LOS ANGELES — On first listen, or even fourth, the songs of Michael Gordon, a guitarist, producer and vocalist who performs as Mk.gee, are not the sort one imagines generating a modern frenzy.
Cracked, shrouded and fuzzy, with jazz, AOR and classic rock DNA — far from the trendiest of building blocks — Mk.gee’s music can feel like a strange whisper or a brief tantrum. Its hooks are sneaky, the payoff more often implied than obvious. And it’s never one thing for very long before warping into something else or stopping altogether.
His breakout album, “Two Star & the Dream Police,” which Mk.gee considers his official debut, is just over 30 minutes long. At concerts, he has taken to playing a track called “Candy” twice. With repeat exposure, it all starts to click.
“This record was supposed to feel like a little forest fire,” said Gordon, a boyish 27, with greasy hair and an understated murmur, from the porch of his Silver Lake, California, home and studio, in a rare interview. “Little refractions of perfect songs amid a lot of chaos and weird atonal moments,” he added, calling it “a new recipe” that he hasn’t quite perfected.
Yet since the independent release of “Two Star & the Dream Police” in February, and especially since the sold-out spring tour where the album’s 12 songs blossomed, that fire, stoked by word of mouth, has been spreading wildly. And it’s putting Mk.gee’s status as a connoisseur’s cult figure — your favorite musician’s favorite musician’s favorite musician — at risk.
John Mayer and Eric Clapton, who compared Mk.gee to a young Prince — “He has found things to do on the guitar that are like nobody else” — have also fueled the blaze. As have Frank Ocean, Kendall Jenner, Charlie Puth, Tyler, the Creator, and the fashion house Jil Sander. Already, Justin Bieber has become an improbable collaborator.
But it’s a growing legion of true-believing fans who are spinning surface-level hype — so common in the music world as to be ineffectual — into a deeper, borderline-religious devotion as they try to crack Mk.gee’s influences and pedal board setup like riddles:
Is that the essence of Genesis’ “Taking It All Too Hard” or Debarge’s “All This Love” they hear? (Both, and more.) “How Does He Make His Guitar Sound Like That?” (358,000 views on YouTube.) And what, “if anything,” is this odd little album about? (“I’m really into funny, mythical old stories — Celtic fables and stuff,” Gordon said. “That’s what the record felt like to me.”)
The myth has grown in live performances, including on YouTube, where Gordon has carefully curated the image of Mk.gee as an enigmatic hero wielding a guitar like a sword (and sometimes just a sword).
An international fall tour, beginning Sept. 2, will play like a victory lap for this year’s unexpected conqueror. It arrives in San Diego on Monday, Sept. 9, with a sold-out concert at the Observatory North Park concert hall.
Except Mk.gee — pronounced “mick-ghee,” a self-professed “dumb name” playing on his own, Mike G. — is not exactly surprised by the outsize reaction. This was the point.
“I made the best record ever,” Gordon said, at first as if it were slightly naughty to admit his ambition. But then he said it again. And again.
“Nobody in alternative music is allowed to be confident,” Gordon explained, adding curses for emphasis, “and be like, No, this is the best thing in the world. If you make alternative music, you’re supposed to do this, and if you make pop music, you’re supposed to be like this.”
“This should be pop music,” he went on. “In my head, it feels like pop music” — or at least, as a friend told him early on, in something of a dig, “like you’re trying to remember what pop music sounds like.” “The goal is the same,” Gordon said. “And there’s no reason I should be asking for anything less because I’m not a clown moving how somebody would move in pop music.”
It all might sound like a bit much, coming from a relative unknown surrounded by messy piles of secondhand musical gear and beer cans. But the beginnings of Mk.gee’s public persona are not a bit based on vintage rock star bluster so much as the single-minded focus of a prodigy just odd enough to make it work.
A loner from Linwood, New Jersey, a small shore town near Atlantic City, Gordon began writing and performing his own music during piano class by the age of 5. He switched to guitar and eventually fell under the tutelage of an upright jazz bassist, tearing the frets off his Fender six-string to mimic Jaco Pastorius.
As a teenager, he told the local paper, “After a while, rock is like the same thing over and over,” adding: “Jazz is something that has a little more soul.”
Naturally, Gordon didn’t fit in — not in a family full of teachers, a town full of jocks (“I was kind of a corny kid”), the clam shack where he worked summers or even his own gigging garage band (“I was like, OK, well — not even in a cocky way — I can play your instruments better”).
After high school, Gordon escaped to the West Coast, attending the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, which he said was “ran like a frat — they want to break you.” He dropped out before graduating. “Everybody hated me,” Gordon added. “Now they use my name to recruit people.”
Chronic disappointment led to self-sufficiency, and Gordon learned to record himself, fiddling first with GarageBand and a four-track Tascam in tandem. (He calls the handful of resulting mixtapes and EPs “experiments.”) He accepted the isolation wrought by his exacting standards, coming to see his inability to fit in as an asset.
“I don’t want to be related to,” Gordon said. “I don’t feel like you at all — I feel like an alien. Why would I make music any other way?”
“Ironically,” he soon found, “that’s when people relate to it.”
It was during the pandemic that Gordon honed the sonic language of Mk.gee, and found the tribe to back his pursuit. These breakthroughs came largely alongside the musician Dijon, a twin flame whom Gordon described as having “the same chip on his shoulder — and maybe not in a good way.”
The first time the two wrote together, it went all night. “We were both trying to kill each other musically,” Gordon recalled. “You know, really testing each other. And it got to a zone where we were like, OK, yeah, we’re the best ever, like, mutually. And then we made a record.”
“Absolutely,” Dijon’s debut album, was released in November 2021, featuring two songs created in that first session. But the real document of their preternatural bond was the short film that accompanied the LP, showing the two young men performing in lockstep, feeding off the same life force, which they would soon bring to stages around the world.
“I think we both shared a frustration with the lack of anger that people had at the state of young people making music,” Dijon said. “We were both trying to just find a new wheel to invent, separately, and kind of questioning why nobody else was as feverishly, or embarrassingly, reaching. Then we were both like, let’s see how far we can push each other.”
Gordon agreed: “I haven’t met a lot of people that kind of have that same ratio of realizing how ridiculous a lot of this is, but at the same time taking it very seriously and being completely driven by changing the world.”
The earliest songs on “Two Star” date to 2020, and Gordon said the album unfurls roughly chronologically as an abstract hero’s journey, inspired by Jungian archetypes of self-discovery — his girlfriend is a psychology student — and “storybooks” like “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.”
But his tale, he said, is told as much through sound as his spare lyrics, morphing from giddiness and naiveté on the album’s first half to something stranger and sharper by the end.
“Mike is a once-in-a-lifetime guitar player,” Dijon said. “But I think that if you listen to that record just for his amazing guitar playing, you completely missed the whole thing, which is that he might be the most fascinating producer on the planet right now.”
Gordon’s production style, which can seem distractingly lo-fi at first, is in fact obsessively intentional, an experiment in contrast and juxtaposition. As a teenager, he collected bootlegged streams from the internet radio service Pandora, not grasping until he got to college that, as a result, most of his digital music collection was extremely low quality.
“I never realized how bright music was,” he said. “It was startling — a scary experience, like all of a sudden 1959 color TV was invented.”
But he maintained “a weird fascination with bad YouTube rips” and songs where “there’s something that’s broken, but at the same time, that’s not the point,” Gordon said. “I think you can only have something weird if there’s something next to it that’s perfect.”
Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, who met Gordon as a member of Dijon’s live band, recalled a night at a dive bar outside Dallas after a concert “where we really knew we were going to be friends forever.”
The place was empty and there happened to be instruments lying around. “Mike is just a songbook,” he said. “Not only does he hear all the music that I hear, but he knows how to play it. There’s moments where I’m like, ‘Am I listening to Bonnie Raitt’s grandson? Or Stevie Winwood’s?’”
They jammed for hours, playing songs by Raitt, Little Feat and more. “These guys know who Don Williams is?” Vernon marveled. “We just couldn’t leave.”
Singer-songwriter Clairo remembered a night on tour with Dijon and Gordon, “where we piled into someone’s trailer and were just exchanging songs that we loved.”
Gordon played “Saturday Night” by the Blue Nile and “Come in From the Cold,” a late-period Joni Mitchell track — “singer-songwriter songs that feel pop but extremely dreamy and with a lot of yearning,” she said.
“Once you put them through the lens of Mike’s album, it makes a lot of sense,” Clairo said. “I wouldn’t have ever been able to pick those out, but I think he’s really special in the way that he synthesizes his inspirations.”
Mk.gee’s genre-smearing, plus his tendency to submerge the sweetness of his sound and his enigmatic personal presentation, are especially legible to — and even coveted by — a generation of music fans that has been overserved everything they have ever wanted, often in too-obvious packages.
Perhaps seeking something more, these listeners have learned to value mystery and delayed gratification via acts once removed from Prince, such as Jai Paul, the Weeknd and Frank Ocean — comparisons Gordon sees as “weak” and superficial despite being a fan. “There should be a new bucket, a new world,” he said.
It’s Gordon’s virtuosic guitar playing that adds an extra variable to the package, one that remains retro in pop but comes with “huge baggage,” he said. “I kind of hate guitar,” Gordon insisted. “You can’t deny that it sucks, because it just represents a thing.”
His hope, typically grandiose but also based in action and creation, is to “reinvent” the instrument “and what it means — maybe subconsciously,” along with what pop can be. The surreal aspect of where he’s found himself is that now, with the world opening up to Mk.gee, those possibilities are nearly in reach.
“The pendulum is always swinging in terms of what the world is craving,” Clairo said. This just happens to be a moment where young people are connecting to “real people behind real instruments.”
Along with chipping away at new music of his own, Gordon has been writing and recording with Bieber, a onetime teen heartthrob now at a creative crossroads. “He’s searching,” said Gordon, an eager accomplice.
“Anything that comes out of his mouth: That’s pop music,” he added. “You can really do pretty wild stuff behind that, just because it represents something.”
It’s not pop, exactly, that Mk.gee is chasing, but “the promise of pop music” — universality as the byproduct of something great.
“Experimentalism has no meaning unless it’s done on the grandest scale,” he said. “I just don’t want to join somebody else’s citadel. I want to build my own thing, my own castle with my friends, because that’s what’s needed. And if people want to come, they can come.”
Mk.gee
When: 7 p.m. Sept. 9
Where: Observatory North Park, 2891 University Ave., San Diego
Tickets: Sold out (resales available)
Online: observatorysd.com
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