Tom DeLonge likes to think big. Whether setting out to deliver a multiyear, multimedia message of hope and peace or single-handedly transforming the music industry and Interwebs with one bright idea, DeLonge is never shy about using 20-point Scrabble words to describe his legacy and vision.

The tattooed skate brat from suburban San Diego has certainly kept himself busy since abandoning SoCal pop-punk trio Blink-182 in early 2005, after 13 years and millions of albums sold worldwide. He launched his latest band, Angels & Airwaves, before the Blink corpse was even cold, and together with former Boxcar Racer bandmate and guitarist David Kennedy, drummer Atom Willard of Rocket from the Crypt, and, most recently, bassist Matt Wachter from 30 Seconds to Mars, DeLonge has spent the last three years crafting the love-and-life themed band.

"We were all pretty much at a point in our careers that if we weren't going to be ambitious, then we weren't living up to our experience," explains DeLonge on the phone from Toronto. "So now, with all of the pieces in place, we can put forth a band that really believes in the spiritual consciousness of human beings and their connectedness. It kind of became a really cool case study to start out with an idea and then give it its own life."

With two albums, We Don't Need to Whisper (2006) and I-Empire (2007), a recently released documentary DVD titled Start the Machine, and a forthcoming feature film, also called I-Empire, all under the Angels & Airwaves banner, DeLonge's focus is now on the Internet. His latest project, Modlife, is a Web site that connects kids with their musical idols using tools like e-mail, instant messages, chat rooms, and video conferencing. Bands who use the site can sell music and do pay-per-view events. Imagine MySpace meets Facebook-for a fee.

"The music industry is having a hard time because it's in an area of evolution right now where kids are used to having the Internet on, the TV on, the radio on at the same time," says DeLonge of the relevance of a pay-for-access site. "They like multidimensional, multisensory input, you know, so what we're trying to offer is the whole spectrum of an artistic idea to interact with. When you give them the entire spectrum of the idea, it really seems to have a much larger effect."

Delivering on DeLonge's mission to not just be about music anymore, the Angels & Airwaves space on Modlife is a busy mishmash of multimedia inspired by I-Empire. Devised as a sister album to We Don't Need to Whisper, the release itself is loaded with stabby piano bursts, orchestral builds, DeLonge's patented puppy-love lyrics, and guitar-driven pop hooks. Thick layers of digital effects and synths give the record a new-wave texture that ultimately saves it from sounding too pop-rock generic while bringing it closer to delivering on the human-connectedness concept.

"We started this record with the right frame of mind and all of the band members having the same goals and the same logic," DeLonge explains. "We created landscapes based on a theme that we wanted to challenge ourselves with."

Angels & Airwaves open for Weezer at GM Place on Friday (October 10).