Q&A With Matt & Kim
posted in: Exclusive Interviews • Features • Pop
Whether you’ve seen them running naked through Times Square in their video for Lessons Learned, caught the “insanity” that is their live show or even drank from a beer bottle with their faces on it, there’s a pretty good chance that the antics of indie pop darlings Matt and Kim caught your eye on their rise to indie stardom. And with shows that play out like a punk rock dance party and videos guaranteed to make you smile, the Brooklyn-based pair ensure that you won’t stop hearing about them any time soon.
We caught up with Matt Johnson to find out what’s going on with the duo and learn about their current summer tour. Of course, we just spoke with Matt in November, so this time around we decided to get a little crazy and find out about the tour with a friendly game of Mad Libs. Here goes nothing…
OS: Okay, so I have a paragraph here that I’m going to read, and whenever I get to a blank I’ll just say so, and you can fill it in with whatever you like.
MJ: Wait, no! I don’t want to hear the paragraph first. I want you just to tell me what kind of word I need to fill it in.
OS: Well, we can definitely do that!
MJ: Isn’t that how Mad Libs generally work? You tell me, like, Oh, it’s a verb, or an adjective or a noun? [Laughs]
OS: I just thought you might want a little more info than that. But I’m totally okay with doing it old school. [Laughs]
MJ: Yeah! No, I’d rather be surprised.
After a few minutes of Mad-Libbing, we’ve come up with one of the more interesting and oddly food-centric tour diaries that we’ve ever read. Matt’s answers are in bold.
So far, our summer tour has been slippery. And a few times, it’s been moist. But it’s given me a chance to show off my super-hype skills, and that makes me stumble. The coolest part so far has been the silver dollar pancakes, because of the free Cinnamon Life. I’m a little nervous about the inner thigh touching, but I think I’m probably just being bitchy. There’s only one thing I would change about this tour, and that’s the big toes. The most important thing I’ve learned over the past few months is just to eat. After the tour is over, Kim and I will probably tango for a while. I think that will be super dreamy.
OS: Well, thanks for putting up with our silliness!
MJ: Sure! I can’t wait to see how it comes out.
OS: Then we just have a few other questions. Did you two toss around any other band names when you started working together, or was it always Matt & Kim? If you were named Donald and Esther, would you still have gone that route?
MJ: We were trying to come up with a name for a while, and it’s just really fucking hard. I mean I could imagine it’s sort of the next hardest thing you could do to naming a baby, I’m guessing. This is the sort of thing you’re going to stick with for a long time. And we couldn’t think of a name. The closest we came to thinking of a name was the Scream Team, which we thought was pretty good. But other than that… we got asked to do a show, and we didn’t even think of ourselves as a real band. They just listed us as our names, and it worked. It worked for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I think just being [known] by our first names really has a lot to do with what we’re about as a band.
OS: Your fans always describe you guys as just being the happiest people. How do you keep up the constant cheer?
MJ: Well, there’s definitely days that are tough. There’s days where you had to wake up at 4:00 am to catch an early flight and whatnot. But when we do shows, that’s what the rest of the twenty-three hours of the day were leading up to. You know, we get on stage and there’s 1,000 people, or you’re at a festival and there’s 30,000 people that are just super excited you’re playing. We just automatically bust out into a grin.
If you haven’t checked Matt and Kim out live yet, you still have a few chances to see the duo on tour this summer. And be sure to check out the delightfully impromptu new video for Block After Block below!