Surf Cat

I smoke a lot of weed, so the studios I record in smell like that. But when I was recording Tickets to My Downfall, Travis Barker, the album’s executive producer, was always burning this because he doesn’t smoke anymore. It made the studio smell like home to me. It’s this really powerful scent. I’m huge into scents — I’m always burning something — so I had to grab some for my house. Every time I burn it, it reminds me of making the album.

My father had the same Montblanc pen his entire life. The top of the pen had this white cap, almost like the top of the mountain the brand is named after. He would just change the cartridges once it was out of ink. My dad was super-proud of that pen, so it’s always been a special brand to me. I am big on writing things down. I have a thing for good pens. With a Montblanc, right when you touch whatever you’re writing on, the ink is super-fluid — my dad’s pen was always like that. It’s almost a metaphor, because you want the ideas to just flow out of you; you don’t want something to stop them. There’s nothing worse than when you have to shake a pen to get it to work. You can lose an idea that way. I couldn’t afford a Montblanc pen earlier in my career, but when I finally got one, I was like, Yeah, this really is the best pen.

When it comes to rolling weed, there are a lot of options. A classic blunt, Swishers, cigarillos, raw papers. Then there are Backwoods, which are my favorite. You just kind of go with what rolls best for you. I probably go through a 100-pack of Backwoods in a week — it’s me and three or four other people smoking them. They’re leaves; you unwrap one and empty out the tobacco from it. It’s always better to stuff a Backwoods because they smoke a lot better that way, so we put two, maybe three, grams of weed in.

Vlogs for artists didn’t really exist when I first started out. It was like Soulja Boy, Wiz Khalifa, me, and a few others who were doing them super early on. I was a big fan of Jackass, which is why I started doing vlogs — I called them Kelly Visions. We were doing gnarly shit — jumping off of roofs into a dumpster with a skateboard — and I was like, People have to see this. I really like being in charge of my own narrative, because allowing other people to be in charge of it can be risky. Not a lot of people get it right. So I got really into editing and production. I have a lot of input in all of my music videos, and I create every behind-the-scenes video I do. I use Adobe Premiere for everything because I like the layout. I used to use Final Cut, but the display on Premiere is a bit more mature than the updated version of Final Cut, which started to feel a little bit too much like iMovie.