A Pop Song Disintegrating Beneath the Waves
Mk.gee: 'How many miles' + Saying goodbye + Meaning I miss you + Meaning I love you + Meaning a thousand different things
My phone buzzed as I settled into my seat on the plane. It was a text from my brother five rows back, urging me to download Mk.gee’s Two Star & the Dream Police before the plane took off and we went offline. I’d already downloaded the album while waiting in line to board, and I told him so. “Very nice,” he responded.
It took less than an hour to fly from Philadelphia to North Carolina, where my other brother lives and was holding his bachelor party. I put on Two Star & the Dream Police towards the end of the flight and was listening to “How many miles” as we landed, drawn in by some urgency in the singing but unable to hear the lyrics over the clamor of the throttled engine.
Before deplaning, I pulled out a small notebook that I’d forgotten to leave in Pennsylvania. It contained a few poems I’d written over a year earlier, which I carefully ripped out and tore up. In the Raleigh airport, I threw them in the first trash can I saw.
I spent the next three days at a lakeside rental house with 11 other men, most of whom I’d never met before. There were drinking games, catered meals, cocktails galore. One partier got far too drunk (hint: it was the groom), but by and large we kept our alcohol down, content to casually unmake ourselves under the forgiving aegis that liquor provides.
In the mornings, lying in bed after waking up, I found myself playing and replaying “How many miles.” The song had a wobbly melancholy that fit the slanted morning light perfectly. But even without competition from an airplane engine, I still couldn’t understand the lyrics. There was too much fuzz and distortion in the mix. It felt like a pop song tossed into the ocean and allowed to disintegrate beneath the waves. Little moments—quivery vocals, guitars ricocheting in and out of focus—rippled and swelled like rays of light caught on the surface, too unstable to last for long and all the more beautiful for it.
The weekend culminated in a family-style dinner around the rental’s central dining table. Our plates full of roast chicken and fancy cheeses, we took turns toasting the groom, trying to put into words what he meant to us.
We stumbled. Can you blame us? We were, to varying degrees, men who had been taught early in life, through a series of crucial (but likely forgotten) moments, that expressing heartfelt emotion is weakness. That anything emotionally messy or revealing—like, say, handwritten poetry written in a notebook long ago—is dangerous to expose and best hidden away.
But the cocktails helped. The toasts weren’t perfect, but they got the point across. As we took turns speaking, I jumped up and started taking photos of the people gathered there, suddenly overcome with a sense that something should remain from the night after it was over.
Listening to “How many miles” in the weeks after my brother’s bachelor party, trying to figure out why it moved me so much, I thought back to those toasts. A standard pop song packages emotion in the sheen of studio-mastered production. The singing sits high in the mix, giving priority to the carefully-picked, clearly-delivered words. They’re polished, and that’s part of what makes them great.
Mk.gee’s production choices, by contrast, feel like a direct acknowledgment of an important emotional truth: that often we know exactly how we feel but not how to express it. Like our toasts, Mk.gee’s lyrics are fumbling, imprecise, maybe hard to follow—but no less valuable for it. Their unfinished quality adds to their vulnerability and urgency; it’s like Mk.gee simply had to share them, even if they weren’t fully formed yet.
At the end of the trip, I said goodbye to both of my brothers as we all returned to the lives we were making in different parts of the world. Saying goodbye to people you used to see every day always feels imperfect. We say goodbye. We really mean thank you, or I miss you, or I love you, or a million other things, more than it’s possible to say while you’re stepping into a cab to the airport.
Instead, we find other times to say what we mean, fitting it into toasts we make in each other’s company, coding it into bachelor party invitations, album recommendations, and thinly-veiled love letters that we publish in places our brothers might see.
I never sent my brothers the photos I took at the bachelor party dinner, but a couple of months later I texted them a different image: the list of songs that I’d listened to most that year. “How many miles” sat at the top. ✹
Love this description of Mk.gee. I saw him live a few months ago and even though he only had one or two other people on stage the smoke machine filled the rest of the space. Red light filtered through. His performance was great, the constant bubblegum vaping of the Gen Z audience less so!