Travis Barker shares rock-inflected cover of Adele’s ‘Easy on Me’ – watch

Travis Barker has shared a clip of himself giving Adele‘s single ‘Easy on Me’ a drum-driven rock infusion.

Posting to his 6.3 million Instagram followers on Tuesday (January 4), the Blink-182 sticksman shared a thirty-second clip of himself hammering the drum kit in his inimitable pop-punk style as a sped-up version of the ’30’ lead single plays. At the end of the clip, one of Barker’s drumsticks breaks. You can view the performance below.

It is the second high-profile cover of the ballad in recent weeks, after Kanye West’s Sunday Service Choir reworked it in Los Angeles on November 28 in honour of the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh, who died that day. The soulful gospel take imbued Adele’s words with new meaning, and in places changed them entirely, particularly on the lines “Go easy on me, father / I am still your child / and I need the chance to / Feel your love around.”

‘Easy on Me’ became an instant global smash when it was released in October of last year, bringing to a close a six-year period with no new music from Adele. It achieved the highest first-week single sales in the UK in four years. with 217,300 in the week of release – the most since Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’ notched up 226,800 copies in January of 2017.

Barker is expected to resume work with Blink in 2022 after bandmate Mark Hoppus completed successful treatment for cancer. The drummer spent the closing weeks of 2021 collaborating with Avril Lavigne; he lent his talents to her track ‘Bite Me’, which he drummed on in the studio and on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and released via his own label, DTA Records.

Hoppus confirmed in September that he is in remission from stage 4 diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. In November, he was named one of GQ’s Men of the Year, as part of a special edition of the annual issue exploring bravery. In an interview with the magazine, he opened the door to the possibility of Tom DeLonge rejoining Blink, possibly alongside his initial replacement, Alkaline Trio frontman Matt Skiba. 

“We haven’t really talked about that, but I’m open to anything in the future,” he said, per Kerrang!  “I don’t know how that would work if it’s all four of us. Like, we’re all going to live in the same house again?”