Machine Gun Kelly on why his new pop-punk album is called Tickets To My Downfall.
While Machine Gun Kelly's career in 2020 couldn't be more exciting, the musician – real name Colson Baker – has explained to Kerrang! the darker meaning behind the title of his upcoming pop-punk album, Tickets To My Downfall.
After having a conversation with a friend late last year and stumbling across the phrase, MGK instantly knew that he wanted to give the record that exact name. And it quickly then spawned a writing session for Tickets To My Downfall's opening song, Title Track (that name in particular being “an ode to early 2000s pop-punk culture”).
Read this: How Kurt Cobain influenced Machine Gun Kelly
To describe the meaning behind Tickets To My Downfall, Machine Gun Kelly details a metaphor of the Goodyear Blimp, flying high above in the sky without anybody paying attention.
“As soon as that Goodyear Blimp catches on fire, or that thing starts falling from the sky, I guarantee you every single eye is going to look up at it; every single phone is going to capture that moment; every single person is going to talk about that, right?” he explains. “‘The Goodyear Blimp falls from the sky.’ But do the headlines ever say when you wake up on this casual fuckin’ Wednesday that the Goodyear Blimp is floating, alive and well? No. And that’s kind of sad: that it takes you to crash and burn to get people to pay attention to you again.”
He adds: “Tickets To My Downfall couldn’t have been my debut album because people wanted to see…” he trails off. “I had to get to a certain height to then decline and crash, and people are aware of this height that I’m at, and they don’t want to see it rise anymore; they want to see it crash. There had to have been a journey for people to care about to still be tuned into, to then see destroyed.”
The full Tickets To My Downfall tracklist is as follows:
1. title track
2. kiss kiss
3. drunk face
4. bloody valentine
5. forget me too ft. Halsey
6. all I know ft. Trippie Redd
7. lonely
8. WWIII
9. kevin and barracuda (interlude)
10. concert for aliens
11. my ex’s best friend ft. blackbear
12. jawbreaker
13. nothing inside ft. Iann Dior
14. banyan tree (interlude)
15. play this when i’m gone
Read this: Machine Gun Kelly: From rap devil to pop-punk god
