Tom DeLonge

Background

Tom DeLonge was born on December 13, 1975, in Poway, California. His father was an oil company executive and his mother was a mortgage broker. He grew up in the middle-class suburbs of Poway, where he developed a love for skateboarding and punk music from a tender age. While attending church camp, he learned to play the guitar and fell in love with the instrument. DeLonge’s parents had a complicated relationship that caused constant fighting at home, driving him to dive into music as a form of release.

During his junior year of high school, he got expelled for going to a basketball game while drunk. This forced him to attend Rancho Bernardo High School, where he met his girlfriend Anne Hoppus, her brother Mark Hoppus, and Scott Raynor. The three boys would form the band Blink-182, recording their first song in 1993. By 1996, the band had created enough buzz that MCA Records offered them a contract. DeLonge enjoyed mainstream success with his group’s 1999 album “Enema of the State,” which was an enormous commercial success. DeLonge and Blink-182 set the tone for pop-punk music throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

In 2005, DeLonge left Blink-182 and started the band Angels and Airwaves. They released their first studio album, “We Don’t Need To Whisper,” in 2006, followed by “I-Empire” in 2007. A year later, after drummer Travis Barker survived an airplane crash, DeLonge returned to a reunited Blink-182. Fall Out Boy and Weezer supported the band’s reunion tour, which was successful enough to sell out arenas nationwide. In January 2015, DeLonge announced that he was leaving Blink-182 to focus on other projects, including novels and solo albums.