Travie McCoy

I've been producing since the early stages of Gym Class Heroes. A lot of the songs on the first 'Papercut Chronicles' were actually beats that I made.

Being a kid during the '80s, I feel I didn't really get the full experience.

I'd like to be remembered as someone that lived life by his own rules with no regrets.

I'm proud I've been able to pay my rent doing what I love because I hate real jobs.

'All In' is like the Giants motto, so I kind of took that, and I kind of used New York as the backdrop - how diehard New Yorkers are for their team. Me being a New Yorker, I just had to show my love for the city as well as my love for the New York Giants.

When I was playing junior football when I was a kid, we were the Geneva Giants, so it was kind of embedded in me to be a Giants fan.

'Billionaire' is basically about, you know, like 'Brewster's Millions.' It's me talking about what would happen if I would somehow manage to become a billionaire. What would I do with the money? Don't get it wrong, I'm far from a billionaire. I think I just made it out the 'thousandaire' category.

With anything I do, it's hard to categorize it. With any project, I just go in and blindly start writing songs and then find out which way we want to go with it.

No one in my circle calls me 'Travis.' Even my family, at a young age started calling me 'Travie.' So I want people to feel comfortable calling me 'Travie.' It's almost like inviting people in.

Pain is definitely a genius in his own right. 'Thr33 Ringz' is definitely one of my top 10 albums. It's one of those albums you listen to front-to-back.

Anyone who takes the craft of songwriting seriously I radiate towards. Spending time with Daryl Hall was a dream come true. I picked his brain a lot because Hall And Oats is timeless.

I'm on tour all the time, so I stop at thrift shops. The minute we hit a town, I'll have my assistant Googling thrift stores. I have him go check beforehand; then we go there.

I'm not a big bulky jewelry dude.

The best thing I ever bought is my dog Stitch. He's the best friend & companion.

DJ Sliink is amazing, and his production is on the next level. There are a lot of EDM producers that I'd like to work with, not for the sake of having an engineered record, but for the fact that I love their production and music.

A lot of underground hip-hop will inspire me as far as rhyme patterns - really wordy, intelligent lyrics.

I think it's hard to put a finger on my music. My music has always been an amalgamation of everything I listen to, which includes everything and anything under the sun. Hip-hop to country to R&B to pop, all the things I'm inspired by find a way into what I do.

Since the inception of Gym Class in 1997, every member has had another musical outlet, if not three or four.

I feel like a lot of people in the hip hop world don't take me seriously as a rapper, and I feel that first-and-foremost I came up as a rapper before I started singing. All a lot of people know from me is 'Cupid's Chokehold,' and they don't scratch the surface and see beyond that dude who sings the song about his girlfriend.

I think anything we do outside of Gym Class Heroes still falls under the Gym Class Heroes umbrella. There's really no method to the madness. With Gym Class, it's more of a democratic process, and when I'm working on solo stuff, it's just me, either working with producers or sitting in a room by myself. They balance and complement each other.

I took vocal lessons for the first time and actually learned a lot about using my voice as an instrument as opposed to just doing what I've always done and going by feeling. I'm still doing that, but I've learned a lot of tricks and how to manipulate and play with my voice a little bit.

A pound of Alaskan king crab legs and buffalo shrimp = happy Travie.

When the fishbowl gets too small, it's time to pack up and leave and jump into the lake or ocean.

We didn't want to worry about the formula that has been implanted into our brains - this verse/pre-chorus/chorus format. When we were writing 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea about any of that. We didn't know how to count bars or how to write what's considered a well-formatted pop song.

The first record we put out on Fueled by Ramon, 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea what the term 'producer' meant. It was just us writing songs, and we are trying to go back to that - singing in a room and vibing off each other.