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 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. Also listening music with his sisters especially Nirvana and Phish and going 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, and it was basically just the two playing around in the computer "just making songs," VanWyngarden says where they created and recorded parody songs but did not perform live. Then VanWyngarden was in a band called Accidental Mersh with future MGMT guitarist Hank Sullivant who would later introduce James Richardson future MGMT's 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 the band 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 new 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: " 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 (according to Q) 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 (Don't) Care (release under the name The Management).
VanWyngarden was on NME Cool List 2008 in 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, '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 likes 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.
Read more about this topic: Andrew Van Wyngarden
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