Machine Gun Kelly’s new album Lost Americana has landed – yep, the one with the trailer narrated by Bob Dylan.
Fans are already digging through the tracklist for clues about his personal life, but he’s gone ahead and confirmed some of it himself on The New York Times’ ‘Popcast’.
The penultimate track, “Treading Water”, is about his stay in rehab over Christmas 2024 (he first went to a facility in 2023). On the bridge, he sings, “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.”
In another verse, he appears to nod to his on-and-off relationship with Megan Fox: “The beast killed the beauty; the last petal fell from the rose / And I loved you truly, that’s why it’s hard to let it go / I broke this home, but I’ll change for our daughter, so she’s not alone.”
On the podcast, MGK admitted the music “speaks better than how I would be able to articulate it,” but still opened up about the rehab stint and his split from Fox (the pair welcomed a daughter in March).
“Here’s the real truth,” he said. “I spent Christmas and New Year’s — 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.”
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Elsewhere in the episode, MGK talked about the pop gem “Sweet Coraline”, named after the 2009 animated classic and influenced by The Strokes. The idea came after a surreal fan encounter in New York, when a tourist 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 said. “There is so much complexity in simplicity … every one of these, I got a story. 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.”
