Matt and Kim rep their favorite borough on Grand

By Laura Leebove
Published: January 15th, 2009 | 12:00pm

Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino, of indie-pop duo Matt and Kim, live in an 8-foot-wide, railroad-style apartment, the kind where getting to one room requires passing through another. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, next to their building on Grand Street, is “our ocean,” says vocalist-keyboardist Johnson. “The cars going by are our splashing waves all night long.” Oh yeah, and they just got heat in late November, thanks to rusted gas pipes that had to be turned off temporarily.

Even though Johnson fears that he and drummer Schifino will return from a tour to find their humble abode crumbled to pieces, the cozy Brooklyn apartment they share with his brother is still their home. “Seeing what you can get in these other cities for what we pay, you can get a whole mansion, and we live in a shoebox,” Johnson says. “But for some reason we just can’t see [ourselves] leaving.”

Though record-label backing has recently given Matt and Kim some financial freedom, they started out with the typical model used by underground musicians in virtually any city: lots of bean-and-rice dinners, scrounging the practice-space couches for snack change, and playing DIY shows everywhere possible, which, in Brooklyn, included tons of basements, parties, and warehouses. “[Brooklyn has] enough like-minded folks … that Kim and I were playing three times a week when we first started playing in Brooklyn, and there’d be people at all these things,” Johnson says. “[In another city], people would be sick of us. We were able to play and play and play our hearts out.”

The couple’s loyalty to their longtime stomping grounds made Grand an obvious title for the band’s second LP (out January 20 on Fader), as the tracks are laced with references to Johnson and Schifino’s favorite borough, and the city in general. In “I’ll Take Us Home,” Johnson sings about the journey home to “New York, our old friend,” where they’ve found peace with the bottles and road signs that sometimes litter the streets. Then, on the album’s sunny single, “Daylight,” he sings about running free through the town — tossing shoes into the ocean, hitchhiking to Maine, and making mischief on the subway.

Musically, Grand is a step up from Matt and Kim’s self-titled 2006 release on Iheartcomix, a collection of 10 short, punchy tracks that are commonly criticized for sounding better at their live show. “We wanted to make a recording that stood on its own, that, if you just heard it, would make sense,” Johnson says of Grand. Part of that meant more freedom — writing, recording, and producing the entire album on their own.

Instead of laying down the tracks in their current place of residence, Matt and Kim retreated to Johnson’s childhood bedroom in his parents’ house. Located in “the middle of freakin’ nowhere” (also known as Jacksonville, Vermont), Johnson says the closest traffic light is about 20 miles away. “I knew it’d be somewhere to be creative,” he says. “At my parents’ house … we can try whatever the hell we want to try. We were on our own timeline.”

The 11 tracks keep much of the repetition and all-smiles energy that defined the band’s self-titled debut. But Grand also tones down the urgency of the vocals and Johnson’s brash and brassy keyboards, and ups the skill level of Schifino’s drumming — all factors that help the record stand without a live audience.

Even though Johnson says he and Schifino created exactly the album they wanted and they couldn’t be happier with it (“It’s like, the best thing I’ve ever worked on in my life”), he’s not sure it’d be safe to continue recording with that much freedom. “I stayed up all night numerous nights because we’d just be home for a little bit of time between tours and there was nothing to stop me from just fiddling the shit,” he says, suggesting that maybe another full-length album would be too large of a project. “To get someone else to do [the mixing and editing] would probably be a wise decision if I wanted that little thing called sanity.”

Sane or not, the hard work is finally starting to pay off, though it’s hard to see them ever slowing down. “I remember Kim and I thinking that true growing up was when we got a full-size bed,” Johnson says. “We slept in a twin bed for, like, three years. We got that full-size bed — now we’re grown-ups. So next is a little bit of success: health insurance.”

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