Matt’s musical journey began when he performed a solo on the alto saxophone for his fourth grade assembly.   “I remember it going pretty well.  ‘Hello Dolly’ was a big hit back in the day.” Although he would never take the stage as a solo performer ever again, he had a very active sax life up through his junior year in high school.  “I never took it too seriously. In orchestra I used to go off the charts all the time and play whatever I felt like playing. As a result, I’m not too good. My approach to the guitar was pretty much the same,” he says.  “I picked up my sister’s old acoustic when I was 16 and figured out how to play ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to play guitar ever since!”

Ellen studied piano with a wacky female jazz musician as a child.  When she tired of practicing the piano, she tried the flute, but playing that made her dizzy.  Instead she turned her attention to the high school stage, and found her voice as a singer.  She became a self-professed “drama geek”.  Her star turns in mediocre productions of “Oklahoma!”, “The Pajama Game”, and “Guys and Dolls”, among others, made her a household name in her own household.

Their well-timed meeting occurred many years later, just as Ellen was planning to move back to New York from Los Angeles.  They quickly fell in love, and over the course of the months that they were apart, they wrote their first songs together, essentially through the mail.  Shortly after Ellen’s return to LA, they got married and started a family.