Happy 4th Anniversary, A Real Good Kid!
On this day, four years ago (January 18, 2019), Mike Posner released his third studio album, A Real Good Kid. The album features 12 tracks including singles “Song About You,” “Stuck In The Middle,” and “Move On.” Mike Posner wrote and produced each track along with songwriters and producers Ricky Reed, Dan Wilson, James Bowen, Jean Marc Belkadi, Nate Mercereau, Adam Friedman, James Valentine, Ryan Merchant, and Pete Kuzma.
The Album
A Real Good Kid is the third studio album by American singer Mike Posner, released on January 18, 2019, through Universal Island. It was announced by Posner on social media on November 21, 2018. It was recorded by Posner over a two-year period. It was supported by the singles “Song About You,” “Stuck in the Middle,” and “Move On.” To celebrate the release of the album, Posner walked across the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean from April 15, 2019 – October 18, 2019.
In the two-year period that the album was recorded, Posner was dealing with the end of a relationship, then moved back to Detroit to care for his terminally ill father, who later died of brain cancer, and his friend Avicii committed suicide. Posner said: “I had to go to the studio every day and I was trying to just show up and record all the songs and do a good job and I was sad.” In a press statement, Posner said the album “deals heavily with love, loss and eventual acceptance.” The album includes recordings of Mike’s father.
“This album is about pain, loss, and the joy that comes with it. It’s about getting a call that my father has a tumor the size of a tangerine in his forehead. It’s about selling my house in L.A. to move into the house I grew up in to help him die. It’s about falling in love after his death. It’s about having that relationship fall apart and not really knowing why. It’s about somehow finding peace through it all.”
Mike Posner
It might appear that Mike Posner’s undergone a total reinvention from the blithe, folksy pop-rap of his 2010 debut—or maybe the guy’s just grown up. His third album, A Real Good Kid, is a document of tough times: During its creation, Posner endured the death of his father and of his good friend Avicii, in addition to a bad breakup. Opener “January 11th, 2017” spares no feelings, describing the day his dad died in tender and occasionally brutal detail, with striking little asides like the perfectly mundane “January in Detroit is cold as f*ck.” But it’s also a document of personal transition: Posner’s re-evaluating his relationships with women, his own mortality, and just about everything else, and he’s doing it with a bluesier bent than we’ve heard on his previous records. Through it all, his songwriting’s matured: He slips into anguished spoken-word poetry on gospel elegy “Drip,” and opens the cathartic move-on with the excellent one-liner “I wish Tracy Chapman was my friend.”
The Singles
On September 10, 2018, Posner released “Song About You,” the lead single from his third studio album, A Real Good Kid.
On November 22, 2018, the second single, “Stuck In The Middle,” was released and the third and final single, “Move On,” released on January 4, 2019.
