"I'm not fully recovered," he admits. "I'm mobile, but Kim has to lug everything around at the airport, which always makes me look like a [jerk]. Your 5-foot-4-inch girlfriend is carrying amplifiers and keyboards while you're standing there holding a cup of coffee."

The injury, caused by so much sleeping in the tour van, finally came to a head when Johnson reached out to turn on an amp at a show in Tampa, Fla. "Man really just wasn't meant to spend six weeks in a cargo van at a time," he says. Matt & Kim made it through that set, and Johnson received painkillers and a back brace for his trouble, but that hasn't slowed the band's momentum much. Or its shouty and danceable keyboard-and-drums pop, for that matter.

Following a breakout self-titled debut in 2006, the duo is still touring behind January's more musically diverse follow-up, Grand. Besides landing the song "Daylight" in a recent commercial for Bacardi rum, Johnson says it's always been easier for the band to support itself financially, since it's just the two of them.

"We share one bed, one cell phone," he explains. "I think sometimes we'll get asked to go places because [organizers] only have to pay for one room."

Laughing, he ventures, "We're just a good deal."