Machine Gun Kelly doesn’t have a death wish, he just acts like it. That’s what the Billboard cover star told Howard Stern on Wednesday morning (March 30) during a visit to the SiriusXM talker’s show, in which he opened up about his intense love affair with fianceé Megan Fox and how intense therapy helped him exorcise some of the demons that haunted him for most of his life.
Stern wondered if “Machine” (as apparently only Stern is allowed to call the Mainstream Sellout star, who now prefers his birth name, Colson Baker) is really serious about wanting to burn out and fade away early as he sings on his new album’s ghoulish “Sid & Nancy?”
“Do you think you have a death wish?” Stern asked. “That was actually a text that Megan had sent me, it was something along the lines of ‘if we have to live a life where we have to see each other with different people then we should just go out murder/suicide,’” Kelly said in a raspy, gravely voice in reference to the Sellout song that features the doomy couplet: “Once we met, I cannot love someone again/ Cut my chest, gave you my heart and soul.”
To Baker, 31, that idea was “very romantic,” but, obviously, not literal, even though he said in December that he once stabbed himself to “look cool” for Fox. Combined with reports that the couple drank each other’s blood when they got engaged and the lyrics to the new song “5150” (which MGK later performed on Stern’s show), the radio host wondered if there was a dangerous theme weaving through the couple’s love affair.
“This is the first true intense relationship that I’ve been in,” Baker said, noting that “5150” — which includes the plea “Leave, leave me now/ Please, please, save yourself/ Leave, leave, me now/ Before I hurt someone else” — was the first song he wrote for Sellout and that at the time he did think the pair were in a “dangerous place” in their PDA-heavy, headline-grabbing romance.
“At the time, yeah, I think we were in a dangerous place… what led us to search for healing in ways of, like, the plant medicine, ayahuasca” he said of their experimentation with the intense psychoactive, psychedelic brew that can bring on altered consciousness; the singer delved further into their trip on Tuesday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!
He said he also began therapy to deal with some childhood trauma that was unresolved and that he wasn’t aware he needed to deal with. And though he’s talked in the past about feeling abandoned by his mother as a child, Baker said he’s since reconnected with her “in a cool way” and regrets how he’s painted their relationship in past interviews.
“Through my 20s I was still acting like the 9-year-old me who was mad that, like, I didn’t understand what was going on,” he said, apologizing and regretting how the “angry, uninformed me” portrayed the person he now realizes “loves me as her son… all is forgiven.” One of the reasons they finally reconnected, he revealed, was because a fan informed him about a locked safe left behind by the singer’s late father that contained a trove of letters MGK’s mother and father had written to each other over the years.
“It was beautiful, man, the way that Megan and I would speak to each other… it was like he wanted me to see him for the him before the alcohol and everything took over his life,” he said of his dad, who died in July 2020. “I saw him the way that my mom saw him when they first fell in love. And I was like, ‘wow.’” When he tweeted about the letters, a fan found his mother’s e-mail address and told her that it seemed like Colson was reaching out.
A short time later, he flew her out and they had a tearful reunion. That reconnection was followed by a string of deep-dives into his trauma via a variety of modalities, from psychotherapy to “cubicle therapy,” EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), the ayahuasca trip and Hirudotherapy, which involves medicinal leeches.
MGK also told Stern that when he was asked to be in the recent Jackass Forever movie he told them not to treat him “like a celebrity,” but rather to give him the full hot order. “I was originally supposed to be in that mime sketch with the snake that you had to be silent while the snake came up and bit your lip,” Machine said. “I was really glad the scheduling didn’t work out for that one.”
