Machine Gun Kelly‘s new album Lost Americana is here (you know, the one Bob Dylan casually narrated the trailer for). While fans are already mining for details about his personal life in the songs, the musician addressed some aspects himself on The New York Times‘ Popcast.
On the podcast, MGK revealed that the penultimate track “Treading Water” is about his time in rehab in late 2024 (he first went to a facility in 2023). “I wrote this in Room Three, spending Christmas in rehabilitation/I got no phone, just a cell that I’m trapped in while my home’s vacant,” he sings on the bridge.
In another verse, he seems to address his on-off relationship with Megan Fox. “This’ll be the last time you hear me say sorry/That’ll be the last tear you waste on me crying/I broke this home,” he sings. “Just ruined their holiday, and lies don’t die, they grow/And everything you try to hide eventually shows.”
Though he told the podcast that the music “speaks better than how I would be able to articulate it,” he did open up more about his rehab stay and split from Fox (the two welcomed a daughter in March). “Here’s the real truth,” he said. “I spent Christmas and New Years — the whole month of December and late November — in a rehab facility. I came out, the world was very loud about me and my personal business. Ironically, neither me or Megan have said anything. Still, to this day, there could have been zero drama, and you would never know, ’cause none of us have said one thing. It’s all claims and things that have happened out of our control.”
Elsewhere in the podcast, he spoke about the pop gem “Sweet Coraline,” named after the 2009 animated classic that was influenced by the Strokes. He says he was inspired to write the track following a bizarre fan encounter with a tourist in New York, who approached him and asked, “How did you fumble Megan Fox?”
“To be fair, I think as a songwriter, I’ve been really slept on for a long time,” he added. “There is so much complexity in simplicity … every one of these, I got a story,” he said. “The point of something about ‘Sweet Coraline,’ you could dismiss it, ‘Oh, it’s a song about a girl.’ This is a song about one sentence that I extrapolated into an entire record.”
From Rolling Stone US
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