Matt and Kim interview
What:
Matt and Kim interview
Who:
Rachel Surgeoner tries to remember her conversation with Matt
Where:
The Step Inn, 186 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
When:
Mon May 4 (Labour Day!) doors 8pm
How much:
$22.75 + bf from OzTix
What else:
Presented by Popfrenzy and co-presented by FourThousand! For all things Matt & Kim visit here. Oh and special guests at the show are Last Dinosaurs and WolfGang DJs.
Photo credit:
Matt Reeves
It's been a year and 3 months since Matt & Kim came to Oz for the very first time. When asked if he's excited about coming back next month, Matt describes the first visit as similar to having a baby... "Childbirth must be the most excruciating pain ever, I don't know how women do it, and then some do it again and again... the flight to Australia is sort of like childbirth, it's so awful during and you feel so messed up after - yet, somehow later on, you kind of forget and you're like - ah, that wasn't so bad - let's do it again!"
Since I was lucky enough to hang with Matt & Kim on their first tour (I was the first person - ever - to introduce them to a Koala and a Kangaroo), I wanted to do a phone interview instead of one via email. (This means you get more organic and casual interviews, plus Matt hates email iv's - but phoners also make for risky business - i.e. your laptop turning itself off for no apparent reason and sabotaging ¾ of your interview!) Thus, please find below my interpretation of my interview with Matt from Matt and Kim: no embellishments, just my squeaky clean memory.
Matt promises me he won't sue me for getting anything wrong...
R: Hey Matt! We've just had an Easter long weekend here and I sort of slept in a little and consequently am a teeny-weeny bit under-prepared for the interview, so bare with me...
R: Where are you right now?
M: At home in Brooklyn, I just stepped off the train actually; we've been out for dinner
R: What did you have for dinner?
M: Um, I just ate, and I can't even remember - oh! It was Mexican - if I could eat just one food for the rest of my life, it would be Mexican food.
R: Whole lot of beans right, you're vego aren't you?
M: yep - beans for life!
R: Did you get any Easter eggs this weekend? America does the Easter egg thing right?
M: My family - how I was raised - we're not really into Easter or religious stuff, so we didn't celebrate Easter.
R: So no Easter eggs for you?
M: No, but I did have some jelly beans, I'm not gonna lie
R: So Grand, the new album, where did the title come from?
M: Well we live on Grand Street. People sort of thought we were giving ups to the album by calling it Grand, you know, like it's so grand... but we didn't even think of it like that. It's so hard naming an album, almost as hard as naming a band and well, we couldn't even manage that - I mean our friends got so tired of us not having name when we started, we got billed as Matt & Kim and so that was that. So Grand was just a simple and natural name - when we're touring we're always talking about home, Grand St. It just made sense.
R: What is 'Daylight' about? Where did the inspiration for that crazy film-clip come from and how was it, ending up in a dumpster?
M: Kim had been wanting to do a film clip of us playing in really awkward spaces, you know like in a raft in a pool or something, but she's actually really claustrophobic and really hates getting water in her eyes, and the dumpster scene - we were told it was going to be a clean dumpster - but what the director meant by clean, was that they had taken all the garbage out of it - but it was still covered in the grime, this thick, thick grime stench. When we cut Kim literally flew out of the thing, without even touching the sides - I swear.
R: And still she keeps that endless smile on her dial
M: Well sort of, she might still be smiling, but when you know Kim as well as I do, you get to know the different smiles - the painful ones, the when will this be over ones.
M: But basically the clip is about our life, you know a day in Brooklyn, we get up, have a shower, get dressed, make breakfast, as for the dumpster - well, there are a lot of dumpsters in Brooklyn. Besides, we're kind of used to playing in weird places, like girls locker rooms... (Editors note: the Brisbane all ages show last year got rained out and ended up being held in the ladies change-room at a public pool).
R: Grand is the first release in 2 years, how long did it take to lay down those tracks at your parents place in Vermont?
M: Well it actually took a really, freaking long time! It took 9 months - 6 weeks in Vermont and the rest of the time at home in Brooklyn, - we did it all ourselves in-between touring. So we'd be on the road for 3 weeks and home for one and we'd spend like every second we had on the album. I mean out first album was done in a studio in LA in one week and everyone is like ‘it will do', ‘yeah that's good enough'. We wanted the sound just right, so we'd be up late at night laying down drum beats - and probably really pissing our neighbours off. Plus, we had no idea what we were doing...
Ta da! (computer recovers and we start the recording again... this is where Matt's real answers start - not like the ones above, which I've seized from my memory)
R: Where you been, what you done, who you met, what you seen in the past year?
M: I don't even know where to start, uh, we went to Alaska, it's out in the middle of nowhere, kinda close to Russia. I shot my first handgun - that was pretty cool. I've never shot a handgun before. We flew in a really little plane in Alaska too.
R: Where did you play in Alaska? I mean, I know they must have live music venues there, but what are they like igloos or something?
M: Yeah, well that's the thing, I was totally confused - I had no idea what it was going to be like. We went to Anchorage I think it was, we played a couple of different venues and it was cool you know, it was fun, it was freezing cold and there were avalanches but it was cool. It was definitely an experience, I was really intrigued about what it would be like there. Yeah, not everyone gets to go to places like that. Back to what we've been up to - I guess we've also done a bunch of tours across the states, we toured with Against Me, who are a band I really like and Cool Kids, and we did shows with Greg - Girl Talk, and we did some summer festivals here and I think we did some in Europe too. It's kind of like all confusing, um, we recently did a whole bunch of shows with a band called Best Fwends - which sounds kind of silly, But I actually had a speech impediment all of my youth, where all my l's and r's came out as w's, so when I said I really liked something it would come out as ‘ I weally wike' something... touring with this band made me flash back to my childhood. I remember having to get pulled out of class to go to speech classes. But I'm so happy I don't say ‘weally' anymore.
R: It would be endearing
M: But yeah, we just did our last tour with Cut Copy, which just ended like a week ago.
R: They are pretty big in the US then?
M: Yeah, yeah, definitely! It's really awesome, and there are only so many bands that can do what they do, I mean they are playing in big places, like 3000 people and everyone from the front to the back are dancing their asses off. And the thing was, like I'd never seen Cut Copy before the tour or before being asked to go on the tour and so I went on YouTube and typed ‘Cut Copy live' and I just found all these clips with the audience dancing their asses off and I'm like this makes sense, we've got to get on this tour you know, because rather than some audiences who sort of stand still and look at their feet, these people are willing to get buck wild.
R: Definitely! So you mentioned some of the bands you've been on tour with this past year, but who are your favourite bands at the moment? Who are you listening to?
M: Even just today I was thinking about this, as I was going to the chiropractor for my back, I put on two of my favourite albums right now, one being Tokyo Police Club's Elephant Shell - that album is like flawless, it works so good, I was walking through Manhattan listening to it. And on the way back I was listening to TI's Paper Trail album and that's another flawless album. So good.
R: Who's that, TI?
M: Yeah TI
R: I'll have to Google it
M: Oh it's so good; I'm mean, they aren't really that huge here. But how big is hip-hop over there?
R: Well we have this really bad Australian hip-hop, I mean there's a market for it here, people really like it, but I just think it's the worst thing I've ever heard. There are still kids listening to American hip-hop over here too, I wouldn't say it was that huge, depends on who you ask ... But I think most Australians agree black dudes rap better!
M: Yeah, it's strange because hip-hop is definitely mainstream over here - like in the top 40 and I forget when you go to other countries, like Europe - it's just not that big. I remember when we were in Australia last time, was maybe the height of Jack Johnson's popularity - he was on like every magazine cover when we were there - I remember someone telling me why he was so popular - because he really appeals to the sensitive side of the surfer dudes.
R: Take my word Matt, Jack Johnson really isn't that popular in Australia if you ask us!
Genre: Pop
Release: Interview
Keywords: The Step Inn, Brooklyn Band, Popfrenzy, Matt and Kim
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