You can find episodes on frondsradio.com and be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, my twitter handle is @stoopkidliveson and I’d love to hear from you. You can find Ryan’s band, Premium Heart, on facebook, twitter, or instagram for upcoming releases and shows.

The original column was published on October 15th, 2019 and can be found below.

Do you hear me out there? I can hear you.

I got you, I can hear you alright.

This is so strange, I want to wish for something new.

This is the scariest thing I've ever done in my life.

Who do we think we are?

It's always been really hard for me to feel like I truly belong. I always get close, but I always feel like I'm just outside the core people who deserve their place in the inner circle. Lately, I've really been trying to take that big jump into the deep end and stop feeling like an awkward observer but own my role as a central figure in my own passions. And one of the things that really helped me re-focus my efforts is one of my favorite albums from the mid 2000s, Angels And Airwaves' 2006 debut, We Don't Need To Whisper.

Leave your pain on the bedroom floor again, bring a smile to survive

And do you think that you have that in you?

If you're here and you're all alone tonight, then I'll give you a free ride.

Take a chance 'cause I know you want to.

blink-182 was the first band I ever really loved. The first CD I ever bought, the reason I bought a bass, the first songs I ever taught myself, the reason I started my first band. There are plenty of pictures, videos, and recordings of me at 14 playing blink songs with my friends. Plenty of people fell in love with blink in the 90s and 00s, so this isn't all that rare of a sentiment. But even among blink fans, there's a lot of camps you can fall into. Those who consider them a punk band, those who call them pop, and the in-betweens. Scott or Travis? Is the Skiba stuff really blink? +44 or Angels? It goes on and on. But none are more pressing than the debate I hear more than any other. Mark or Tom?

For those who don't know, Mark Hoppus is the bass player and one of the singers, and Tom Delonge is the guitarist and other singer. Tom's the one with the voice. Where are you and I'm so sorry and all that. I will always love them both, but despite citing Mark as the reason I play bass (and for what it's worth, I do crib a lot of his fifth-based melodies and chord structures), I've pretty much always been firmly in camp Tom... and boy, oh boy, have I gotten a lot of shit for it. How much that contributed to my feelings that I was always just a little bit of an outsider, I don't know, but it certainly didn't help.

In 2005, when blink broke up, everyone blamed Tom. And then when Angels And Airwaves debuted, it was pretty divisive. It sounds nothing like blink, even with Tom's voice fronting the record. It's got these long, atmosphere-building songs, U2-inspired guitar sounds, lofty lyrics on war and grandiose takes on love. Tom took a whole lot of chances when he reinvented himself this way, and not everyone liked it. But man, I ate that shit up. At 15, We Don't Need To Whisper was a permanent fixture in my stereo and quite a few of the songs made it into my band's setlist. That June, I saw them with Taking Back Sunday and hearing Tom play the verses of "Down" by himself was the first time I ever cried at a concert. It was truly a defining moment for my teenage years.

But even then, I still had this... tinge of outsider. After the Angels set, people in our section, as well as the whole coliseum, stormed the floor to hop the wall and get on the floor. And I couldn't. I just kept thinking, "wow, those people are so cool, I could never do anything like that. Those are real punks. If I did that, they would just think I'm some poser." And th