Catching Up With... Matt & Kim

It’s been a a pretty huge year for Matt & Kim. Following a big tour, the duo dropped an even bigger-sounding album, Sidewalks. Recorded in Atlanta, Matt & Kim paired up with a producer—Ben H. Allen, who’s worked with Gnarls Barkley, Animal Collective and Deerhunter—for the first time, and the result is a glossy makeover of the band’s previously lo-fi pop. It’s a good look for the group, and to hear Matt Johnson tell it, its a sign of what’s to come. Paste caught up with him recently and discussed Twitter, underwear shopping and the forthcoming music video that upset his mom.

Paste: How was underwear shopping today?
Johnson: It was successful on Kim’s behalf. Not so much on my behalf. I had big plans. A while back, someone told me boxer briefs would change my life. I tried to get into it, but I could just never switch. I can’t find a pair of boxers that just don’t look terrible, that don’t look like someone’s dad.

Paste: Mostly I’m just pleased that we live in a world with such connectiveness that I can start interviews with questions like that.
Johnson: On what I just did an hour ago?

Paste: Yeah, exactly. How has Twitter changed Matt & Kim?
Johnson: I think the only thing is it tries to make me look more in a Seinfeldian/Larry David way with humorous observations on life. Those are the only accounts I really follow: the ones that use 140 characters for something quasi-funny. So we try…it’s not really our forte. So it tries to make me open my mind to rise to, you know, some sort of silliness.

Paste: I noticed you’re a Kelly Oxford fan. She’s one of my favorite people on Twitter.
Johnson: Oh my gosh, incredible! I don’t know how she just nails one after another. Such, such good bits.

Paste: It’s ridiculous. But I’ll talk about Twitter for this entire interview if I don’t cut myself off. I understand you guys just shot the video for “Cameras.” Can you tell me a little about that?
Johnson: We did. We’re trying to keep it a bit under wraps. We don’t plan on releasing the video until January. So, I don’t know. We’ve definitely had some success with our videos. There’s a little expectation for what we’ll make. We definitely made a ridiculous video; I didn’t think that was possible. But it’s definitely ridiculous. It might make people mad, but it’ll make more people happy than make them mad I think.

Paste: You think the video itself is going to upset people?
Johnson: Well, my mom didn’t like the concept so much. But she’s a supporter no matter what, you know? But yeah.

Paste: Fair enough. “The New Video From Matt & Kim That Upset Matt’s Mom.”
Johnson: She had made it clear once I said it was going to piss her off, she was like, “Matty, you know you can’t do anything to piss me off.”

Paste: Aw.
Johnson: She definitely follows anything online about Kim and I so she always knows. I should give her a shout out; she’ll see it.

Paste: It’s been a huge year for you guys. Do you feel like you’ve reached some new and tangible level with Sidewalks or does it just seem that way from the outside?
Johnson: We never take anything for granted. This band is our only job. We were always pretty wowed, but we just came off a two-month tour in the U.S. It was way better than anything I could have hoped for—at any point in my life. So yeah, definitely in the last year and a half, the growth has been a lot more. But it’s funny because in the same way, we’ve just been doing the same thing—just traveling around, playing shows, playing music for the last five years. In a way, it feels very similar, but in another way, it feels like, “Wow, we were in Japan doing a festival and all these people were singing along to our words.” And I remember thinking in high school, if one person I didn’t know knew some words to a song I had written, that’d blow my mind.

Paste: I imagine it’s probably easy not to realize the growth as it comes so gradually over the years.
Johnson: In a way. But like I said, this past year and a half has been pretty wild. And this year, with some festivals, Lollapalooza, Coachella, Austin City Limits, even when we were on stage, it didn’t feel so weird but we look back and in some videos or photos and see 30 thousand plus people. Like, hot damn! I guess things have changed a little since playing basements and living rooms and bathrooms and what other weird places we’ve played.

Paste: Did you guys really play a bathroom?
Johnson: Yeah, we did. Well, we played a women’s locker room in Brisbane, Australia.

Paste: You worked with Ben Allen on the new album. What made you choose him as producer?
Johnson: We liked that he had done really different things from the Gnarls Barkley album to Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion: two very different albums, but albums that I liked for really different reasons. Kim and I are kind of lucky because we don’t get pinned into one category of music. We sort of make sense wherever someone wants something fun, so we like the idea of someone who’s worked in a bunch of different things. You know, he’s engineered Christina Aguilera, Notorious B.I.G., shit like that.

Paste: What was it like working with him?
Johnson: We did one song last year when we both had a week free and we worked with him in New York. Kim and I did Grand, our past album, by ourselves. And seeing that we recording it, figured it out, did all the engineering and everything ourselves. It was nice to work with someone who knew what the hell they were doing as opposed to Kim and I, scratching our heads. We’re just like monkeys in a cage trying to figure out thing after thing and seeing what it sounded like. It makes it so you can’t focus on the songs as much as on the technical aspect. But we’re really proud of how Grand came out and it made a lot of sense to do it that way because we had no money at the time to make an album; it was a lot cheaper. Now, we had enough money to work with someone who we liked what they have done and be able to spend as much time as we needed on it. I liked Ben’s suggestions and stuff like that—being able to bounce ideas off another person and have a tiebreaker because when Kim and I disagree on something, what do you do? If it were up to Kim… She has a saying called “Kim’s always right.” But, you know, it doesn’t apply to everything. But in a long relationship, “Kim’s always right” is a good policy for me to stand behind.

Paste: The new album is huge sounding. Was that part of the goal, or did that just sort of happen?
Johnson: We weren’t looking for a DIY aesthetic. People had this idea that Matt & Kim was sort of supposed to sound lo-fi. While I like all sorts of music and all sorts of fidelities and whatnot, we didn’t want to put down any barriers. People who are used to listening to a lo-fi type of thing won’t have any difficulty getting to the songs. [We] didn’t want to cut any audience off right at the beginning. We tried to make the sound stand.

Paste: Were you worried at all about alienating those listeners if you got a little bigger with your sound?
Johnson: No, because we went into it with the same objective that we always have, which is: Kim and I just wanting to make music that we like and want to hear in this world. And I think as long as we’re honest to that, we’re not writing our songs any differently or anything like that. We’re just still trying to make music that we would like. I think as long as we do that, it’s still honest and real and we’re doing it for all the right reasons.

The way we’ve sounded in the past is only because we recorded in situations where…our first demo we recorded in our practice space. Our first album we recorded in six days. Our second album we recorded in a bedroom at my parents’ house. It was never, like, an intention. It was just like one of the things that happened. With this album, we were able to record in a couple different studios with a couple people who knew what they were doing so what happened with that is that we might have sounded a little more finished sounding. That song “Cameras,” I mixed that song myself back in the same bedroom I mixed Grand in. I know a little bit more what I’m doing now.

Paste: So, the next album will be recorded in Italy, China, multiple European countries?
Johnson: No, we’re just going to rent an island in Jamaica.

Paste: There you go.
Johnson: That’ll be the next step. Get some tropical drinks.

Paste: Yeah, totally. I read that “Silver Tiles” is the first song you guys wrote. Is that true?
Johnson: That is true. I wrote that on the baritone ukulele—one of my favorite instruments. This was before we knew we were going to be a keyboard and drum band. We were just jamming out in our bedroom at that time. Kim was learning to play drums. I was also learning keyboard but, like I said, I had a baritone ukulele. I had a strumming pattern; everything was strummed. Then when it came down to moving everything over to keyboards, because you get a better live sound that way. I thought, “How the hell do you strum a keyboard?” So what you hear, that’s me trying to strum the keyboard.

Paste: What made you guys choose to resurrect that song and use it now?
Johnson: Well, for a long time, it was kind of like our anthem. We closed all our shows with it and everyone knew it and would sing along to it. It was just on our demo. We had never actually recorded it for an album. But then as we grew, less and less of our audience had the demo and whatnot, people just stopped knowing it. So we stopped playing it at shows because no one would be singing along because no one knew it that much. We decided we were going to record it again basically so we could bring it back to the live shows. People can brush up on the literature and know the words before we go for it.

Paste: You’re going to Australia in the new year. What’s happening in the next couple months?
Johnson: We head to Miami on Wednesday; there’s an Art Basel down there. Kim and I are big fans of visual art. We met at art school, so basically we can just check out art, hang out, see friends and stuff like that. We’re also DJing some.
And then, the time before January will be spent learning how the hell to play Sidewalks live, which we have played none of that live besides “Silver Tiles.” It’s the same thing as we did with Grand when we went into the studio just to make the best recorded album we could because we realize there’s something very different between live music and recorded music. And when we finished Grand, we didn’t know how we would do it live but we worked it out.

Paste: Are you guys planning on touring a lot after, or working on other things?
Johnson: Basically, after Australia, we come back. We’re doing Hawaii for the first time on the way back. We’re doing a college in Chicago. Coming into spring, we’re doing a tour of the colleges and we’re already starting to book some festivals. I think late spring or early summer, we’re doing a full U.S. trip with all of Sidewalks because we didn’t play any of that on our fall tour.