Coming into recording with Rubin as the band's new drummer, DeLonge wanted to "do something that is a left turn from what people know of Angels and Airwaves," while also being eager to explore the concept of dreams for a long time. Following the Love project, he felt that many of the songs had begun to sound the same, and wanted to take a major shift in style by bringing in new people for the songwriting and production. This resulted in DeLonge and Rubin being the only composers on the album, while also bringing in Rubin's brother, Aaron, as the band's new producer. Much of ''The Dream Walker's'' recording focused on DeLonge and Rubin learning about how each other record. This resulted in letting Rubin do most of the composition while DeLonge acted as the primary lyricist, but also acted as a co-composer. During the production, DeLonge heavily praised Rubin's talent as a musician:“Ilan is the best multi-instrumentalist I’ve met in my life. He plays drums with Nine Inch Nails and he’s an incredible drummer, but he’s better at guitar than I am and he’s the best piano player that I’ve ever seen in my life! I grew up in a punk rock scene that was built as a vehicle to express emotion, but Ilan grew up as a fanboy of Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and Queen. When you mix those two worlds together, musically it became much more diverse. Ilan is the kind of guy that’ll sit there and read a manual until 4 in the morning on how to create his own synthesizer sound through a bunch of oscillators and I’m the kind of guy that’ll throw a bunch of paint on a canvas and go, ‘Wow, that’s fucking cool!’ so we’re polar opposites and I think that’s why we became a really good pairing.” - Tom DeLongeMuch of this recording process was documented for a video series on the band's YouTube channel. While Kennedy and new bassist,
Eddie Breckenridge, were not part of the process, DeLonge confirmed that they were still involved with the band, but via non-recording duties. == Release ==