Matt & Kim In Town

http://www.pittnews.com/arts_entertainment/1.915032-1.915032

Matt and Kim get down in WPU
From November 2008

Judging by the success of Matt and Kim’s two-person journey, the life of music stars is still a happy option.

Although they have progressed to MTV2 program hosts, the pair’s musical tale had fairly average origins. Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino’s alternative punk and dance band was formed when their first careers didn’t work out after college.

“Kim was always kind of infatuated with drums,” said Johnson in a phone interview with The Pitt News. “She had never played them and then tried to learn how to play. I had this really cool keyboard I found when I was 15, and I decided it was time to figure it out.”

“It’s way more fun to learn anything if you try to learn things with another person,” added Johnson.

Johnson was 26 and Schifino was 29 when they began practicing. Both had already attended Pratt Institute and discovered that their majors hadn’t suited either of their passions. So they went back to their teenage roots.

“I played in punk bands throughout school, and I used to practice in my bedroom in my parent’s house,” said Johnson. “I don’t know if they liked the noise, but they were always supportive.”

But the pair never planned on success. Their instrument experiments involved muting the sounds of their instruments with towels in their bedroom. It was their friends in other local bands who eventually made them play in public.

Johnson recalled, “I remember being totally terrified — we only had three songs!”

After their performance, though, they continued to make public appearances in small gigs. And thanks to Internet chatter, their audience continued to grow.

They released Matt and Kim in 2006, and their second album, Grand, is due out in 2009. The pair has been traveling and performing for almost four years now.

“There’s so many cool little towns that you find out are fun to go to!” said Johnson.

Johnson and Schifino both continue to enjoy the simplest things in life. The travelers were excited just to have a new van that had working air conditioning.

“We’ll work out some sort of beat together. We always start with the beat for some reason,” said Johnson. “Then I’ll do a keyboard melody or something. When it comes to lyrics, we just rhyme through it. Kim will just write lists of sentences on pieces of paper that have nothing to do with each other, and then I’ll pick out the ones that might go together.”

And from there the music is fine-tuned into a dance melody with head-bang syndrome.

“Our influences are things that we find fun,” admitted Johnson. “We’re really open to music as long as it’s really kind of upbeat and just fun. When it comes to music, we listen to a lot of hip hop.”

Though Schifino, who studied art in college, occasionally draws, Johnson’s hobby turns out to be his daily work.

“I essentially just do my hobby as a job,” he said, “and it’s turned out to be an awesome life.”