Three words that come to mind when trying to describe the way MGMT's song "Electric Feel" makes *me* feel: 1) Awesome. 2) Electric. 3) Super-Motivated. It's just a damn positive song with a fine booty beat, ya know? Try and trump that. Just try. My iTunes tells me "Electric Feel" is my #1 Most Played song in my library. Damn right it is. #2 may be Lil Wayne, but MGMT is #1.

Ben Goldwasser: Well, basically the band started on the internet.  Andrew (VanWyngarden) and I met freshman year of college and hung out together, had similar tastes in music, just started messing around, not really, like, planning on forming a band or anything.  And our first show, um—mostly we played on our college campus—our first shows were like really short kind of electronic shows.  After that we started writing more “pop songs” I guess, and after that we graduated from college, went on tour with Of Montreal for a little while, after that we  decided to take six months off of the band and we didn’t do anything,  And just as we were getting back together, like a week after we had started working on stuff again, we got contacted by someone at Columbia Records and started recording an album.

Wow.  OK.  In the beginning, when you were messing around at college, who would you say were some of your influences?

I guess the stuff we were playing didn’t really sound like the stuff we were listening to.  Like, we were listening to mostly rock, classic rock, psychadelic stuff from the 70’s.  The music we were making was more kind of ironic, I guess. Kind of like electronic, synth, and we didn’t really listen to anything like that.  The stuff we’re doing now, I guess, is starting to sound more like the stuff we listening to.

And that first tour was with Of Montreal...

Yeah.

How was that? Hitting the road for the first time as a band?  I mean, were you guys fighting a lot, was everybody getting along?

Well, all of it.  The first tour we did, it was just me and Andrew.  We were doing the music all off an iPod, and playing along with it.  We have a full band on the road with us now; it’s a lot nicer.

Yeah, I saw you guys on Valentine’s Day at The Music Hall of Williamsburg and I had great time.  I felt like there were a lot of young girls in the crowd.

Oh yeah?

Um, I don’t know.  It’s hard to say.  I think the cool thing about our audience is like the pretty good cross section; it’s not all one type of person.  There are, you know, teenage girls and there are also couple of 50-year-old hippies and there are people just out of college and, you know, they’re not all like hipsters or one type of person, is the thing.  So that’s really nice to see.

What are you working on now?  Are you kind of taking a break or are you still touring?

We actually just started a tour; we’re going out to the North East, doing a lot of college shows and stuff.  And then, we’re going out to the west coast and doing a bunch of shows out there.

Where are you guys living these days?

Andrew just moved out of his place; he was living in Park Slope, but he’s currently homeless.

[Laughs]

I have a place in Jersey, right outside of Newark.

What do you think of New York?

I like it.  I think that I have kind of a love-hate relationship with New York.  A lot of people I know here, there’s this kind of antagonism and opposition that you feel but I feel like that kind of forces you to push yourself, and drives you to create something or do something because there’s always this negative energy that you’re always working again.  But I’ve lived in Brooklyn for a year, year and a half maybe and I just moved out.

Why’s that?

Well, I don’t know.  I mean, there are some really nice spots in Brooklyn and I love Brooklyn but I just didn’t want to have to like end up looking for a cheap spot in Brooklyn that wasn’t in a nice neighborhood.  Especially, like, being on the road it’s really nice to come home to where I live, to be able to lay back on the couch, in just a regular old community.

Sure. So, what was going through your heads, or maybe even if you sat down and talked about it, you know, about making music and going on tour and then all of the sudden, on Columbia and getting all this attention and playing bigger and bigger shows?  I mean, was there like “a moment” when you guys took a step back and like talked it out?  Or was it all just like “Yeah, lets do it.  Let’s go! Lets go!”?

Oh no, we were really kind of nervous and apprehensive at first.  We’ve always heard about major labels, and stepping up your career, you know, all the negative things that people hear.  And so, it took a lot of convincing for us to even consider the possibility of signing, especially at a time when businesses was not really doing that well. But I think they did a lot of things that really won us over; they talked about how they wanted to sign less generic and more weird-themed band, like slightly more of a small scaled success than a huge thing.  They told us they’d give us more creative freedom and just like a lot of things that they said.  And you know, once we actually talked to the human beings who worked there...  So far it’s been good, but I don’t know... the whole thing is crazy.  We’re trying not to pay too much attention to the media, just do what we’re doing.  We wouldn’t want to get discouraged, and we also don’t want to get a big ego, either way.