Andrew VanWyngarden is the lead vocalist, guitar player and songwriter
for the band MGMT, praised for "an uncanny knack for producing pop music
that sounds as if it were filtered through a kaleidoscope". One of his
songs "Kids" received a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Performance by a
Duo or Group, while the duo was nominated in the Best New Artist
category. Biography
Andrew VanWyngarden was born in Columbia, Missouri, and grew up in
Memphis, Tennessee, where he attended Lausanne Collegiate School and White
Station High School. His father Bruce VanWyngarden is the editor of the
alternative newspaper Memphis Flyer since 1992. Andrew fondly remembered his
childhood years in Memphis, especially fishing and camping with his dad. "I've
always really liked nature and the ocean. My friends and I would go out
with nets and make little aquariums with the creatures we'd find," he said. He
was active in YMCA outdoors programs, and the family frequently went canoeing,
camping, and fishing. His first musical influences was
listening to his dad play The Who song "Pinball Wizard" on his electric guitar
with a Fender Twin Reverb amp. In seventh grade, he received a Les Paul
guitar and immediately started playing. That same year, he won a contest at
Lausanne, playing "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He was
influenced by the music he listened to with his sisters, Nirvana and Phish in
particular, and often went through his parents' record collection in the attic
where he found Neil Young, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, etc. "From then on,
all he ever wanted for Christmas was musical instruments; future seasons saw
a drum set, a banjo, and a mandolin" While in high school, he formed a band
with Dan Treharne called Glitter Penis, where it was just the two playing around
on the computer "just making songs," VanWyngarden says. They created and
recorded parody songs but did not perform live. Later on, VanWyngarden was
in a band called Accidental Mersh with future MGMT guitarist Hank Sullivant who
would later introduce James Richardson, MGMT's future guitarist. The band
achieved local success and fame in and around the Memphis area, and released
two albums: The self-titled Accidental Mersh and Mirror Isaeli. The first album
reached the #2 spot on Napster's "Unsigned Bands" chart. The band went on
hiatus when most of its members went to college. Andrew invited Ben Goldwasser
to play the keyboard for Mersh during the summer of 2002. The band had a
weekly gig at Newby's but the shows were sparsely attended and the band
dissolved. In college, he wrote and performed a song called "Super Volcano"
for a class. VanWyngarden attended and graduated in
music, from Wesleyan University, where he met fellow band member Ben Goldwasser
in his freshmen year. He said he planned to study natural sciences of astronomy,
but meeting Goldwasser changed his whole life course. It was Andrew who initiated
the formation of the group: "[Ben] wasn't really into it. I remember him
saying he wanted to do some sort of social work, something noble for a good
course. I was like: C'mon, man! Where's your selfish ambition?" he remembered.
Andrew remembered his University years as something "almost sickeningly
idyllic: lots of doing mushrooms in the woods, not a hard graft in the library".
He has said in interviews that "Kids" was one of the first songs they produced
together, the song is included in the band's early EP "We Care".
VanWyngarden was on NME's Cool List in 2008 at number 3, just below Jay-Z and
Alice Glass. Andrew came up with the title of MGMT's
2010 album Congratulations while making Oracular Spectacular. He writes a lot of
the lyrics for MGMT, he has described the process, "I'd sit down for a few
hours and try to do them. Usually, the ideas for the lyrics have been in my
head for a while, and that's how I go over them again and again." His favorite
song of the new album is "Siberian Breaks". In a recent interview, speaking
of fame and its effects on him, Andrew conceded that to some extent he's turned
into a kind of character he was poking fun at in the debut album. "I didn't
realize it until now, but it's kind of funny, because the first song on our
first album was 'Time to Pretend', which was about the imagined rock star
scenario. So, [the song] 'It's Working' is like, "Yeah, we went out there and we
did a lot of drugs, and it's not that great," he told Spin. Upon the release
of Congratulations, Andrew says he has gotten more of a kind of anxious feeling
developing over the past year when they got a lot of criticism from music
journalists. He has cited his literary influences like Leaves of Grass by Walt
Whitman, the Ice Storm, The Anthology of French Poetry and authors such as Robert
Anton Wilson and John Ashbery. His favorite pastime is surfing and says
that in the future he would like to produce.
= Side projects= Andrew VanWyngarden is in a project with
Kevin Barnes from Of Montreal called Blikk Fang. In October 2014, it was
announced that two songs will be released by Blikk Fang in Polyvinyl
Records' upcoming 4 Track Singles Series for 2015. He appeared in The Heart is a
Drum Machine, a documentary film about the nature of contemporary music.
In 2014, he released a solo track entitled "I Just Knew" for the surfing
film, Spirit of Akasha. He also released a cover of "I'm Alive", a song
originally by Peter Howe. VanWyngarden mentions Werner Herzog,
David Lynch, and Federico Fellini as his favourite directors.
Personal life VanWyngarden currently lives in Rockaway
Beach, Queens, New York. References
External links Official MGMT band