Whether you’re 2 or 92, Travis Barker is a household name for music fans around the world.
This weekend, the 40-year-old drummer brings his 9th Annual Musink Festival to the OC Fair & Event Center in Southern California. With a killer lineup featuring Snoop Dogg and Taking Back Sunday, the festival is not only about the music. Barker will have over 25 tattoo artists on site including Paul Booth, GTC’s Tattooland, and Spotlight Tattoo.
“I’m so stoked for Snoop Dogg and Deftones to take the stage at Musink,” Travis told us exclusively. “I’m also really excited to play with Yelawolf and Transplants the first day. People may not have heard of Plague Vendor yet, but they’re such a good band and I think they should check them out too. The whole festival is just going to be awesome.”
We’re only three months in to 2016 and Barker has already been super busy. Just last month, the Blink-182 drummer performed with Pitbull and Robin Thicke at the 58th Annual GRAMMY Awards and brought his kids as his dates.
“This is the third year I’ve performed at The GRAMMYs and also the third year I’ve brought my kids. I feel like I can’t take anyone else,” Travis said. “My kids are the world to me and memories like those you’ll cherish forever. They won’t remember me buying them a bracelet or a new pair of shoes, but they’ll remember walking down the red carpet at The GRAMMYs and whatever memories we create there. They love music and I think they both want to pursue music, so I like to show them every side of the industry — the GRAMMY side, the touring side, and even the endless hours of practice that goes into performances.”
In addition to The GRAMMYs, Barker performed at Shaun White’s Air + Style snowboarding competition and it was totally killer. CelebSecrets4U was on site at the festival and we totally loved the vibe of his set.
“It’s cool. I mean I’m so like not specific to one genre, ya know? You’ll hear The Ramones, Drake, ASAP Ferg, Refused, and Fagazi in my set, so it’s really unorthodox. I grew up happily confused, so I always feel like when I took on the role of DJing and drumming, I needed to play what represents me. It’s not a bad thing if people come to my set and learn something from it,” he revealed.
For the rest of 2016, Travis will be working with Blink-182 to release more material. When we asked Barker about the album, this is what he told us:
“We’re faced with a problem we’ve never been faced with before. We have too many good songs and we don’t know which ones to put on the album. We’ve never had that. We’ve had like maybe 14 songs at one time and it was so easy to say ‘I know these 12 go on there.’ This record has 26 potential songs, so it is really hard to choose the right ones.”
This is definitely a great problem for Blink-182 fans.
“I think [the album] is everything you’d expect from Blink 182. Even with a member change, I think you can expect some pieces to be a little different too but in a really good kind of way. On this album there’s the classic Blink sound everyone knows us for, a couple departure songs, and even some dangerous songs that’ll make you wanna drive fast and hit somebody. There’s all sorts of stuff on there and it’s an album I’m really proud of.”
There is no set date for Blink-182‘s album yet.
Reporting and photo by Michelle Jacquot for CelebSecrets4U
