Machine Gun Kelly is not having a good day. When he sits down at the lobby terrace of the Edition Hotel overlooking Times Square, he looks like he’s itching to get right back up and bail.
“It’s a dark day today in my f–king head,” says the rapper, who goes by his real name, Colson Baker, as an actor. “Anyway, what’s up?”
In fact, just to let you know exactly what kind of mood he’s in, he tells you straight off that he’s already walked out of another interview earlier in the day.
“It was actually nobody but myself to blame. I was in a bad headspace,” he says. “I don’t ever wanna bring my bad vibe around anybody. But I didn’t have the option of staying inside today.”
Clearly, on this midsummer late afternoon, Machine Gun Kelly is residing somewhere inside “Hotel Diablo,” the troubled headspace that also serves as the title of his fourth studio album, released in July. “It’s a place that travels with me constantly, I guess,” he explains. “That’s why I tattooed it on the back of my head. It’s a mind state. It’s a place you can’t really check out of.”
For MGK, “Hotel Diablo” — with “diablo” being Spanish for “devil” — symbolizes “the truth … it’s the part before you see something polished, all the jagged edges. On my other projects, I would smooth out the edges a little bit. But on this one, I just had no energy to smooth out any of this.”
“Hotel Diablo” wasn’t a Beyoncé-style surprise release, but it was dropped on MGK’s label, Bad Boy/Interscope, without any notice. “No one had any clue I was even making this album, so no one had a chance to touch it. It was done upon delivery,” he says. “The album I had originally made and was about to turn in, I deleted. I played it for my friends, and I watched the whole room look at me like, ‘I don’t feel anything.’ ”
Drinking a bloody mary (“It’s like food, man”) and rocking silver rings — including one made by a friend that says “Misfit” — MGK, 29, says that he’s working through his own demons in “Hotel Diablo” tracks such as the single “I Think I’m OKAY,” featuring Yungblud and Blink-182’s Travis Barker. “That’s why the kid is on the cover, the childhood picture of me,” he explains. “I’m talking about all those problems that I’ve obviously kept inside since I was a kid and haven’t confronted.”
Some of those problems stem from being abandoned by his mother at a young age. The heavily tattooed Ohio native — who got his rap handle from his rapid-fire delivery — addresses that desertion on the new track “Burning Memories.” “This one’s for the mama that I never knew/I took acid just to burn all of my memories of you,” he raps over the moody groove.
“There’s few memories to even burn in the first place ’cause she left when I was so young,” he says. “But the ones that are there … I’ve numbed those parts out of me.” Plus, he adds, “I’m obviously an avid LSD user … I don’t think it’s a secret.”
Meanwhile, “Glass House” looks at artists who have died young, from Nipsey Hussle and Lil Peep to Mac Miller and Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington. “I had personal relationships with all of them except for Peep — and that was me kinda calling myself out for not having a relationship with someone who was coming up and was also so much like myself,” he says of the rapper, who died from an accidental overdose in 2017.
As for Hussle, who was murdered in March, MGK says, “Nip is one of them people where it’s like I still feel his presence all around … I was at his funeral, and the power that I felt inside that building was indescribable.”
Reflecting on those early deaths, the star admits that he has been his own “most dangerous enemy. I’ve had points during times when I was on something that you’re like, ‘Oh, this feels like my body’s shutting down. This might be it right now.’ I have them fears sometimes, but I’m trying to live forever though.”
The main reason MGK — whose tour with Young Thug hits the US in October — wants to stick around is for his 11-year-old daughter, Casie, with ex-girlfriend Emma Cannon. “Hope I’m alive to see my baby get her cap and gown,” he raps on the “Hotel Diablo” track “Death in my Pocket.”
“There’s this beautiful privilege that you have as a parent where you can just stare at your little mini-you and daydream about all these moments that are gonna happen in their life,” he says. “She really makes me sane. But when I’m away [from her] … you can get lost. And in those moments when you’re lost, the first thing that pops in your head is those daydreams and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I need to find my way home so I can have these moments.’ ”
Another anchor has been his BFF, “Saturday Night Live” comedian Pete Davidson. The two, who co-star in the upcoming comedy “Big Time Adolescence,” bonded last year over the public drama they went through when MGK was linked with singer Halsey — which led to a feud with her ex, rapper G-Eazy — and Davidson split with Ariana Grande after a quickie engagement. While the two felt like “some of the most hated people on planet Earth,” as the rapper describes, their bromance blossomed.
“It was a rough ending of that year, but the way that we started off 2019 … we were focused and determined and not gonna let the narrative continue to be decided by the public,” says MGK, who wears a Rolex given to him by Davidson as a symbol of their friendship: “You ever meet somebody and you’re like, ‘Were we separated at birth?’ It was one of those things. I probably credit some of how tight we became to how much weed we both smoke.”
MGK, who also appears in an upcoming, as-yet-untitled Judd Apatow film starring Davidson, has more movie projects on the horizon, including a Netflix sci-fi flick with Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But his dream role is the Joker: “If you look at the Joker, what a chance to just let all your demons out in front of everyone’s face … being able to get away with being the you that you wish you could be in front of everybody.”
But when envisioning himself 20 years from now, Machine Gun Kelly hopes he’ll be demon-free. “I’d really, really like to be emotionally stable,” he says.
“But I don’t want to say content, because I always want to be hungry and chase being the best. But I’d love to be emotionally stable, man.”
Editor: Serena French; Stylist: Anahita Moussavian; Groomer: Sonia Lee for Exclusive Artists using Harry’s; Production: 3Star Productions