When Blink-182 decided to record a new album with Matt Skiba in place of Tom DeLonge, there was a lot of pressure on the band. Luckily they delivered a solid album with “California” but there was a bit of an adjustment period in regards to the writing process.
Matt Skiba recently spoke to Ultimate Guitar about writing the album, and he says that the original songs he wrote did not sound like Blink.
“I would bring a song into the studio, we’d work on it, or I would send a very crude demo to Mark and Travis and then go in the next day and kind of learn it, and everybody bring their own thing to it. We were doing this for several months. The songs were good. It was cool but it didn’t sound like Blink. The songs I was bringing in sounded like [Alkaline Trio].”
Skiba went on to say that things changed for the better when the trio enlisted the help of producer John Feldman.
“It has to be something special, powerful and something the fans are going to absolutely love and we just weren’t really getting that. We were talking about different producers to work with and John Feldmann was one of them. He was the first guy we went into work with and the first song we wrote together was the first single off of ‘California,’ ‘Bored to Death.'”
