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 Rishikesh Hirway. This episode has some explicit language. You're listening to Song Exploder. My name is Rishikesh Hirway. MGMT was formed by Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wijngarten in 2001. The song Time to Pretend was when 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, A Racular Spectacular, which was named Album 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. The actual sounds that we made on my laptop without any fancy studio gear or anything like that, and most of that stuff is still on the recordings.
That 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. There's synths in reason. Everything pretty much is one of the stock synthesizers that comes with the program. In college and 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 bass on one of the synths in reason.
Hey, this is Andrew Van Wijngarten. We were like really into Super Nyeave, Childlike Melody, Stuff in College, and the intro kind of has a very totalling sound. It's not a pleasing sound. It's like the wings of an insect are making you add or something, but definitely the hook.
At that point in time, we were to nerdy liberal arts college students. The band was a joke about being rock stars. That was the kind of whole stick of the band in college is that we would be playing like in someone's living room for 15 people. We'd be wearing fake fur coats and sunglasses, then drinking champagne and just acting like fools. It's kind of performance in a way, but not very 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. We came sort of like this ironic mission statement type thing and it felt right for us both to sing every part of it. 2005 was the first time the song was on an official release. I think we made like a thousand CD copies of the EP.
2006 is when there was the first interest from Columbia Records. They didn't only recording on the EP. They wanted to put those songs out as well. 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. 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 Friedman 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 Ava, which it is. And also we recorded the same piano part from Dancing Queen in the song. You can't really hear it.
Yeah, this is definitely there at the end. There it is. It's in there somewhere. 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 a bunch of live drum takes that were just really ridiculous. This was Dave's ideas as well. Some takes where I was doing the most ridiculous 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. You would never be fooled into thinking that somebody was 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. And there's some like let's go on a fox hunt kind of like French horn sound. Dave Fremont's one musical performance on the album.
It was this little like metal robot instrument. It looks like a robot and it's called a thing in the group. And it has like a little light sensor on it and the difference in the 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 theorem in. 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 Fremont 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 definitely a moment for me where I kind of hit me like 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 would ask 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 number 10 and we decided to wear druid capes and we were 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 like a f***ing idiot in the Jude cape.
So like I don't know that was like I feel like if you watch that video you can see me like kind of like oh god what is happening. Now here's time to pretend by MGMT in its entirety. I'm feeling rough I'm feeling wrong in the time of my life. Let's make some music, make some funny, find some models for wives. I'll put two pair of shoes on here when the fun with the stars. You've never had a demo, cocaine, never been in cards.
This is our decision to live fast and tidy up. We got the vision now let's have some fun. Yeah so the world, the world's can be do. Get jobs at offices and wake up for the money. Yeah I'm about our mothers and our friends. We're facing to pretend. To pretend, we're facing to pretend. To pretend. I'll miss the playgrounds in the animals and digging up worms. I'll miss my system, miss my father, miss my dog and my home. Yeah I'm support of them, I'm free of them and time's been low.
There's really nothing, nothing we can do. Love a deeper garden like you know we start off the new world. We're models for our children, get it to force, find some modern models, everything was running as cards. We're all so proud of all that will be it. We're facing to pretend. To pretend, we're facing to pretend. To pretend. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Song Exploder is brought to you by Progressive. Are you driving your car or doing laundry right now?
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And for 10% off your first year's membership, go to distro kid.com slash VIP slash song exploder. 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 radio topia from PRX. My name is Rishikesh your way. Thanks for listening. Radio topia from PRX.