Matthew Check has been producing a lot of music over the last couple of years, and he has another album ‘Without a Throne‘ coming out on the 30th of September. He’s had quite the varied career – starting off by moving from Newtown to New York City initially to take graduate classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary. But he spent much of his time playing bluegrass banjo in jams downtown. Eventually, he would combine his love of bluegrass and Judaism into something he dubbed “jewgrass”—which yielded an album colorfully entitled ‘The Bluegrass Kabbalat Shabbat Experience.’ He was also the first banjo player for Gangstagrass and played on the 2010 Emmy Nominated Song ‘Long Hard Times to come.’ Next up was a duo Joanie and Matt with Grammy-winning Joanie Leeds producing folk/rock and that led to a solo stint, where he (currently) remains.
Matthew Check told Americana UK the background to the song: “I began writing ‘The Very Beginning’ on a friend’s piano in Hawthorne, Los Angeles while visiting the city for a wedding last summer. At the time, I had just broken up with my girlfriend after spending a long weekend with her in Las Vegas, (the first time we had seen each other in two months because I had been traveling in Arizona, Utah, Alaska and finally California before flying home to New York). I was in LA right after we broke up and it was the first time I had sat in front of a piano in months.
