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.[4] 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.[5]

The first musical influences he had involved going through his sister's records and listening to his dad play an electric guitar when he was 4 years old.[citation needed]

While in high school, VanWyngarden was in a band called Accidental Mersh with future MGMT guitarist Hank Sullivant. He also had a side project called Glitter Penis with friend Dan Treharne. They created and recorded parody songs but did not perform live.[6] In college, he wrote and performed a song called "Super Volcano" for a class.[7]

VanWyngarden attended and graduated from Wesleyan University, where he met fellow band member Ben Goldwasser. 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. [8] 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".[5] 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.[9]

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.[10] 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 Magazine.[11]

Side projects

Andrew VanWyngarden is in a project with Kevin Barnes from Of Montreal called Blikk Fang.[12] He appeared in "The Heart is a Drum Machine," a documentary film about the nature of contemporary music.[13]. VanWyngarden mentions Werner Herzog, David Lynch, and Federico Fellini as his favourite directors.