Travis Barker
Travis Barker
Travis Landon Barkeris an American musician and producer, and the drummer for the American rock band Blink-182. Barker has also performed as a frequent collaborator with hip-hop artists, and with the alternative rock band +44, the rap rock group the Transplants, the alternative rock band Box Car Racer, and most recently with Antemasque. He was a frequent collaborator with the late DJ AM, and together they formed TRV$DJAM...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDrummer
Date of Birth14 November 1975
CityFontana, CA
CountryUnited States of America
My mom passed away a day before high school started, and her dream was for me to be a full rock and roll guy, and play drums in a band.
With rock music, it usually revolves around the band. You go in as a band and probably take about a year to record an album. But for a hip-hop song, you can create a track and an idea with verses and choruses in a day, and get three different people on it. It seems like you're able to do more with hip-hop.
But there's actually a lot of punk bands out there that go out of the norm, use odd time signatures, or a lot of different tempo changes in a song.
I listened a little to punk when I was younger, but it was straight edge punk. It was nothing like what is going on now, like poppy punk.
Playing my drums is therapy.
I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.
I practice every day, I warm up before I play.
But really, anytime, I play on a practice pad as much as I can.
I like Steve Gadd, everything he did with Steely Dan. There's so many. I like everything.
And I was in another band called Flash In The Pan, which was soca, Latin music, down in Laguna Beach.
I want to keep pushing the limits for drummers and expressing myself,
I've always loved playing in bands where there's like three or four people and we're all throwing out ideas and coming together to make an album.
All I wanted to do was ride skateboards - I wanted to be a professional skateboarder. But I had this problem. I kept breaking half of my body skateboarding.
I learned the songs and played the gigs, and then they called me about a month later. They told me they were like super stoked on me and asked me to join their band.