Machine Gun Kelly beamed into the Late Late Show on Tuesday night (Jan. 19) to talk about his many extraterrestrial encounters and play his new single, “Concert For Aliens.”
But first, Colson Baker described to host James Corden how and why he decided to take a break from rhyming to release his more pop-punk-oriented album Tickets to My Downfall.
The rapper-turned-singer explained that he “disappeared for a year” to work on the project and by the time his label found out what he was up to, “the whole album was just done and I was just like, ‘here, you have no choice.’” He said there’s even a video of him vibing to the record in a room full of label staffers, bobbing his head after which, he joked, half of them were like, “Okay, I quit.”
He said the whole thing felt like a “metaphor for jumping out of the line,” which will hopefully encourage labels to take more chances. He also talked about the recently-released coming-of-age film Downfalls High, which he described as his twist on the usual high school love film, which doesn’t find the hero losing and then regaining his true love, but — spoiler alert — getting stuck in the messy aftermath.
Setting up his performance, MGK got really real with Corden, tripling down his belief in life on other planets by revealing that he’s had a number of alien encounters. Like, this year. “Homey, I saw life on this planet that was from another planet two nights ago over a lake in Thousand Oaks,” said MGK, sitting on a couch under a lavender neon sign bearing the title of his Hotel Diablo album. He described it as a “red orb” that came out of nowhere and then disappeared, which came after he saw a blue orb over the skies in Bora Bora the week before reports of a similar object crashing into the sea near Hawaii.
“They’re out here… they’re all looking at Earth, like, ‘You guys are so dumb!’ Everything we’re doing the past year is so dumb!,” he said. MGK then returned to rock “Concert For Aliens” with frequent collaborator Blink-182’s Travis Barker on drums, strumming his pink electric guitar in a graffiti-scrawled bathroom while a trio of teen rhythmically pretended to throw up into toilets.
Watch MGK on the Late Late Show below.
