Quotes by Travis Barker

• We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.
• 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'm super serious about that stuff. I mean, it's rare that I sit down at a drum set when I'm not touring, because we tour so much.
• I've always liked Dennis Chambers, he's real flashy.
• In 1996, I was in was in an acoustic kind of rock band, we were called Feeble. We were just playing locally.
• My chops are still up, even though I'm not still in high school.
• 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.
• Oh, I was super serious about practicing and rudiments, and still am. I still have all my books.
• On tour, you never have a home, you don't get used to anything, and you're always super busy.
• We all liked the Descendants and stuff like that, so we started playing it. It's not that it was really hard, well, it does take skill to play fast and keep up your stamina. But it was something that just happened.
• We just wanted to write a bunch of songs that we thought were good songs.
• We just wrote songs that seemed good to us. We wrote the album in like two weeks. We could have had more time, but we accomplished what we needed to in the two weeks.
• We never worry about the big things, just the small things.
• We were concerned with having good songs, not just songs that go two hundred miles per hour.
• In junior high, I sang in madrigals, men's' and women's' choir. I played piano too, but then I got out of it.
• I was told once if I kept breaking things on my legs, that I wasn't going to be able to walk soon, you know? I wanted to be a pro skateboarder, but it was too hard. I was trying, but it wasn't going to happen.
• Then I tried out for the Fontana High School drum line, in Riverside, and I did really well. I got second chair, and played snare in that drum line for three years.
• 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.
• My mom listened to the Beatles and Elvis, a lot of different types of music.
• 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.
• And I played in jazz band as well during all three years in school.
• And I was in another band called Flash In The Pan, which was soca, Latin music, down in Laguna Beach.
• Bill Stevenson of The Descendants is really good, too.
• But really, anytime, I play on a practice pad as much as I can.
• I can play punk rock, and I love playing punk rock, but I was into every other style of music before I played punk rock.
• I like Steve Gadd, everything he did with Steely Dan. There's so many. I like everything.
• 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.
• I was playing with the Aquabats, and then I quit to join a band called Suicide Machine in Detroit.
• I play Orange County drums. I love those guys. I've got a four piece kit.
• A lot of people think that punk rock musicians don't know what they're doing.
• I practice every day, I warm up before I play.
• I used to have friends come on tour and work as my drum tech, but they get bummed out when I have to tell them what to do. This time I'm just going to fly them out and let them hang. It's all good.
• I was a kid, and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to play the drums, you know? All I wanted to do was skateboard, but I was still learning and taking it in, so it was good.
• I was in a band called Hooker for a while.
• 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.