Blink-182's Mark Hoppus Talks Getting Older, 'After Midnight' -- Exclusive Photos

Blink-182 have made quantum leaps from the goofnugget songs that catapulted them to fame in the late '90s. Following a string of successful and critically acclaimed albums, the band went on indefinite hiatus after releasing their self-titled LP in 2006, a collection of songs that showed the band taking major strides and plumbing emotional depths they'd never before reached.

Seven years later, Blink-182 have reunited and recorded 'Neighborhoods,' their most ambitious album to date. The band takes that darker tone and stadium-reaching weight even further, and the result is the most musically and tonally complex work they have put on tape to date. Bassist and vocalist Mark Hoppus spoke to Spinner about getting the band back together and their most recent music video, 'After Midnight.' As a bonus, check out our exclusive behind-the-scenes photos from the video shoot below.

How did the 'After Midnight' video shoot go down?

We did the band performance section in a hangar that was built in the 1940s to construct blimps inside of. It's the world's largest freestanding wooden structure, so there's an interesting piece of trivia for you. It was just this really cool setting -- the way that they lit it, the way that they shot it. It just had this really industrial yet organic feel to it. It was a good combination of the two because it is obviously a giant superstructure but because it's wooden and because the way that they shot it with water on the ground, everything looked really organic as well.

What is the concept behind the video?

We went out to a lot of different directors on this one. I think we had 30 different submissions from different directors and 30 different treatments, some of which were great and some of which were not so good. This one with Isaac [Rentz, the director] stuck out. We trust Isaac, he did a great job on the 'Up All Night' video. We just told people we wanted something that was troubled. We wanted something that was a little strange. We didn't want the complete abandon of 'Up All Night' but we wanted something that was a little troubled because the song is a troubled love song. Isaac came up with this idea of a guy and a girl trapped inside of an insane asylum. They find one another, they escape themselves for the evening and they have a night of reckless romance before they get put back into their cells.

What is the relationship between 'After Midnight' and 'I Miss You?'

I think it's more lyrically. Tom did callbacks to several different songs that we had through Blink at the end of the second verse. When we wrote the song we divided the workload of writing the lyrics and writing the chorus between Tom and myself. I wrote the choruses and Tom wrote the verses and we didn't know what the other was going to write about but somehow they fit together well, which is the same thing we did on 'I Miss You.'

Has your songwriting process changed at all as your songs have evolved over the years?

Not necessarily. I think that it's a lot more fluid. Back when we started the band and all we wanted to do was write three-chord punk-rock songs, we'd write a song and it would kind of stay that way throughout the recording process. Now with Pro Tools and different things you can do with songs, I feel a lot freer to change an idea at any point during the composition. From the time that we start recording it until we send it to mix it could change a thousand times. We're a lot more open to different ideas and different takes on songs. But my process is still largely writing a song on an acoustic guitar and then putting that into a larger context.

Has anything changed on an interpersonal level since the band reunited?

Yeah, it's a lot different now than it was seven years ago. It's a lot better now; everybody is a lot more open to different ideas. Everybody is a lot more respectful of one another, a lot more willing to listen to other people and what they need and want. We're open to different songs. Everything is a lot more open and supportive. We are just in a much better place now.

Now that you're a father and you've settled down, what is it like playing your old songs? Is it weird?

It's great. I love it. I really love playing those songs. It's like a tattoo: It reminds you of a certain point in your life. It reminds you of where you were when you wrote it, what was going on in your life when you wrote it. Those songs are pieces of a scrapbook of all of our lives. I think that they are really great songs and even though we've been playing some of them for 25 years, every time we go on stage and play them it's still fun.

How are you going to expose your kid to your music? It can get inappropriate at times.

Oh yeah. My son has come on tour a bunch and he's asked why I get to say bad words on stage but he can't. I don't expect my kid to never curse or to say a bad word. My goal is to try and explain to him that there are places where you can say stuff and there are places where you can't say stuff. I put it to him like this: When you are in school and you're on the playground, you can run around and you can be silly and you can scream, you can play tag with your friends. But when you're in the classroom, you have to sit there, and listen to what the teacher is saying, and not raise your voice, and wait for your turn to talk. Bad words are kind of like that. There are places where you can say "f---" and there are places where you can't. The trick of being a human is to learn what that difference is.