which i might find annoying too. seems like something management may have talked them into during that era, given how little they've done it since.

great song, can't wait for the album.

i love seein' stars, but that's because it's basically tame impala. the rest of the singles i heard were just extremely bland. i feel like writers/journalists have been coddling them with light praise because everyone knows the band lost a huge asset in ebert. and it's really sad, too... band blows up huge, makes biggest hardcore album ever, guitarist chooses drugs over the band. so you want to root for them. and the visuals are cool, the songs sound great... but the riffs are just missing, and the songs just meander. again, that's based off my impression of the singles, but i haven't heard promising things about the rest

i had to put that shit on like 1.75x speed to get through it, just to see if there were any interesting bits. mark gets better as the interview goes on. i've literally never heard someone talk more than toby. it's like he's nervous to let the other person get a word in edgewise. mark sort-of picks that up and just lets him go, but it's soooo awful. add in "oh so sick dude", "fuck, that's crazy", etc and he's absolutely insufferable. you would think being in a band like h2o would have made him more relaxed around other pro musicians, but i guess that's not always the case.

toby morse can be an irritating interviewer -- has anyone ever talked MORE? but there were some amusing relevations from this back and forth: Tom and Mark shared a bus for a leg of the one more time tour. i dont know why i was so shocked or surprised by this, but for two guys who would travel separately on buses, the idea of them SHARING one, especially with their wealth, shocked me. it just goes to show how much has changed -- or perhaps the insane cost of touring nowadays. the official meaning of the "vagina exploding" story from the book: mark's wife had an ovarian cyst burst. he just found it funny in the context of the big VMA success to juxtapose it with a story like that. mark flew so much when making his fuse show and living in london that he was offered american airlines concierge key status — the highest level they have lol. it's so elite that it isn't even publicized. royalty!

Oof those songs blow.

Tickets is 🔥 it’s like pop punk mad libs. It’s a fun retro pastiche altogether with some great guitar work (courtesy of whoever) and strong melodies. The rest of the MGK punk pivot sucks but there’s a cadence and consistency to tickets. It’s a really solid record. this is coming from someone who hated the manufactured Feldy era. I guess the difference is that prime blink actually had agency/originality, and MGK had none of that. He was, as @Champ182 once put it, putting on a pop punk Halloween costume. I guess not taking it seriously is why I’ve enjoyed it.

honestly impressive lmao. i'm never disappointed every time i look him up. the faces, the mannerisms -- it's all very creepy

toooo funny man. i remember you posting lyrics too and just liking the posts lol.

did i ever say here that the same guy had approached me with clips from cali dlx? maybe i didn't at the time 'cause i didn't want the guy in trouble. he sent me a few clips of the songs being audibly played with the camera facing a laminate floor lol, and that was it. it was at least 2-3 months before release too. weird situation!

Not sure of the logistics since we’ve never seen a contract but I think that they probably had another album left on their deal with UMG. It could’ve been that the greatest hits fulfilled the original contract, or maybe it didn’t count since it wasn’t original material. I feel like I remember mark confirming that the deal they made for the second +44 record (that he posted on his pkrset blog) may have been fulfilled by neighborhoods too. Either way, I think there may have been unfinished business with UMG when they reunited in 2009, it’s just that instead of releasing Neighborhoods on geffen, they released it on interscope, which is where they were pushing the rock stuff at the time. Tom pushing to end the contract/not renegotiate in late 2012 was an ulterior motive to push the band towards releasing albums via modlife, was the implication I got. then, agreeing to disagree after the modlife debacle, he washed his hands of any ownership over blink and said he “wouldn’t put his own money into it going forward”, according to Travis’s book. It’s what led them to eventually sign with BMG, which was set in stone right before he bailed a second time at the end of 2014.

yeah, that segment shocked me too. can't believe he was embarrassing them in meetings. and the stuff about the tour "breaking" their team was interesting too -- that they were so difficult to work with people who had spent years touring with them quit. i was glad he gave more detail on that era for sure.

as an adult, it's easy to see jen's perspective that tom was missing out on significant, crucial portions of their children's lives. but at the end of the day, is this not what you signed up for? she had been dating/married to a musician for the better part of a decade, one that had been continuously on tour, more or less, since 1995. like ghent said, you think you would've hired a babysitter. or brought the kids on the road with you, like mark or travis tended to do. one could glean that that weird competition mark writes about was driven primarily by jen. maybe it was her distrust in the band that drove her, and thus tom, further away too. it's easy to be parasocial about this stuff and make assumptions -- and i think it's also too easy and sexist to "blame the wife" when it's obvious tom is pretty quirky altogether. but it's just so weird now on the other side of this that tom seems like a changed man post-divorce. on the outside, it definitely feels like something toxic going on, so much so that we as fans picked up on it before mark ever even wrote the book.

i think it's just a weird inside joke that might sound funny out loud but reads very differently in print. i'm sure dan ozzi was like "whatever you say boss" but it definitely feels very weird in the book lol

@Thibaut182 i updated some of the timeline pages on the public site, and added some new pics to them. i also updated the highlights section for more recent events. there's still plenty of work to do lmao, esp outside tour dates, but i decided to do some. i also updated the "thanks" section to give you bigger credit at the top, since you run this day-to-day. thanks for all your hard work.

those new clips are so great. crazy good quality, would kill for the whole shows.

Yeah it was very disappointing that he glosses over like seven years of history in a few pages. There’s something uncomfortable there he’s not ready to talk about. extremely underrated blink song. Mark grappling with recognizing that things have to change. He was so clearly on fire in the dude ranch era

It seemed more like a long running inside joke, or something to tease her about. Not one of his better anecdotes

Honestly I feel like you kind of CAN blame Tom based on almost everything we know, which is quite a bit. According to the book, he deliberately avoided telling Mark and waited until the project was well into development to even tell him about it, only then underselling it as a simple acoustic thing. He then also left him in the dark as the coterie of agents, managers, label execs and Travis (!) got involved. part of me feels like Travis hasn't been as truthful regarding his participation. is there something we don't know about mark then? was he annoying or pissing people off, driving people like rick, tom, travis, even jerry finn to want him absent? then, for Tom to play both sides — this went way beyond my control, but also I’m fine with doing radio, tour, promo, videos — is telling. that and he had originally asked for time off after his back injury… Mark says this in the book, but you’d think that if he really needed the time away from touring, he wouldn’t mount two full-scale tours back to back like BCR did in 2002. what seals the deal is that after having sort-of buried the hatchet, two years later, Mark was mistakenly copied on emails about Tom’s secret solo project (this was in 2004, right before they broke up). why would tom again be looking for the door or planning something solo without being truthful to mark about it? Mark even writes: “The message to me was clear: Tom thought I held him back from greatness.” while it sounds like conjecture and somewhat parasocial to analyze, i've always felt like it was entirely duplicitous of him. it feels like tom got what he wanted -- fame and fortune -- and became embarrassed with their image and sound. maybe he got tired of sharing the limelight with mark. mark mentions the wife and life arms race they were having in '01. he even says that tom became secretive when he wasn't previously, and if you read between the lines, it's not hard to glean that a lot of tom's problems stemmed from his marriage. perhaps there were people in his circle like jen that pushed him to do things like BCR and later AVA that made *him* more of the star. at the end of the day, it happened and there was no obvious reason for it to happen. it's just fucked up it did and i'm surprised to this day that mark can forgive him, honestly. way to humiliate him at the peak of their success on the world stage.

He’s clearly not ready to talk about it. The slightest hint — that he had initially expressed skepticism at inviting cowriters into the once insular process — is perhaps as close as we will get for now. Was it Travis steering the ship? An evident lack of chemistry with Matt? Mark admitting he felt washed? We won’t know the answers for this until years from now. He compresses 2017-2020 into literally a page and a half. The fact that he outright admits that NINE “didn’t connect” is about as far is he willing to go. He somewhat hints he was just going with the flow with the label’s interests — considering they’re presumably still with the same execs/team, maybe he doesn’t feel like trashing the process? part of me wonders if the entire concept of accepting cowriters was an early, tacit acknowledgement that nothing could replace the true blink — Mark, Tom and Travis — and that the new era should be graded differently.

Initially I thought the idea of a partially scripted book tour was unique but that does sound pretty disappointing. I guess it makes sense not to have a Q&A — given some of the sensitive subject matter in the book — but it seems unnecessarily guarded in a weird way

It also could be completely innocuous at the end of the day — Tom was busy on the road, or on a preplanned vacation, or something. Maybe he and Finn weren’t that close after all and the bond was stronger with Mark. Who knows. It tracks that Mark would let it incense him at the time, but who knows what was happening.

Makes complete sense. It’s honestly really nice to see them settle into a legacy live act

I still can’t believe that they’re touring again with a pretty large slate of dates. Tom really must’ve made a huge change in his life to agreeing to being on the road this much, because I know he hated it for so long. It’s honestly great to see them so active