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
