This poignant track is a departure for Blink-182, a skate-punk trio known for their goofy antics and love of toilet humor. The band's bass player, Mark Hoppus, wrote it when he was in a state of depression about being on tour and having no one to go home to. "Tom [DeLonge, guitarist] and Travis [Barker, drummer] always had girlfriends waiting back home, so they had something to look forward to at the end of the tour. But I didn't, so it was always like, I was lonely on tour, but then I got home and it didn't matter because there was nothing there for me anyway," he told
Rolling Stone in 2000.
Although the lyrics unfold like a suicide note, the end of the song is a message that things will get better - which was true for Hoppus, who met his future wife on the set of the
Enema Of The State video "
All The Small Things."
Hoppus was also influenced by a tale of teen suicide. Guitarist Tom DeLonge explained: "The story behind that is Mark read a letter someone sent him as an email, that a kid wrote before he committed suicide to his parents. We kind of got together and wrote this sad, slow song. It came out sadder than we ever thought it would, which is good too. Any song that moves you is good. Some people listen to it and go 'Wow, that's a real bum-out of a song.' But it's one of those things, a story of a kid not being happy in his life, crossed with us being really lonely on tour. At the end of it there's a better way out, there are better things to do than kill yourself."
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The lyrics, "I traced the cord back to the wall, no wonder it was never plugged in at all," were inspired when guitarist Tom Delonge was playing in his garage and he and his amp were in a puddle. Luckily, the amp was not plugged in or he could have been electrocuted.
The line, "I took my time, I hurried up, the choice was mine, I didn't think enough," refers to the 1991 Nirvana's song "
Come As You Are." There, the line is, "Take your time, hurry up, the choice is yours, don't be late."
Mark Hoppus explained during a Twitter Q&A session that one of the lyrics referred back to an incident in his childhood days when his parents were "headed for divorce."
Remember the time that I spilled the cup
Of apple juice in the hall
"They were arguing in their room behind a closed door and I was in the hallway listening, frightened, to their muffled voices," Hoppus said. "Suddenly the noise stopped, their door opened, and I ran, spilling my apple juice."
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The song came under fire after 17-year-old Greg Barnes played it on repeat as he committed suicide in his family's garage. Barnes, a Columbine High School student, was grieving the loss of his best friend who was murdered in the mass shooting at the school a year earlier. The band was devastated by the news, but took to MTV to stress the song's anti-suicide theme. Hoppus told MTV News:
"I was actually out shopping, and management called me up and told me the story of what happened, and I was like, 'But that's an anti-suicide song!' It felt awful. I mean, the things that the kid had had to go through in his life were very saddening, and then to end it that way was really depressing. But 'Adam's Song,' the heart of the song is about having hard times in your life, being depressed, and going through a difficult period, but then finding the strength to go on and finding a better place at the other side of that."
According to Travis Barker, despite the song's anti-suicide message, its title was inspired by a sketch from the '90s comedy series Mr. Show where the metal band Titannica plays a song encouraging a fan to commit suicide.
This was the album's third single, following "
What's My Age Again?" and "All The Small Things." It peaked at #2 on the Modern Rock chart.
The album was produced by Jerry Finn, who mixed Green Day's hit 1994 album,
Dookie, and produced Rancid's
And Out Come The Wolves... in 1995. Punk rock was heading towards a more polished sound, and Blink hoped Finn would help take them to the next level.
"He was involved with the cooler punk rock bands that were doing really big, produced albums," DeLonge told
Wondering Sound in 2014. "So that was the thing to do, was to elevate the art form, and we wanted to be on par with the most elevated."
The band worked with Finn through two more albums until he died of a brain hemorrhage in the summer of 2008.
Roger Joseph Manning Jr., a session musician who played in Beck's backing band for several years, played piano on the track.
The music video, directed by Liz Friedlander (Celine Dion, Deftones), features the band performing in a warehouse decorated with photos that tell stories of quiet desperation from unnoticed folks in their vicinity - from a man being left alone after an argument with his girlfriend at a Blink show to a sad-looking woman attempting to make a phone call outside of a convenience store where the guys browse magazines inside.
For Friedlander, it was important to highlight the people who typically go unnoticed in our day-to-day routines.
"We never know what's going on in other people's lives - people who we have relationships with, but also the people you sit next to at a concert or pass on the street, these humans you brush up against," she told NPR in 2018. "We all are dealing with our stuff, and we don't look, and don't see, and so then we don't notice."
This was used in the 2022 movie Good Mourning, starring Colson Baker and Megan Fox. It was also featured in the TV shows Daria ("Just Add Water" - 1999, "Of Human Bonding" - 2000) and Roswell ("Blind Date" - 2000).