Machine Gun Kelly has a year of sobriety under his belt and he has girlfriend Megan Fox to thank for helping him stay “completely sober from everything” since he quietly entered a rehab facility last year. “I’m completely sober from everything. I don’t drink anymore. I haven’t drank since last August,” MGK, 34, told Bunnie XO on her Dumb Blonde podcast on Monday (August 5).
Kelly said he went to rehab after wrapping up his European tour in July 2023. “I didn’t tell anybody outside of the [people] closest to me. That was my first time I ever went to rehab,” he told Bunnie, the model/influencer/podcaster and wife of country star Jelly Roll. “They just gave me so many ways to operate the body, show where this anger is coming from, and methods to quell it.”
He said he met with a number of therapists and psychiatrists, some of whom “gave up on me,” before he came to peace with his condition. “It’s a constant tightrope walk,” he said of sobriety after admitting he “went the f–k off” with drugs in his 20s.
“I continue to embrace that this journey is gonna be hard for me, but I accept it and forgive myself. I’m also really hard on myself, very self-deprecating,” he said, while also thanking longtime partner actress Fox for standing by him. “Megan has for sure been extremely helpful in dealing with the kind of psychological withdrawals that come with [sobriety]. I love that I’m clear when I look at the person I love. I’m really happy that I’m clear when my daughter [Casie] and I are having our conversations and I’m coming from a place of being centered and holding space for what a child needs from their parent, which is patience and advice.”
The one thing MGK joked “kills” him is that at one point Bunnie asked the singer if he was up for a drinking contest with his “Lonely Road” collaborator Jelly Roll, and a sober Kelly had to politely decline. “It just kills me because I just know I would have f–king drank that man under the table!” MGK laughed during what was otherwise a very measured, intense pod.
The conversation also touched on the rapper/rocker-turned country crooner’s difficult childhood, including a mea culpa for the anger he’s previously expressed in interviews about his parents, especially his late father. “They deserve forgiveness,” he said of some of the comments earlier in his career he made about his traumatic upbringing. “He [MGK’s father] was so tormented from some of the most insane s–t I could imagine a kid could go through that he had to figure it out with almost every possible bad circumstance going against him.”
The singer, born Colson Baker, grew up the son of Christian missionaries and he described the trauma of his father being implicated in the murder of his own father when he was nine-years-old. “The story that was always told me was that their dad dropped the gun and his head essentially blew off,” MGK said haltingly about the horrifying accident and the generational “curse” he’s been told about by mediums in reference to the men in his family. “That all happened in the room with my dad at nine-years-old. So him and my grandmother were tried for the murder. They were both acquitted.”
He recalled his dad’s “gnarly” freak outs whenever a young Colson would make loud noises, a reaction that made the rapper “hate him,” though he know realizes that what he was reacting to was his father’s childhood trauma. Though he didn’t go into details, MGK said he discussed the incident with his father when he was on his death bed, which made the musician realize he’s “projected myself to be somebody who has the stamina to endure… all these things that come with fame and criticism and hate because I fought back with all those traumas by becoming what I always wanted my dad to be, which is like tough, and shake everything off and fight anyone that comes at you.”
The nearly two-hour, wide-ranging chat also touched on MGK’s troubled relationship with his mother, whom he also admitted to “misrepresent[ing] her a lot early in my career.”
Listen to MGK talk his rehab stint on Dumb Blonde below (sobriety talk begins at 1:46:45 mark).
