Here's Your Letter

Blink-182 bassist Mark Hoppus explained the meaning of this break-up tune in the 2003 album's liner notes: "This song is about people's inability to communicate with one another and how words and explanations only confuse the issues."

Hoppus: "It's a song from which I wrote the verses and Tom the choruses and which are from two different songs. I don't know... It really worked! Lyrics are about a letter you're writing to someone in order to tell him/ her it's over, that there's no way it can work anymore."

The band's untitled fifth album was released two years after its predecessor, Take Off Your Pants And Jacket. In the interim, guitarist Tom DeLonge and drummer Travis Barker founded the side project Box Car Racer, a post-hardcore band that DeLonge described as an experimental creative outlet to explore darker, heavier themes outside of the uptempo pop-punk material of blink-182. The project exacerbated tensions in the band, with Hoppus feeling betrayed at being left out, but it was a huge influence on the next blink album. "I always tell people that record was blink-182's best record absolutely because of the Box Car Racer record," DeLonge told Billboard in 2017. "It had nothing to do with anything else in my opinion, because there was so much drama around the Box Car Racer record in the band that we all had kind of a coming to Jesus moment saying, 'Look, what are the things you're looking to do musically?' to me, and I said, 'This is the kind of stuff I wanna do. It's much more dynamic, it's more emotional,' and all those things I described earlier. So we said, 'Well, let's do that here.'"