Travis Barker Gets Candid About Kourtney Kardashian, Flying, and Taylor Hawkins

Photography by Sam Dameshek

Styled by Christopher Kim in Tommy Hilfiger

From the beginning of his tenure with blink-182, Travis Barker was the “serious” one—an oasis of relative calm and maturity among the dick jokes and dirtbag expressions that animated his bandmates. Barker worshipped jazz drummers and practiced for hours every day, but almost more importantly, this studied devotion to his technique was coupled with the je ne sais quoi separating real rock stars from the pretenders. 

So maybe it’s not surprising that, a couple of decades on, Barker has remained renowned for his musicianship and style while aging into a mentor for a newer generation of artists: an example of how to marry stardom with plain hard work. The night before we meet at Manhattan’s Baccarat Hotel, Barker capped off an appearance at Tommy Hilfiger’s New York Fashion Week show with a live performance of an original song just a few minutes long that he nonetheless practiced 10 hours for. “Music is my religion; it’s all I do,” he says, very seriously, from his seat in the hotel dining room. “From the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep every day, I’m either producing or writing or performing. Besides my kids, that’s all I know.” 

This dogged commitment has allowed Barker to live multiple lives in the American mainstream, beyond the pop-punk dominance of blink-182. He has become the go-to drummer across musical genres and generations, performing with rappers and punks alike, and oversees the careers of burgeoning stars like Willow and Machine Gun Kelly. He is also, notably, a new celestial body within the Kardashian universe, following his public courtship of and marriage to Kourtney Kardashian. The future holds a great many plans he’s excited about, though he politely refused to hand out any spoilers (most notably regarding the persistent rumors that guitarist Tom DeLonge will rejoin blink-182, years after his departure.) [Ed note: Today, the original trio announced a world tour and new music.] We talked to the musician about paying tributes to bygone friends, relearning how to fly, what keeps him going, and much more.

L’O: Over the last couple of years, you’ve been more visibly working with younger artists. What pushed you in that direction? 

TB: COVID happened, and it changed everything. I’m usually in my studio for a month, and then I’m pulled away to do shows or whatever, and I was just in my studio. So it was really easy. I had finished producing a bunch of stuff for Trippie Redd; I had done one song for Machine Gun Kelly; and then we had this little crew that was always hanging out. Then right around that time, everyone was on lockdown—and I was like, fuck it, I’m just gonna stay in the studio every day and write and record because no one knew what was going to happen. I literally stayed in my studio for 20 hours a day, every day, for like, six months, and co-wrote and produced [Machine Gun Kelly’s 2020 album] Tickets to My Downfall. I just work with people I want to work with; I don’t have a manager who puts me in the studio with artists. Kelly and I have known each other for 15 years; he’s come to blink shows, and I’ve watched his whole career. I’ve been like a mentor to him, and he’s been like a brother to me. So everything pretty much happens organically. It was so fun to not tour and just be in the studio and create stuff and do everything you don’t normally get to do.

L’O: Having seen the music industry change, what’s the advice you share with young artists that you wish you might have gotten at the start?

TB: You don’t know until you live through it, right? When blink was at its highest, the label would just tell us what to do. We didn’t know we could be like, We don’t want to do that—we just thought you do what you’re told if you want to be on the label. But we were also so good at making fun of ourselves; my experience was the perfect balance of not taking yourself too seriously. I didn’t have any sort of mentor aside from when we’d talk with people who were more experienced than we were, but you learn something from every tour. A great song is still what you need, before TikTok can work for you. There are a lot of people writing catchy songs, and some of them are just 20 seconds of a song that are popular on TikTok, but other people are making great albums, you know? Turnstile’s record [2021’s GLOW ON] was great from front to back; it’s not supposed to trend on TikTok. I see it all the time where a song is very popular on that platform, but when the song actually comes out, it’s not popular. I don’t pay too much attention to that part of music, but a great song is key; and usually if it’s a great song it can be produced a million different ways, including just an acoustic version. But I tend to love albums; in a time where everyone’s single-driven, I like to put on Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and be very pleased. 

L’O: You just got back from playing the tribute show in London for Taylor [Hawkins, the long-time drummer for Foo Fighters, who passed away earlier this year]. What was that experience like? 

TB: It was bittersweet. I knew Taylor for a long time; I left home around the time I graduated high school because my dad had said, “You’re either going to work a 60-hour-a-week job and pay rent, or go play drums and do this music thing, but you’re not going to do it here.” A friend of mine called me; I was like, “I’m just gonna work; my boss wants me to join the Army,” and he said, “It’s a huge mistake: Come sleep on my couch and play in this punk band I started.” Long story short, we started playing every Thursday at these clubs, and Taylor would always come. I was a trash man playing in a punk band, skating every day, and Taylor would come to my shows. He wasn’t Taylor Hawkins yet; he was to a lot of us, but nobody really knew of him. He would just be like, “Man, I come every week to watch you play drums; you’re gonna go somewhere, man.” 

It was so nice to have support from someone I didn’t even know; we’d just talk drums. Then, a year later he’s in Foo Fighters and a year after that I’m in blink, and we’re in Australia together. Our friendship just kept growing, and then, oddly enough, life brought us both to Calabasas, just two miles from each other, so we’d see each other all the time. I’d see him at the bank; we’d keep in touch over text, or he’d just call me randomly to talk about The Police songs, just out of the blue: “Did you ever notice Stewart [Copeland] did this on “The Bed’s Too Big Without You”? Just dorky drummer stuff only we would understand. So it was bittersweet, but an awesome tribute to him.

L’O: In the last year, you’ve been public about your return to flying. [In 2008, Barker was a passenger in a catastrophic private plane crash that killed both pilots and two of his fellow passengers, and nearly required the amputation of his foot.] What would you share about that, for someone dealing with the same feelings of anxiety about flying? 

TB: I was crippled by it; I wouldn’t even look at a plane. I remember when my daughter Alabama was little, maybe five or six years after my accident, she had an aviation field trip. I’m not gonna make my little girl go by herself, but deep down I’m like, Damn, I don’t want to go either. But it’s hard for her because she knows what happened, and she’s never flown either. And then we couldn’t even walk on the plane; she ran out bawling, and I was just so upset. 

So I’d always put it out there: I’ll never fly again; I’m never going to Brazil, never going anywhere unless people find a way for me to get there. I’d travel six days to New York on a bus, and ten days from New York to London on a cruise ship. It was hell, but it was all I knew. I was stuck in my ways, and really cool with not flying again; I was just married to music, good with being in the studio 20 hours a day and coming home just to sleep. But then one of my best friends [Kourtney Kardashian], who I worked out with every day—we got really close and found love. She would be like, “I want to take you to so many places,” and it was almost painful to hear because I was so restricted—I’d put these handcuffs on myself. Even someone saying, “Could you just try,” would give me nightmares for days. And then I said, “If you ever want to try, don’t tell me—give me less than 24 hours notice, and we’ll see what happens.” She did that, and it worked. I don’t think I would have done it if I wasn’t in love, and feeling invincible. And I’ve flown 20 times now. 

L’O: What are you pursuing that you’re excited about in the future?

TB: [Smiles] Next year will be crazy.