VanWyngarden was born in
Columbia, Missouri on February 1, 1983, and was raised in
Memphis, Tennessee. His father, Bruce VanWyngarden, was the
editor-at-large of the alternative newspaper
Memphis Flyer. Andrew fondly remembers his childhood years in Memphis, especially fishing and camping with his father. "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. One of his first experiences with music was listening to his father play
The Who song "
Pinball Wizard" on his electric guitar with a
Fender Twin Reverb amp. Later on, VanWyngarden was in a band called Accidental Mersh with future MGMT guitarist Hank Sullivant who would later introduce him to James Richardson, MGMT's future live 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 Israeli. 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 freshman year. He said he planned to study the natural sciences of astronomy, but meeting Goldwasser changed his whole life course. He also mentioned studying entomology while in college. 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 cause. I was like: 'C'mon, man! Where's your selfish ambition?'" 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." Andrew graduated from
Wesleyan University in 2005, the same year they released their
Time to Pretend EP; both Andrew and Ben would host small gigs playing their obnoxious music in front of crowds of 10 to 30 people. They produced this along side a label company called
Cantora Records, a record company a friend of Andrew started up that also helped a couple of other small bands in the same university distribute music releases. Once his university days were over Andrew insisted of leaving his music life to focus more on his personal development; not long before
Columbia Records caught the attention of tracks like
Kids and
Time To Pretend. VanWyngarden was on
NMEs 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 from the album is "
Siberian Breaks". In a 2010 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".
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 would be released by Blikk Fang in
Polyvinyl Records'
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. In October 2020, VanWyngarden began hosting a radio show on
WYXR called Time Passage. VanWyngarden mentions
Werner Herzog,
David Lynch, and
Federico Fellini as his favorite directors. ==Personal life==