I’m catching MGK in a happy place. You wouldn’t know it from his expression, which is dour and serious, or from the tones of black he’s in today—black bandana tied low on his brow, a black Henley open at his neck, the edge of his enveloping blackout body tattoo visible at his neck—but this is a guy riding a professional high. His bristling, ideas-packed seventh album, Lost Americana , has been buoyed along by the pop-inflected singles “Cliché,” “Vampire Diaries,” and “Miss Sunshine,” and by videos that show MGK, real name Colson Baker, 35, dancing, goofing around, and shedding any pretense of studied seriousness or cool.

This is just another shift in a career full of transformations—in sound, look—that have marked MGK, formerly Machine Gun Kelly, as a dramatically mutable star, and invi

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