Song Exploder - MGMT - Time to Pretend

Episode Date: January 19, 2016

MGMT was formed by Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden in 2001. The song Time to Pretend was one they wrote early in their career. It first came out on their debut: the Time to Pretend EP in 2005. And three years after that, they put out a new version of the song, on their first full-length album, Oracular Spectactular, which was named album of the year by NME and was one of Rolling Stone's top 20 albums of the decade. It went on to sell over a million copies worldwide. In this episode, Ben and Andrew trace how the song Time to Pretend was made, from its dorm room origins, to its first recording, to re-envisioning it with Grammy-winning producer Dave Fridmann. They also uncover the hidden sounds and easter eggs within the recording.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. This episode has some explicit language. You're listening to Song Exploder. My name's Rishikash Hirway. MGMT was formed by Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wynne Garden in 2001. The song Time to Pretend was one they wrote early in their career. It first came out on their debut, the Time to Pretend EP, in 2005. Three years after that, they put out a new version of the song on their first full-length album,

Iracular Spectacular, which was named Album of the Year by NME, and was one of Rolling Stones' top 20 albums of the decade. It went on to sell over a million copies worldwide. In this episode, Ben and Andrew trace how the song Time to Pretend was made, from its dorm room origins to its first recording to re-envisioning it with Grammy-winning producer Dave Friedman. They also uncover the hidden sounds and Easter eggs within the recording. Here's MGMT on Song Exploder. This is Ben from MGMT. Most of the sounds in both the recording on the EP and on the album version have been around since we were in college.

I mean, the actual sounds that we made on my laptop without any fancy studio gear or anything like that, most of that stuff is still on the recordings. I was totally broke. I couldn't afford any musical gear at all. I mean, it was all on the laptop that I used to write papers on for college. They're just, they're scents in reason. Like everything pretty much is, you know,

one of the stock synthesizers that comes with the program. And in college in our spare time, we just spent a lot of time messing around with those synths and trying to see what kinds of crazy noises we could get out of them. That's just a base on one of the synths and reason. Hey, this is Andrew Van Weingarten. We were, like, really into super naive childlike melody stuff in college. and the intro kind of has a very toddling sound.

It's not a pleasing sound. It's like the wings of an insect are making it or something. But it's definitely the hook. At that point in time, we were two nerdy liberal arts college students. The band was a joke about being rock stars. That was the kind of whole schick of the band in college is that we would be playing in someone's living room for 15 people and we'd be wearing fake fur coats and sunglasses.

and drinking champagne and just acting like fools. It was kind of performance art in a way, but not very, like, high concepts. I would say no concepts. No concepts. I mean, it was a song about becoming rock stars and destroying our lives, and we would sing everything in unison.

It became sort of like this ironic mission statement type thing, and it felt right for us both to sing every part of it. Let's make some music, make some money. Find some models for wise I'll move to parachute some heroin and fuck with the stars 2005 was the first time the song was on an official release.

I think we made like a thousand CD copies of the EPE. And then 2006 is when there was the first interest from Columbia Records. And they didn't own the recording on the EP. You know, they wanted to put those songs out. as well, and I mean, we were fine with that.

So when Ben and Andrew went to record new tracks for their album on Columbia, they also recorded a new version of Time to Pretend. We didn't really re-record the whole song. I mean, it's, you know, remix is probably more accurate. The label was telling us, you need to work with a producer. We didn't really know what a producer did or get the subtlety of what a producer could be. That's when we kind of started to think about producers, who we would want to record with, And we talked to Dave Fridman and really got along well.

I mean, we knew we liked the way that the drums on the Flaming Lips record sounded. Dave is a very easygoing guy as a producer. He never really phrases things like, you should do this. He's more like, hey, how about we try this as an experiment? Dave is the one who suggested we changed the tempo a little bit. It was only like one or two BPM that we sped it up. And we landed on and wanted it to be the exact tempo of Dancing Queen. by Abba, which it is.

And also we recorded the same piano part from Dancing Queen in the song. You can't really hear it. Yeah, but it's in there at the end. There it is. It's in there somewhere, but we'll probably get in trouble for saying this now. I don't know if it was an obvious thing to add live drums.

Maybe a lot of it had to do with the fact that we were just really excited about being in a studio where we could make drums sound good. And we hadn't really had that. opportunity before. And I remember I did like a bunch of live drum takes that were just really ridiculous. This was kind of Dave's idea as well, some takes where I was just doing the most ridiculous like Tom Phil's. Yeah, we were really taking advantage of Dave's abilities with drum sounds. Ben was kind of a master of synth horn arrangements in college.

I've always been really inspired by like really good fake sampled orchestra instruments. Like, you would never be fooled into thinking that somebody who's actually playing that instrument. But it sounds really amazing in its own way, and it's really fun to manipulate that and turn it into something new. Is there some, like, let's go on a fox hunt kind of, like, French horn sound? Dave Frimmons won musical performance on the album. I've forgotten about that. It's amazing. It was this little, like, metal robot instrument. It looks like a robot, and it's called a Thingamogup, and it has, like, a little light sensor on it.

The difference in the amount of light would change the pitch. He had like a giant industrial dimmer switch for the lights in his room, so you could actually play the robot sort of like a pheromone. There's a sound towards the latter part of the song that's like an ascending kind of squeal. That's being played by Dave Freeman by turning a dimmer switch very precisely. It was just such a big deal to be in a real recording studio with like this guy who was a legend in our minds.

And that was kind of a definitely moment for me where it kind of hit me that we were at a different level of working. We weren't just screwing around. We were kind of like making something that was maybe good. Time to pretend, like, if you had asked us in 2005, we wouldn't have been like,

oh yeah, that song could be popular. When we were kind of first talking to the label, some guy in the music industry thought it could be a hit single and we were like laughing about that because we were like, yeah, right. But then I guess, I don't know. You know, we didn't really know what we were doing at all.

Our next guests are an acclaimed band from Brooklyn who are making their network television debut with us tonight. This is their CD entitled Oracular Spectacular. Please welcome MGMT. I know for me, I think whenever it was 2008, when we played on David Letterman, that was kind of like very surreal. Because we played time to pretend, and we decided to wear druid capes. And it was just one of those moments where like, yeah, it was all like funny and silly, like inside joke.

And then like, oh yeah, but you're on national TV looking like fucking idiot and a druid cape. So like, I don't know. That was like, I feel like if you watch that video, you can see me kind of like, oh, God, what is happening? Here's Time to Pretend by MGMT in its entirety. A new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kaysh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career.

And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrobe.

I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nod. Rossrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now.

You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Next time on Song Exploder, Kalella breaks down her song, Rewind. You can subscribe to Song Exploder on iTunes, and you can find all the past episodes on the show's website,

songexploder.net. Song Exploder is part of Radiotopia from PRX. My name is Rishi Kesh Your Way. Thanks for listening.