Artist: Matthew Check
Hometown: New York, New York
Song: “Lovely to have met you”
Album: The November Album
Release Date: November 5, 2021
In Their Words: “In another recent review, I referred to the chorus of ‘Lovely to have met you’ as partially a tribute to one of my favorite bars from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I lived at the time of the song’s writing. What I have yet to mention is how much I actually drank during that era of my life AT THAT BAR (which was too much). While it might have seemed like I was perfectly fine to my family and friends (I had a great job and had all of the proverbial boxes ticked off), I was struggling to connect on genuine levels with everyone in my life and was quite lonely. Now that I’m sober (I just celebrated seven years), the desperation of a ‘younger me’ in the lyrics is so much more apparent: ‘thoughts, of my loaded emptiness / my antiquated tenderness / that I don’t wanna share.’ In my sobriety, I’ve learned to connect with everyone in my life. And that’s why I have a rebuttal to the song’s coda, ‘It’s lovely to have met you but it hurts,’ and it’s this: it stops hurting when you stop drinking and get in touch with how you feel.” — Matthew Check
Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez
