Travis Barker is opening up about flying for the first time since 2008, and how with girlfriend Kourtney Kardashian makes him feel “invincible” when he’s with her.
In an interview with Nylon published on Wednesday (Sept. 8) that praised him as “The Pop-Punk Patriarch,” the 45-year-old Blink-182 drummer and his girlfriend traveled back in time to relive the trips he’s taken with Kardashian this summer. In August, the couple flew from Los Angeles to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, via Kylie Jenner’s private jet. The trip marked his first flight since surviving a deadly 2008 plane crash that killed four people. “With you anything is possible,” Barker captioned a photo of him lifting Kourt outside of the jet at the time. He told Nylon that the two-hour flight was “the easiest ever” and he felt “awesome” after.
Weeks later, the lovebirds took flight to Italy and watched the Dolce & Gabbana show in Venice while sharing tons of sun-kissed snapshots. Most recently, the all-star couple hit the City of Love, a.k.a. Paris, that was captured in even more romantic moments outside of the Eiffel Tower.
In June, before making the trips, he had contemplated the idea of once again taking to the skies by tweeting, “I might fly again.” But it wasn’t until Kardashian, 42, came into the picture that he felt like it was possible — and she had all those exact places they have now traveled to in mind.
“It’s still something very new to me, but having something that gives me the strength and hope to be able to overcome things that were so traumatic in my life, it just says a ton,” he said in his Nylon interview. “She’s definitely that for me. I’m invincible when I’m with her. It’s like I never dreamed, I never even considered flying again.”
He explained how he “made a deal with her that she had just said to me, ‘I would love to do so much traveling with you. I want to go to Italy with you. I want to go to Cabo with you. I want to go to Paris with you. I want to go to Bora Bora with you,’” Barker recalled of their conversation. “And I said, ‘Well, when the day comes you want to fly, I’m telling you I’ll do it with you. I would do anything with you. And just give me 24 hours’ notice.’ And that’s what she did.”
While Kardashian has gotten Barker to get on a plane again, he’s gotten her to get into the studio more often. Machine Gun Kelly, whose Billboard 200-topping album Tickets to My Downfall was executive produced by Barker, told Nylon that the two make up reasons to hang out in the studio all the time while bringing their famous significant others along. “Our girls [Kardashian and Megan Fox] are like, ‘I swear to f—ing God, if you guys go to the studio every single day, we are going to f—ing leave!’” he said. “We had to be, like, banned from the studio from each other for a minute.”
But someone who is a fan of studio time is Kardashian’s 9-year-old daughter, Penelope, who was recently gifted a custom pink drum kit that has her name in script on the bass drum from her mother and Barker for her birthday. “You can’t be pushy, but you’re like, ‘Oh, do you want to learn to play something?’ And she’s always bright-eyed and like, ‘Yes, like I’m so excited to learn how to play.’ So she caught on really quick, like super quick,” he said, adding that he’s been giving her regular lessons.
“Not weekly, like, ‘OK, Penelope, we have to do lessons today,’” Barker shared. “But when she wants to learn then, or learn something new, I like being there to fill that little space, that creative space in her head. I think next, she’s just going to record something at the studio.”
