“I was a huge Phish fan—I was obsessed with Phish. And I remember reading at some point in high school Trey [Anastasio] talking about something he called the “kill mummy” phase—just how at one point he kind of forced himself to break from that and step out and try something else,” Andrew VanWyngarden said in late spring, while finishing work on MGMT’s third, self-titled album. “I think that’s kind of what happened with us on this album with rock and roll.” VanWyngarden has experienced a lot of changes since MGMT released Congratulations in 2010: he rediscovered electronic music, moved out to the Rockaway Beach section of Queens, NY and managed to massage a series of dark, synth-heavy jams into his band’s most psychedelic release yet. Plus, he turned 30 and is in the midst of a “Saturn’s Return” phase of his career. “The kind of mystical side of me thinks that there’s kind of like this development of what it means to be a human, kind of the whole people wanting kind of a medicine band, music to kind of push them and open up different perspectives or whatever,” he muses on a spring day during a series of interviews with Relix and Jambands.com for our July/August issue. “So I think that’s what psychedelic music does when it’s doing it best.”
Let’s start with the new album. Can you give us a quick rundown on when you started working on MGMT and how you came up with your new recording approach?
All the recording sessions were all up in Buffalo. We did some writing and improvising with these little synthesizer kind of jams that would become some of the parts of the songs at Ben’s house and my old house in Brooklyn, where we used to have a studio.
But pretty much every track was recorded at Dave Fridmann’s studio. That’s the first time we’ve done it like that. Dave worked with us on both of our other albums but [the approach was different]. The first one was sort of loose and the second one was sort of mixed recording wise.
With this one we recorded every track in the studio and it’s all super well engineered and high quality—as opposed to the other ones which would have tracks that Ben and I recorded with our limited but expanding knowledge of recording techniques. Dave Fridmann also had a bigger role kind of as a motivator and also kind of pushing us to go with certain sounds.
In terms of a timeline, at what point did you start sketching up those original ideas at Ben’s house and then start making the pilgrimage up to the studio in the woods?
January 2012 is when we started doing those jams in Brooklyn at Ben’s house or at my house. Early March 2012, was the first Taxbox session [at Fridmann’s studio in Buffalo]. And then over that last year we went up there I think a total of five times, maybe six. Some sessions were more productive than others, but it really wasn’t until the last two sessions when we kind of saw it come together as a whole and made sense to us.
It was one of those situations where the last song we mixed was the last song of the album and once that was there with vocals and everything, it all kind of made sense as a whole. It was a nice way to end it.
You recorded Congratulations with your live band and captured the psychedelic feel of your stage show but decided to revert to the original MGMT duo for your new studio album. Was your initial goal to create an album that was a true “studio project” or did that idea really marinate when you went into the studio with Dave?
The only goals we had initially were really just to… We wanted to be a little less inhibited with our musical decisions and just kind of let things bloom and grow a little bit more because we had a bad habit of starting an idea and then just cutting it off.
The moments that felt like things were really working together and Ben and I were grooving and feeling happy were coming out of these extended kind of improvisations. We would have drum machines and Ben’s module loop here and synthesizers and sometimes guitars and everything going and sometimes we would be doing it for like an hour and a half, two hours, and then that’s where the meat of the jam would be and we would take those sections and that’s when we were getting really excited and feeling happiest. We didn’t really have a set approach but we knew that it was going to be different.
I’m sure that this new approach allowed you to shift your roles a little bit.
Yeah, on some of the tracks it was definitely like that. It was much less like, like you said, like I’m the guitar player and Ben’s the keyboard player. For the first two albums, I played a lot of the drum and bass parts, but really Ben was more kind of master of the keyboard and synth area.
But we both just love making sounds together even though it is usually a point of contention to the particulars of the sound because we love making weird and original sounding synthesized stuff. Dave was important in that we would kind of do a bit of a jam or get something going and then kind of like laugh and kind of go do something else and Dave would be like, “No guys, you should keep going with this. This sounds cool.” That was really helpful and good. But yeah, I played more synthesizers than I’ve ever played.
I actually saw you play synthesizers at that Joshua White performance you guys did.
That was kind of like we’d never done something like that before in front of people. But that’s what we do on our own so that was kind of cool. That’s how a lot of the songs came about on this album.
Did that Joshua White performance come to fruition because you were kind of working with this template or was it just kind of a great coincidence these guys asked you to do something?
I guess it was both. I mean, they asked us to do something and it was early in the year and we were like, “Well, we don’t want to play a full band show but we could do something kind of one-off for this.” And it would be kind of a challenge to what we were used to and we went for it.
In terms of the improvisation, I know that psychedelic music has been something that you guys have been interested in for many years, but when it came to actual jams was it more like you guys actually jamming live or was it you were going to loop and Ben would kind of flesh it out or vice versa and then Dave would just roll tape and then focus in on those moments?
There were a bunch of different approaches. It kind of goes song by song. For “Alien Days,” that was one of the first songs that we wrote during this writing period. That came more from me kind of strumming on the verse chords on my acoustic guitar, and then going into Ben and we kind of worked out the song, which is way more the way we used to do things.
But then something like “A Good Sadness”—that whole song is just a chunk taken from a long jam. All the chord changes we were doing live and then we just kind of arranged a little bit, added a few things and sang over it. Then Dave kind of mixes it.
And then something like “Your Life Is a Lie” was much more kind of a spur of the moment, just kind of really quickly done song that we thought was funny and made us laugh but was kind of crazy. So there’s a mix.
At what point did you add the lyrics to these jam sessions?
Like with the first two albums, it’s always coming last.
That said, since this was recorded over so many different sessions, over a chunk of months, did you find there were some lyrical themes that run through all those songs or was it almost like “Alien Days” was written at this point and this other song was written at a different stage, where you were?
I think there are some themes. Ben and I kind of started to see the first album as this sort of wide-eyed, kind of naïve, psychedelic fantasy, post-apocalyptic thing. And kind of just like this beautiful energy, and then the second one I feel like was kind of the result of all the touring and kind of us being naïve and not knowing what we were getting into with being a band and touring.
The second one’s more of I guess melancholy and looking inside and kind of more closed off and a lot about just being a musician. And so I think we had to get that one out and kind of like therapy, and this one feels much more like kind of where the first breaths of feeling comfortable with the music we’re making and excited about being free to do whatever we want, which is kind of scary on one hand that we’re taking risks.
The themes I think were kind of this feeling of being overwhelmed or feeling of a constant chaotic sensation which is daily life in New York or whatever, and trying to make sense of it or accept it or kind of accepting these kind of multiple realities. I don’t know it’s us searching for answers or something [Laughs].
I think we enjoyed finding sounds that were abrasive and putting multiple melodies that you wouldn’t think would go together, throwing them on top of each other and taking the result of that as the sound.
That’s something that Dave got really into with us, which I think would be cool if you could talk to him about it because he was always amazed or kind of impressed that we would have these songs where there was… You couldn’t really tell at the end of the song what the chord at any given moment was or sometimes where the beat is but it still made sense and it was still sing-able.
I think that’s the kind of angle that he really wanted to help grow and encourage.
2013 has been the year psychedelic music returned to the mainstream. Do you think that that’s a result of the fact that people who have grown up with this music have had the opportunity to present this music to a larger audience and embrace it or do you feel like there’s some sort of trend that’s going through, with Tame Impala being on the other side of the world and embracing the same thing too?
Yeah, it’s interesting to see it sprouting up simultaneously around the world. I think it’s a combination of a certain group of kids that probably have slightly similar musical backgrounds. I’m sure that all of our parents played classic rock and psychedelic stuff from the ‘70s and late ‘60s. Growing up, that was just a part of our musical knowledge and possibly even some of the last generations of kids that didn’t kind of have that, so I think that’s part of it.
And then the kind of mystical side of me thinks that there’s kind of like this development of what it means to be a human, kind of the whole people wanting kind of a medicine band, music to kind of push them and open up different perspectives or whatever. So I think that’s what psychedelic music does when it’s doing it best.
You see this in bands like Tame Impala and Flaming Lips, too. Their new album is pretty dark and out there, I mean, just kind of embracing the pretty utopian side of psychedelic music as much as the fucked up side of it.
I think it’s interesting from the Relix perspective—being a magazine that was formed as a Grateful Dead fan magazine and obviously has grown along with the jamband scene—that psychedelic music has entered a dark sonic period recently. A band like Tame Impala wouldn’t have fit with the “happy-vibe” of the Clinton-era jambands.
Yeah, well not to be too political or social by bringing that side of thing into it but with the Internet I feel like so much information is available, pretty much everything you want to know so that it’s harder for there to be this abstract concept of “the man” that you’re writing songs about so it kind of leaves you.
If you’re a psychedelic band that wants to be political, it’s like what are you really going to go into that’s safe?
I guess that’s kind of the distilled situationist approach. But Ben and I, and I think the Tame Impala guys too, were definitely were inspired in college a lot by way antagonistic groups like Suicide and Throbbing Gristle and bands that kind of had this sort of kind of like nasty prank side to it or something. I was definitely not like everything is roses, the other side of it.
In terms of the approach, it does sound it’s something that you guys have been building towards for a while. Is that why you decided to self-title this album?
Well, just like with the last album, which we decided to call _Congratulations like when we first started touring for the first album. We thought would be funny to call the second one Congratulations, this one we decided to self-title it while we were touring for the last album. And then we kind of just felt like we had to stick with it. But I think it kind of makes sense.
It’s like The Band how their self-titled record being their second one versus their first record and whatnot, kind of with that whole arc of a rock band.
Yeah, it’s kind of playing with that cliché. I think it’s other bands that have done that too, where their self-titled one is not just like the third or second one. I guess Ben and I were also just like as musicians are prone to do, kind of looking at the careers of other bands and realizing that for a lot of bands that we listen to and love, they put out like four or five albums before they found their sound. But a lot of the times those first four or five albums are the ones that Ben and I are more drawn to [Laughs]. So I don’t know. I feel like Simple Minds and The Cure and R.E.M., it takes a while to crystallize their sound and that was kind of comforting for us in a way. Not that we’re trying to put ourselves on the same level as those bands but just kind of seeing what can happen and try not to be stressed out about it, like a make or break situation.
It’s interesting. We talked about the evolution of our generation and where we are now ultimately some of the first people to see rock clichés in bands that were designed to break society’s clichés about how a lot of these groups coming out for independent, less mainstream releases and then they had their big break. R.E.M. had ten years under their belt before they had their first album. There are probably a lot of R.E.M. listeners who didn’t even know there was something before “Losing My Religion.” Have you found that knowing Ben now since you were 18 years old that you guys have evolved musically together in terms of your listening interests?
There was a major shift in musical influences for this album. I think simultaneously Ben and I both got a little sick of rock and roll, which if I heard myself say that four years ago I would be like, “What are you talking about?”
But it’s true. I think for the first two albums we were listening to a ton of Rolling Stones and Elton John and just a lot of classic rock and I think we just kind of got a little bit over that or something. I don’t really know why. But I think a big part of it for me was in 2011, I finally started really getting back into electronic music and something changed in my brain where I was able to hear like soul and just heart and kind of a real spirit in electronic music which before I never really broke through. And then at the same time when I would try to listen to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “Brown Sugar,” I could only hear something that was tired and really fun. Obviously they had it down, they did some amazing shit but…
I was a huge Phish fan. I was obsessed with Phish. And I remember reading at some point in high school Trey talking about something he called the “kill mommy” phase, I think he was talking about Jerry Garcia, just how at one point he kind of forced himself to break from that and step out and try something else.
I think that’s kind of what happened with us on this album with rock and roll. I mean and it was probably more extreme with Ben even because he was listening to a lot of this band Denim, which he got really into. Because they have a guy kind of got into this world in the ‘90s of writing songs that were like rock and roll songs making fun of rock and roll.
When did you get back into electronic music? I also think it’s important to qualify what electronic music you are referring too because your new album definitely isn’t a dance album it’s more Aphex Twin then say even some of your earlier stuff which has a dance beat to it but was much less abrasive.
Yeah. Well, I didn’t listen to electronic music until I was a freshman in college. It really was Ben who introduced me to a lot of music that we were really nuts about early on, like Mouse on Mars and Aphex Twin and this band called Bridge and these more cut and paste electronic groups that I think that was a major influence early on, our love of alien and insectoid sounding synth noises.
But then in 2011 when I started getting back into electronic music, it was much more the house side of things. And maybe that was a result of having toured so much that I found listening to house music while traveling was really great because it kind of just got your whole system into this groove and kind of let you get through things. And we were on this tour in Australia that we really felt a little bit out of place on the Future Music tour. But Tame Impala were there too that was like our only friend. We made a lot of friends, it was mostly DJs and electronic guys, but I made friends with a couple people and the last night of that tour, this legendary DJ Spinback, who was on the tour, he DJed at the artists’ after-party and I danced until six in the morning and that was another kind of breakthrough moment where I kind of realized what it’s all about with electronic music and the skill involved with a really good DJ. So then from there…
So that was first starting off I was really into this guy Omar-S, who was a Detroit guy, but he’s definitely influenced a lot by the other Detroit electronic acts from the ‘80s, Also, this band Woo was a big influence, they’re not really electronic per say but it’s more like this kind of atmosphere, and then the Orb was probably the biggest… I got really into the Orb. And not to talk about drugs or anything, another major breakthrough for me was like I had just made this playlist one time while I was on an airplane and it had like “Slug Dub” and it had a couple whatever that 20 minute long Stereolab and EAR song and it had all this stuff that I kind of just threw on there, and then I took really good clean acid in Hawaii and put the mix on and like I had never listened to really electronic music while tripping, and to hear something like “Slug Dub,” which just goes everywhere, you realize that’s what it’s meant for [Laughs] and like I know I’m probably like the five billionth person to have that revelation but it was special, you know?
Lots of kids have smoked pot and listened to Dark Side of the Moon and had that experience. It doesn’t mean it’s less special.
Yeah, I know, I know. It was cool. It’s like, I hadn’t had a moment like that since college so that was pretty cool.
Do you feel that drugs do have a role in the creative process at this point, not just for you, but for artists in general?
We didn’t really do too much. I mean, we were pretty clean, straight, for this whole session. It was really only one song that I could say was coming from a drug experience that we had up at the studio, that was “Your Life Is a Lie.”
It’s funny how these two worlds have kind of come back together in a weird way. It is almost like you have circled back to a scene that was evolving parallel to the ‘90s Phish scene you were part of.
Definitely. And there’s a huge, not even in the past five or six years, it’s been a huge growth in electronic music in that underground world. But Ben and I have our own take on it. It’s not like we haven’t felt like we’re coming late to the party or anything.
It’s almost like when hip-hop got involved in music in like the ‘80s, it’s so current you can’t ignore it otherwise you’ll sound overtly retro. When’s the last time you saw Phish?
At the side of the stage we played before them, a couple of days before them, at Outside Lands. My mom and sister were there, they were at the last show, so Trey came into our dressing room and we all hung out with my family and got our band, we watched from the side of the stage.
We had a great time.
I’m sure as somebody who grew up with Phish, you know, and I know that you’re part of the wave of indie or psych-rockers who have roots in Phish, it must have been great to have him… I know he teased you guys at one of the festivals, teased “Kids,” has name-dropped you and stuff.
It’s pretty epic. Pretty cool.
When do you feel you kind of fell out of listening to them?
I guess it’s kind of when I got to college. It wasn’t that I turned against them or dislike them, I just, I think in a way my high school musical world was pretty small and closed off.
Not that it’s a result of this, but high school in Memphis was much more oriented towards jambands, classic rock, the Grateful Dead and what my sister listened to. It was harder to kind of… When I got up to college, people were playing all sorts of shit I had never heard of so I just ran away with that.
Do you have a favorite show you went to?
My friend and I did a summer run 2000 on the East Coast and I really liked the Lakewood Amphitheater, Atlanta show and they did a great “Bathtub Gin.” The Holmdel show in Jersey that was really good. But I think the most special show for me was probably when they came to Memphis when I was I think a junior in high school, back in ’99.
They played at the Pyramid and it was Trey’s birthday, one or two days after, but the crowd sang happy birthday. It was nice.
You mentioned surfing before. I know you moved out to Rockaway not too long ago, is that because you wanted to be closer to the beach or did it just feel like time to leave the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn and Manhattan?
Yeah I guess. I mean, I love my old house but I was going out to Rockaway all the time and I was sharing a room, renting a room out there, and surfing a lot. I told myself that if a house ever popped up in this little neighborhood, this little couple block area where I was spending most of my time, that I would consider buying
Actually it was the first time I went out, got my car, and it’s like January, kind of dead of winter, and, I was telling my friend, I’m going to go out and see if there’s any houses for sale.
I got out into my car, drove 50 feet and turned a corner and there’s a “For Sale” sign. It was meant to be. I was like, “Yeah!” and I called and three months later, it wasn’t the smoothest sale with the owners, but yeah I bought it and started renovations and then it’s crazy because six months of renovations later is when Sandy happened. So it was a crazy end of the year. But I really like the feeling out there right now. I mean, it’s a little scary obviously but there’s like… I don’t know, it feels really bohemian and I got a few friends who have young kids, and my friend Sarah’s making soaps and my friend Zach has a coffee shop, and they have this temporary dome out there that MoMA built, selling coffee and we DJed in there and I don’t know, it just kind of has a nice vibe that needs to grow a lot obviously.
I went there a couple of times last summer just to walk down the boardwalk. It feels like a really cool artist community, which Woodstock probably was before it became commercialized and whatnot. Did your apartment get badly damaged in the storm?
It got some damage, yeah. My basement was full of water and trash and the concrete on the basement floor got all messed up. But you know, compared to a lot of spots around me it was not that bad.
Do you ever see Patti Smith walking around there?
Yeah, I met her out there, talked to her a little bit. That would be pretty cool… She seems pretty great. She told me when I met her that she in a way had given up on Manhattan as a place for innovative artistic people to really flourish. So she’s kind of trying to find this fringe neighborhood that has infinite possibilities and I think she feels like Rockaway is that zone. It’s cool.
Do you feel like you’re a New Yorker for life now? Or having grown up in Memphis, going to school upstate and then…
I don’t know, I guess… I mean, I always entertain the possibility of living somewhere else or trying to live overseas somewhere but it usually ends up coming back to New York being the place that I get down with most.
At this point are you guys working on the live show? And if so, what’s that process been like picking these songs that were born out of jams and then applying them to your live band and also I don’t know if you can reinterpret them exactly or do you need additional people with you?
We’re not going to have additional people. We’re trying to do things differently though, and we really want to make it easier on ourselves. Which I think…
We’ve been playing since 2007 as a live band where we play everything live and try to recreate all these sounds. Ben’s playing a keyboard part with two hands and then having to switch to another one and then sing, and James is playing tambourine and keyboard at the same time… All this stuff that we kind of had a moment where we were like, “Who’s really impressed by this? And what are we losing with the kind of stage show and entertainment value by having to be completely focused on all these parts?”
We’re going to try to have some sounds sequenced that we’re playing with. But in a way that still allows for extended parts and jamming and stuff like that but it’s already kind of taking a big bit of stress off of our backs I think. And it doesn’t feel wrong it just feels kind of nice and I think we’ll look happier and more into it on stage.
Do you think you will incorporate moments of improvisation in the live show or stick with a more stylized performance?
No, I think there are still going to be moments of improvisation. I mean, it’s a combination, we’re trying to go back and re-arrange all of our old songs too, mostly just by re-arranging by changing up the sounds and adding sounds that make it more in line with some of the new songs which I think is cool.
It’s not like they’re unrecognizable by any means but they’re different, fresh and I think that people will like that.
In that sense, do you feel like obligated to play “Kids” or “Time to Pretend” or “Congratulations” or any certain songs from your past or in a sense do you feel like Animal Collective, where they only play new songs? And they’ve done a good job at that but I’m sure at some point these people are going to want to hear something off of Merriweather Post.
We’re still getting songs from every era. We’re trying to think of it from the perspective of the audience a little bit because you don’t want to deny some simple pleasure of hearing a song that they want to hear.
I can understand really wanting to push it and be experimental but our whole goal as using some backing tracks, I guess you could say, even though that’s where it sounds bad, it’s just to free ourselves up so that we can engage more and can feel more like an experience live. You know, I think Tame Impala was an inspiration for us for our live show because their live show is incredible and it’s super tight and they have some things that are kind of sequenced filters or effects that kind of make things sound just like the album when it needs to or they can kind of go off and do something, but their show flows well.
That’s what we really want to do is have things flow and kind of have an arc to it.
I got really into Parliament live. I got a double LP in Memphis, I really liked that one and I really like a couple DJ mixes I’ve gotten, this guy Intergalactic Gary. I listen to WFMU all the time and have the app on my phone so I’ll hear a song and be like, “What’s that?” and take a picture and then go download it.
We’re putting out a single cassette of “Alien Days” for Record Store Day and the B-Side of the cassette is this guy who I heard on WFMU called Hardy White. He has this show where he’s just got this incredible way of kind of with this really. We just got in touch with him through the radio station. Recently, I haven’t really seen much live music at all. I’ve been like DJing a little bit in Rockaway but just random parties and kind of low-key things for friends. But I’ve really gotten to enjoy DJing—building sets and having an arc to it that’s really fun.
I’m glad you say that because I feel like since the iPod, a lot of times musicians DJing is just playing their iPod it’s cool to see you treating it like a setlist, organizing all this stuff. And do you do vinyl mostly?
No, I’m still digital with the goal of kind of once I figure out the set that I really get into, then I’ll try to track everything down on vinyl. But I like using this virtual DJ program which is probably not the top thing but I’ve been using it for years because you can have like six virtual turntables at once, but I use four so I can have these going and set a loop and I can have three other songs or three other loops playing so you can kind of end up making your own music which is pretty cool.
You cover a Fade Jade song on MGMT how did you pick that cover?
It’s a ‘60’s kind of like flower pop band from Long Island called Faine Jade. The song we covered, I’m pretty sure it’s on one of the Nuggets compilations, is called “Introspection.” That was a band that my friend introduced me to five or six years ago and I’ve always been into that song and then there was a moment in the recording process when last summer or something when it felt like we didn’t know what to do next and we still didn’t know what we were doing and so I was just like, “Screw it, let’s try a cover.” So we started recording that and then we were just really happy with the way it sounded.
Do you think that influenced the tone of the sessions after that?
Yeah, I think lyrically it fits in that theme of the record because actually Dave was the one who was really pushing for this final track order.
He thinks there’s this kind of story line that really works so “Introspection” comes kind of after this initial introduction to the darker, slightly more menacing, questioning side of things, then comes “Introspection,” and then the result of the introspection is like the realization is that your life is a lie or something. It’s kind of like really twisted.
I feel like there’s two distinct halves, sides to the record because the second side is way more the kind of dream sequence, kind of nighttime, trippy side.
You mentioned that this concept of life being a lie but what you said in the last hour or so it sounds like your life is the opposite. You’ve kind of reclaimed the artist community, you’re working the DJ set, you’re playing the music you want to play, it’s not a lie in that sense.
Who knows where that song came from. While we were like tripping hard on acid by a fire but I just started singing that. I kind of think it must be directed at some other people. I think Ben and I kind of enjoy going on rants about people that we don’t really agree with their approach to life.
But at the same time it’s interesting that sometimes people will be listening whether it’s at a bar or a party and not getting the life element.
That’s why I think it’s funny too is that that’s kind of like the catchiest, shortest song on the album so that would be really incredible I think if that song were to get popular because then everyone’s singing, “Your life is a lie.”
When you find yourself singing older lyrics listening back do you channel who you were then or did you sing it to put on a good live show for your friends or your audience?
I still connect to the older lyrics, a lot of them. I mean, some of them not as much but I think it’s important to try to channel the feelings when you’re singing it and get into that zone.
