MGMT built its nameon blaring synths and angsty, anthemic choruses. But to Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, that’s not what defines their band. Inside jokes do. “There is a lot of music we would fall on the floor laughing at, and most people would be like, ‘What the fuck are they … Why is that funny?’” VanWyngarden says. They can’t quite explain why doingsomething like modulating a note while repeating the chorus to their 2007 song “The Youth” is amusing; to them, it just is.
A shared sense of humor iswhatfirst connected VanWyngarden and Goldwasser in the mid-aughts, when they started recording music together at Wesleyan University. Early songs like “Time to Pretend” and “Kids” would become millennial touchstones and lead to a deal at Columbia Records during the era’s alt-rock feeding frenzy. The band only got weirder from there, making them critical darlings but not the hitmakers Columbia had likely hoped for. That briefly changed as they were leaving the label, when their 2018 song “Little Dark Age” became a TikTok hit during the pandemic. But the duo weren’t interested in a follow-up breakout moment. Once their contract with Columbia was up,they began working on music outside of a label for the first time since college. “Coming back on our own schedule and just doing whatever felt right, it felt like getting back to the roots of the band,” Goldwasser says.
The resulting album, Loss of Life, is a charming hodgepodge of often critically derided styles: the ‘90s alt-rock the duo grew up on, self-serious folk, ‘80s power ballads. And though it’s lighter on synths, it’s still full of those playful MGMT moments, like a self-described“disgusting” bass part on “Dancing in Babylon” or the cheeky sequencing of “Loss of Life, Pt. 2” as the opening track. “We just chuckle, even though it’s not Ween or something that has a universal silliness everybody can sense,” VanWyngarden says. As he and Goldwasser tell it, the album has more in common with Meat Loaf, Oasis, and even Elden Ring.
Leaving Columbia Records
Ben Goldwasser: I think it would be easy to paint this picture of a major label clamping down on us creatively, but there wasn’t really any of that. They were generally supportive and let us put out whatever music we wanted to. But there was always the business side of it, the suits and whatever, in the back of our minds.
Andrew VanWyngarden: In order to have faith in our abilities and really find our creative flow, we would have to forget about what had happened in the last album cycle that was disappointing for us. It led to this cycle of getting your hopes up, and then a lot of promises that weren’t delivered on. Operating without that hanging over us this time was a major difference.
BG: It was a little intimidating to be like, “We are solely responsible for creating the timeframe and doing things when it feels right.” But once we really got into the process, it was very liberating.
AVW: We didn’t feel like we had to make an album, either. We first started with a couple of sessions that were more experimental and were like, “Maybe if the inspiration strikes and we hit on something, then we’ll go with it.” But for a while, it was just testing out different ideas.
BG: In the past, we’ve ended up in an almost apologetic stance talking about the music that we’ve made. Having this gut feeling that things aren’t going to go as well as we hoped they would. And this time, we generally feel more optimistic — not necessarily because, “Oh, we’ve got a hit on our hands,” but “Whatever happens, happens.” We really like what we did and we hope other people like it, but it doesn’t feel like the stakes are as high.
AVW: OnLittle Dark Age, there are themes that deal with being on a major label and lyrics about feeling shitty in a world dominated by technology that makes everything cheap. This album, it feels like we both wanted to do something that was a new challenge to us, which is to be really direct and sincere and still be lighthearted and cheeky.
Power ballads by Meat Loaf and Roxy Music
BG: “Dancing in Babylon” started out sounding a bit like Magnetic Fields or Television Personalities, and maybe a little twee. Then it went into this Euro-dance style. Then we ended up cutting it to half-time, and it started to make a lot more sense as a ballad. There are certain styles of music that have this nostalgic vibe for us just because it’s music we remember from when we were kids. That ended up inspiring us.
AVW: There’s this schmaltzy piano breakdown that Ben added when it was still Euro-house. Once we had that, we were like, “Oh, it could be more in the vein of Meat Loaf or Roxy Music or ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’.” But at the same time, it’s not that at all. The song is a Frankenstein structure.
BG: I was talking to a friend the other night about the Meat Loaf piano breakdown. I was like, “I don’t think I’ve ever played piano like that in my life.” I didn’t really realize that I had that in me. Maybe I was possessed or something.
AVW: I was a bit self-conscious to show Christine and the Queens the song. Chris was riding high, had two albums done, and was playing me all of these songs with really great production. And then I’m like, “Okay, now it’s time to play our idea.” At that point, it was this really dinky, all-over-the-place Euro-house song with scratch vocals that I did on the computer microphone. But we discussed the mood and the emotion before I played it, and that’s really what we connected on. It allowed him to hear the actual idea of the song and not get distracted by how terrible it sounded at that point.
BG: A lot of ’80s music, you could have an incredibly soulful, raw vocal performance, and then the musical bedding is dinky if you just listen to that on its own. It’s like there’s this suspension of disbelief where the dinkiness of the music can accent an incredible human performance.
Oasis
BG: We had made a plan to work with Dan Lopatin, Oneohtrix Point Never, who Andrew had met at a party. I had never met him before, and I came to New York to do this session with Andrew and Patrick Wimberley, our producer. And then Andrew and Patrick ended up getting COVID. So I showed up at Dan’s studio and we opened up “Mother Nature.” And there was something funny that happened where, since both Dan and I are more electronically oriented, we said, “Well, we’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to do rock stuff on this track.” I’m a pretty mediocre guitar player, and I had a lot of fun just building up layers of weird, detuned guitar stuff. Miles, the engineer on the record, is this huge Oasis fan. So there was something exciting about being like, “Okay, Miles, we’re going to give you your Oasis moment.” He helped me get the perfect guitar tone for it.
Buying random guitars
AVW: I bought this little child-scale classical guitar in Argentina when we were touring around 2011. I was taking it everywhere and would play the “Nothing to Declare” verse on it. All I had was the title and the little verse-chord progression, but it was something that would make our touring guitarist James really crack up. So I would do it whenever we were in an airport, and do this really sad, soppy English folk voice. It always felt like it couldn’t actually be a real song. Then, during the pandemic, I finished the arrangement on a piano, and it seemed like it would fit with the other songs we were working on. The fact that after more than ten years it was still circulating in my head, I was like, That has to mean that there’s something to this. Ben and I aren’t really prolific, so if we have something that we’ve started and it’s still in our heads years later, we have this urge to complete it.
I also played the 4 Non Blondes guitar on the recording. That was a spontaneous eBay buy during the pandemic. I started playing it and I was like, There’s something about the guitar. I’ve seen this before. It’s from the “What’s Up?” video. Linda is playing the same model.
’90s alternative rock videos (and Tom Scharpling’s love of Stone Temple Pilots)
BG: We wanted Tom Scharpling to direct a video. We just gravitated toward talking about grunge music videos and that classic era of MTV and VH1. We were also talking about what “Bubblegum Dog” actually meant and the idea of something that you’re constantly running away from, whether it’s your shameful past or the truth or just accepting reality. It somehow all seemed to fit.
AVW: I loved the Smashing Pumpkins “Today” reference at the end of the video.
BG: We did get a shoutout from Smashing Pumpkins. That was validating. Part of us was thinking, like, Oh man, if any of these people actually see this video, they’re just going to hate us. So hearing back from one of the original artists being positive was pretty cool.
AVW: There’s definitely a nod to the “Black Hole Sun” music video with the little girl with the sunflower. Alice in Chains — there’s a big reference with the crazy laughing man, but that’s in every ’90s alternative video. There was just a ton. I definitely tried to impersonate Eddie Vedder’s facial expressions during the opening scene, which was really fun. Tom’s actually a huge fan of Stone Temple Pilots. I think there are at least three Stone Temple Pilots references in it.
BG: As the hours wore on and there was a little bit of stress about not being able to get all the shots, Tom started communicating his stress by just coming up behind you and singing Stone Temple Pilots songs. He couldn’t really talk about what was happening in the moment.
Their producer’s son
BG: Dave Fridmann’s son John did the horn arrangements. Dave has produced and mixed all of our records since Oracular Spectacular, and we’ve known his son since he was, I don’t even — he was really young when we met him.
AVW: Probably 8 or something.
BG: So we’ve watched him become an adult, and he’s always been around. Even when he was young, he was one of those little kids who could just be brutally honest, almost in a scary way. I think even Wayne Coyne was a little scared of him when he was a kid because he was the only person who would stand up to Wayne. It just felt really right to put John on the record.
AVW: On every album, we’ve ended up incorporating at least a few moments where we’re trying to impress or make John and Mike, Dave’s other son, laugh. I had done a MIDI trumpet solo in this one part of “Nothing Changes,” so the first thing we did was have John just do that with a real trumpet. Then we knew, conceptually, with “Nothing Changes,” that we wanted to have a major, major scene change musically. We just described what we were thinking, and he composed that ’70s loungey midsection. We listened a few times and we were just like, “Whoa, I guess, yeah, let’s make it work.” And it worked. Then we had this established flow that we were doing.
Playing Elden Ring in the studio
AVW: We should mention … what’s the game called?
BG: Elden Ring.
AVW: Yeah, Elden Ring was a constant presence. We were living in the fantasy zone a little bit.
BG: John Fridmann also is obsessed with video-game music. It’s basically his favorite genre. I had been playing a ton of Elden Ring at Dave’s studio, and then I got Patrick and Miles hooked on it too. So basically anytime we were taking breaks, somebody was playing Elden Ring or watching someone play.
AVW: I don’t play, but I love watching people play video games, so I would just take a load off after a long day in a studio and get really, really stoned and watch somebody play Elden Ring. And I think that seeped into the lyrics on a few songs.
The end of the world
BG: I feel like a lot of us have been thinking about it. One thing that has been really present, to us at least, is the idea that So what, the world is ending? Get over it. There have been so many periods in human history that have felt like the world is ending and nothing could possibly come after that, and then for centuries, somehow, we continue to persist on this planet.
AVW: But also, the whole thing about being a human is that the world is ending for everybody. You’re going to die. We’ve dealt with this idea of mortality and existential anxiety for a long time in our music, so it’s just a matter of which timeframe you choose to — do you want to be terrified about dying from a nuclear attack? Which one do you want to focus on? You can stress out about something today that’s happening in the present, or you can stress out about the fact that you’re going to die no matter what. Or you can just choose to do something else and have a happier existence.
BG: A lot of it for me comes more from a place of wanting to just feel more at ease or go through life with a little more grace. Which is hard to do, but it’s a goal I would like to work toward. And I like approaching music like that. We’ve approached making it from a more angsty or chaotic place before, and it feels cool to be like, “What if we try to approach it from a place of peace or tranquility and see what happens?”
AVW: It’s at the root of our friendship and our music, finding absurdity in the human condition. I don’t think it’s just a passing phase. I think it’s going to always be there.
Related
- MGMT, Parquet Courts, and the End of the World
Justin Curto , 2024-02-23 15:00:50
Source link
