Q&A: MGMT's Andrew Vanwyngarden

MGMT (Andrew Vanwyngarden left) / Photo by Nick Haymes

With neon headbands, funky synth melodies, and jokey anthems about living fast and dying young, MGMT danced their way from Wesleyan's dorm rooms onto our iTunes playlists -- and were awarded with a pair of Grammy noms just last month. This spring the duo will release their second album, Congratulations, and singer Andrew Vanwyngarden has a warning for fans: "It's definitely going to shock people.

"We dropped any sort of irony that was on the first record, and Congratulations feels true to who we really are," the 26-year-old tells SPIN.com.

The Brooklyn resident also discusses fame, his respect for Lady Gaga, and how his love of surfing influenced Congratulations:

How's the new album coming?
It's mixed and mastered, and now we're just working on presenting it to the world. We spent all of last year working on it, and that's after a good long while touring behind the first record [2008's Oracular Spectacular], so it's definitely nice to be done.

What about Congratulations is really going to surprise people?
The honesty of it; it's very plaintive. In a weird way, it's like a soul record. That, and there's an instrumental track, the second to last song on the album, called "Lady Dada's Nightmare."

Lady DaDa? Is the song a tribute to Lady Gaga?
Well, it's just an instrumental track, but it's very nightmare-ish sounding! Actually, it's really kind of messed up sounding, and we thought it would be funny to call it "Lady Dada's Nightmare."

Are you a fan of Lady Gaga?
Well, at first I brushed her off as crap. And then I realized that her videos are really creative, and I like that she's getting more and more bizarre and spreading that to the mainstream. VH1 would say that she's driven, that she wanted to be as famous as possible. That's a very different goal from us. But I respect that she's doing what she wants to do.

MGMT have become quite famous over the past two years, but some lyrics on your first album poke fun at fame and rock excess. Do you ever feel you're becoming the kind of person you were making fun of?
We did become the people we were making fun of -- but you can't blame us. We were a group of guys in their mid-20s touring around the world and of course we are going to party. But after a while we all learned that you can't just keep doing that over and over, and the new record addresses those issues. On some of the new songs, I found myself thinking about Lady Gaga or Kanye West, and what their ultimate goal is. This sounds cheesy, but for us it's really just about the music and getting people to hear what we have to say. I'm sure it's about the music for those people, too… but fame… it's an interesting career.

The lyrics to Congratulations' title track seem to be about the spoils of your newfound fame -- the money, drugs, etc. Can you elaborate?
I was working on the lyrics while we were on the road. Some of it is about the worldwide economic crisis and how -- thankfully -- we were able to continue making music through it. But it's also from the perspective of other musicians, and about how fame and all the stuff it affords doesn't get you any answers. Maybe that's a cynical outlook.

Another track on the new album called "It's Working" seems to explore the same topic.
Yeah. It was the first song that we demo-ed almost a year ago. Ben [Goldwasser] and I went up to this little cabin in the woods in upstate New York, and the second I walked in the door I sat down and played this chord progression. The next day we expanded it into a song. Lyrically, it's about doing drugs. 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." The song is mostly about Ecstasy.

Is there any specific experience with Ecstasy that influenced that song?

Continue reading SPIN's interview with Andrew Vanwyngarden >>