"Distraction" follows and is filled with hand claps and a keyboard melody over verses lamenting death and destruction. "Do It for Me Now" originated from a beat DeLonge created in 2004 for rapper Talib Kweli, who turned the opportunity down; the Morse code beat was later adapted by the band and stimulated DeLonge's vision of the song being the soundtrack to "young lovers watching the sunrise." "The Adventure" is an "exhilarating ode to a beckoning future with a huge guitar sound reminiscent of The Cure." The song was motivated by a friend whose marriage was falling apart when his wife committed adultery. The situation had a deep impact on DeLonge in that he spent a night up crying for him when he wrote the track. "A Little's Enough" was inspired by a religious concept in which a God came to bring positive change on Earth when it faces terrorism, war or famine. "The War", an anthem about the Iraq War and its death toll, is succeeded by "It Hurts", a track about a friend of DeLonge's with a cheating girlfriend. "It's a terrible situation where my friend is being crushed from the inside out by all the manipulative stuff she's doing and this song's about that." During development, DeLonge often took his daughter Ava to an ice cream shop in San Diego, and on one occasion they wandered into a next door toy store and DeLonge was enchanted by the sound of a pink toy piano, which he would eventually purchase. He placed the piano in his shower and recorded "Start the Machine", which attempts to illustrate the state of "being on a boat as you're leaving a city in flames", only to find a tropical island and a more alluring place ahead. DeLonge considered it a reference to his time with Blink-182 and central to Angels & Airwaves' theme that "something special [can come] out of destruction." In September 2005, after spending months avoiding publicity, DeLonge announced his new Angels & Airwaves project and promised "the greatest rock and roll revolution for this generation." His statements—containing predictions that the album would usher in an "entire new culture of the youth" and lead to the band's dominance—were regarded as highly grandiose in the press and mocked and set sources in his belief that his album would become a recording critics would refer to two decades on as the album of the 2000s, or the sole successor to what he considered the most recent "important" album, Nirvana's "Nevermind" (1991).