Blink-182 were determined to step things up on their third album. The Californian trio had made a big breakthrough with the puerile punk-pop of their 1997 second record Dude Ranch and now they made a plan to up the ante across the board: more puerile, more punk, more pop. Nowhere is that final ambition better summed up than on their indelible anthem All The Small Things. The second single to be released from 1999’s Enema Of The State, it became their biggest ever hit, the sort of song that takes a band from out of one lane and into another, a mainstream crossover that turned Blink-182 into an arena-dwelling global phenomenon.
Though it had been released as part of the record six months earlier, All The Small Things only really took off globally when released as a single in the UK in March 2000, 25 years ago this month. Things were already rapidly heating up for the band, with Enema Of The State’s lead single What’s My Age Again? doing the leg work in setting the stage for another huge leap up the commercial ladder. But no-one quite had any idea just what a huge all-conquering hit its follow-up would become.
It was written towards the end of recording sessions in LA for the album when the band decided they needed one more hook-laden song that would be catnip to radio stations. DeLonge went home and wrote just the thing, penning an ode to his then-girlfriend (and later wife… and later ex-wife) Jennifer Jenkins, about whom he'd spent months on the road touring Dude Ranch pining to be home with.
“It’s a pretty little ballad,” he said in an interview at the time. Influenced by the Ramones, its wordless chorus also came about because he'd hit a lyrical hurdle. “I put na-na’s in it cos I couldn’t think of any words.” What is certain is that All The Small Things is the sound of someone head over heels in love - the lyrics saying, “She left me roses by the stairs / Surprises let me know she cares” were an actual thing that Jenkins did.
“Tom is totally, 100 percent faithful to his girlfriend,” DeLonge’s bandmate Mark Hoppus said to Rolling Stone when asked to describe him. “He’s pretty straightforward. He hangs out with his girlfriend, and he believes in aliens.”
Although DeLonge had fulfilled his own brief in writing a song that was impossibly straightforward and filled with undeniable, melodic hooks, he was also unsure about just how route one it was.
“It was one of the last songs we recorded, because it was so simple it wasn’t that much fun to play,” he told Kerrang!. “But once we put it all together and played it as a band, we all looked at each other and said, ‘This song’s huge!’. Once we recorded it and heard it, it gave us the chills. We looked at each other and knew we had this little piece of magic. We knew that thing was going to be a gigantic thing, I don’t know how, but we just felt it straight away.”
Their intuition was not wrong. All The Small Things turned Blink-182 into world beaters and became their most successful single. That, in part, was down to its accompanying video and its parodying of an array of superstar pop acts at the time. As Mark Hoppus explained in an interview a few years ago, their radar wasn’t quite as well attuned with foreseeing how well that would go down.
“It was directed by Marcos Siega and he told us the concept for the video and I remember saying, ‘This isn’t funny, no-one is going to like this video, there’s nothing funny about it’,” Hoppus told Rock Sound. “It probably ended up being our most well-received video and people thought it was genius. I guess my issue with it was I didn’t have any frame of reference, I didn’t watch any of these pop bands, I didn’t know any of the videos we were spoofing. I was totally wrong, it turned out great!” It wasn’t just a highly-successful video that Hoppus got out of the shoot, either – it’s also where he met his wife Skye Everley, who worked for MTV at the time.
DeLonge’s initial reservations about All The Small Things did come full circle, though. In an interview in 2022, he explained that he had come to regret his vocal delivery in the track. “I sound like I’m four years old!” he joked. “Four times a month, there’s a cover band somewhere playing that and someone I know has filmed it and sent it to me and I go, ‘Really?!’. We have a lot of really cool songs in Blink and it’s weird to me that’s the one.”
