“I have a lot of things going on right now, I just can’t talk about them. I have to be careful what I say, but super big things are in the works; dreams coming true, that’s all I have to say. My dreams are coming true.”
Even with his close-lipped and coy approach, 20-year-old Travis Mills cannot hide his boyish grin and genuine excitement when talking (or not talking) about the big things that are about to happen for him. Better known as T. Mills, this half hip-hop, half pop artist has been working on the current project of creating his own genre of music for the past year and half, yet it seems that he just might be on the brink of really showing the world what he can do.
“When people ask me the kind of music I play, I say two words, it’s hip pop,” Mills says distinctly. “I’m making my own sound. It’s like a mixture between, I want to say pop rock choruses with hip-hop and rap verses.”
At 12-years-old when Mills was growing up in Riverside, Calif., he first started to explore his interest in music and dabbled in just about everything in his adolescence before ending up pursuing his current style.
“First instrument I ever played was drums, so I played drums in this shitty rock band,” timelines Mills. “And then I quit drums and started playing guitar. Played guitar in a shitty rock band. Then I got into death metal, so I started screaming for a bunch of like hardcore bands, I sucked at that. And then my first band that actually started doing anything with … was like Fall Out Boy style music, like pop-rock, and that was the first band I ever sang for and then when we broke up, I just started rapping, like freestyling and doing all that and I just had this idea to write pop-rock choruses and then hip-hop verses.”
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With his mohawked hair, minimal bare skin real estate due to his collage of tattoos and a plethora of piercings, one might not expect Mills to spit the freestyles that he does. Yet that concept was how he recorded his first EP Finders Keepers, digitally released in July 2009.
“This project started like a year and a half ago, just me on my computer,” says Mills. “I made a song on Garage Band and I made a MySpace page and just kids picked up on it and it just really went from there. I’d make songs on my laptop by myself in my room and then I started getting some attention, I signed to an independent record label called Uprising Records, they put me in a studio, [and] I recorded an EP.”
This fast-forward lifestyle has seemed to be the standard for T. Mills. Songs on Garage Band, MySpace page, record deal. Followed by studio, EP, nationwide summer festival tour.
“I got on Warped Tour two weeks before Warped Tour started … literally a week before I left for tour, I booked two days in a studio. I came in with seven beats and I freestyled my whole EP in two days… I came in there with just the music, I had no lyrics written or anything so it was pretty quick.”
The term “quick” does not even crack the surface. From making songs in his room and playing for online listeners on MySpace, Mills played his first live show ever on a Warped Tour stage for a festival of hundreds, if not, thousands of kids, and shared a summer-long bill with artists like Bad Religion, Less Than Jake, NOFX and 3OH!3.
After returning from the summer tour, Mills refined his music by adding a drummer, hypeman and various techs to his live set as well as working on new music that was still aiming to be entirely unique.
“I don’t really draw like influences from other artists, I kind of just do my own thing. It’ll come to me randomly like if I’m just driving and you know I see a sign that has a cool phrase I’ll take that and I’ll just like start writing a verse off of that.”
Even though Mills actually sat down and prepared for some of the new tracks he recorded, he didn’t steer too far away from his hip-hop roots and freestyling approach to first release a mixtape that is out this month before releasing his first
full-length later this spring.
Mills say the Foreplay Mixtape is similar to his first EP with freestyle verses laid over other people’s instrumentals, but his first LP entitled Ladies and Gentleman, which is slated for release on April 20 (not purely coincidental of this also being a holiday for smokers), has had Mills logging tons of time in the studio.
“I’m actually sitting down and writing choruses and coming up with concepts,” explains Mills about Ladies and Gentleman, “I want to have a themed album. Every song is going to be a little bit different but it’s all going to tie into the last song.”
Ladies and Gentleman is also slated to be a 20-track album with 10 songs using Auto-Tune and 10 songs without it, and then Mills plans on releasing “a bunch of B-sides after that.” This album will also be dropping smack dab in the middle of T. Mill’s other current major accomplishment – the Bamboozle music festivals.
After John D, the creator of Bamboozle, heard T. Mills’ s music he called him up to invite him to record the theme song of this year’s festivals, appropriately called “Bamboozle,” and play all dates of the festivals with his self-described live set “for everyone” that includes dance, pop and rap songs. Mills says “we can play shows with rappers, we can play shows with rock bands, we can play shows at nightclubs… just a little bit of everything.”
When asked what he wants to be doing throughout 2010, Mills does not flinch or even skip a beat as he says plain and simple – “Touring.”
“I just want to stay on the road, I don’t want to come home. I love it. I’m addicted to it… Waking up in a new state every single day, meeting new kids every night; playing shows is why I love doing this. That’s what everyone in my camp loves doing, it’s like a natural high.
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