Machine Gun Kelly opens up about his dad being tried for own father’s murder

The singer’s father stood trial when he was only 9 years old.

Machine Gun Kelly is getting vulnerable about the life experiences that led to his passion for music.

The singer opened up about a particularly dark chapter in his childhood on a recent episode of Dumb Blonde, a podcast hosted by Bunnie XO, the model, influencer, and wife of country singer Jelly Roll.

MGK, whose real name is Colson Baker, grew up the son of Christian missionaries. The family lived in Germany, Kenya, Egypt, and Texas all by the time Baker was a teenager. When his father was only nine years old, he was implicated in a gruesome event that irrevocably altered the course of his whole family’s lives: the murder of his own father.

Machine Gun Kelly the 2023 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue release party.

DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY

“The story that was always told me was that their dad dropped the gun and his head essentially blew off,” Baker told Bunnie XO. “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.”

Baker also connected his early childhood trauma to his passion for music, saying, “I was a really shy, f—ed up kid, internally, and really broken. I’m just now fixing myself and I don’t have the energy to be the image that I was, because I’m also kinda sick of being on an island alone, outside of my fans who can really read into the music.”

Baker has discussed the event before, most prominently on the 2022 Hulu documentary Machine Gun Kelly’s Life in Pink. There, Baker can be seen flipping through a personal scrapbook titled “MY BLOOD!” He comes across a June 6, 1968 article from the Albuquerque Journal with the headline “ARMY CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER IS FOUND SHOT TO DEATH AT SANDIA BASE APARTMENT.”

“I watched my Dad suffer a lot. He watched his dad die in front of him,” Baker narrates. He describes growing up with a father that was loving and invested but, despite himself, could be jumpy, depressive, and emotionally removed. Baker theorizes that, “Maybe I sabotage myself on purpose ’cause I just feel not worthy of being loved. It’s instilled from childhood, and you learn from the people that raise you.”

Baker’s young daughter Casie with ex Emma Cannon shared her own perspective on her dad’s troubled childhood in the doc, saying “I can see why my Dad is so depressed, ’cause like it kind of passed on through generations to him.”

“The wound’s too deep to heal,” he said in Life in Pink, “I kind of just transfer all my focus into drowning out my own pain with this noise.”

Baker’s most recent album under the Machine Gun Kelly moniker is Mainstream Sellout, which released in 2022. The album followed the Hulu documentary, and both of which came on the heels of an unprecedented level of buzz around Baker due to his highly public relationship with Megan Fox.

The two met when Baker cast her in the music video for his 2020 song “Bloody Valentine.”