Ep. 261: Travis Barker | Survival and Building a Legendary Career out of the Ashes

Today's guest is the drummer who took punk out of the garage, put it on your radio, then on MTV, then on your body. But his real story isn't the discography. It's what he did with everything that was supposed to end him.

From a four-piece kit in Fontana to the center of the album cover, Travis carries three things simultaneously that most musicians never figure out how to hold at once: the craft of writing a drum part as a hook — singing it in his head before his hands ever get there; the conviction that no genre gets to own him, and no one else gets to write his ending; and the contrarian edge to ban Auto-Tune, editing, and drum samples from his own studio at the exact moment the rest of the industry is sprinting toward machine-clean.

And The Writer Is... Travis Barker!

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CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro

1:51 Why the documentary sat for nine years

3:18 The producers pitch an ending: "Can you just walk onto a plane?"

4:51 Survivor's guilt: "They wouldn't want me to sit here and not fly again"

6:33 "The doc was dead to me" — and living your life like it's a movie

9:41 "I don't make beats." "Now you do. I need it in two days."

12:23 Beastie Boys, Bad Brains, Buck Owens — refusing the box

15:28 The drums are a hook, not a timekeeper

15:54 "That's not music" — the teacher who wouldn't teach him rock

17:25 How he actually writes a part: "I sing it in my head"

18:21 Learning the whole blink-182 set in an hour

21:29 Trash men in Laguna, and one store that sold their tape

22:52 The untitled album, and the day the process changed

25:57 The lyrics he wrote: "We'll have Halloween on Christmas"

27:15 "I Miss You" — the loop he had to convince them to keep

28:07 "You have to put your ego away to be a drummer who's a songwriter"

35:46 The burn center: "How am I going to play drums?"

36:25 The hand he couldn't feel, and why he told no one

43:20 "Too heavy for blink" — Boxcar Racer, and Mark

56:30 "There was no therapy for what happened"

1:10:19 What drummers should actually practice

1:19:29 AI: "I hate it" — no Auto-Tune, no editing, no samples

1:31:20 "All the Small Things" — the day Tom told him to open the valve

1:33:33 "Where's all the hits?" — the note that made Rock Show and First Date

1:35:15 "One More Time": writing about your own band breaking up

Credits:

Hosted by Ross Golan

Produced by Joe London and Jad Saad

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.