The Songs of Coleman Mellett

For nearly 10 years, Jeanie Bryson had been listening to her husband, Coleman Mellett, work on a collection of songs in his bedroom studio over the garage. The guitarist, whom she met at a Sunday jam session and ended up hiring to play in her band in 1999, was accustomed to recording his vocals in the soundproofed walk-in closet.

“He’d say, ‘Turn off everything!’ We’d shut the air conditioning off, and he’d go in there and sing his vocals and come out dripping in sweat,” recalls Byron, the daughter of Dizzy Gillespie and an accomplished jazz-pop vocalist in her own right. “He would come down with the acoustic guitar and play a song for me and my mother, who would be there, and we’d go, ‘Oh, my God, Coley! It’s another hit!’”

On February 14, 2009, on the way to a Chuck Mangione gig in Buffalo, Mellett tragically perished in an air crash, along with bandmember Jerry Niewood and 47 others.

At the time of his death, there had been no plan in place to turn those songs into anything. They were good songs, songs he had written for Bryson. Then, at the memorial service just a few days later, Bryson broached the idea of making a posthumous album with two of Mellett’s trusted musical cohorts, Barry Miles and Ron DiCesare. All three thought the world needed to hear their beloved “Coley’s” music.

A full 16 years later, this collection of songs, mostly love letters written from Mellett to his wife, has been released as Sing You a Brand New Song, produced by Bryson as her own love letter back to her husband. It debuted on Valentine’s Day 2025.

Keyboardist/producer Miles had known Mellett through a longtime association with Bryson, having recorded her first demo in the 1980s. He had been privy to this new music of Mellett’s since late 2008 when the guitarist asked if he would put some keyboard parts on a few of the songs. Mellett had met DiCesare in 2006 when the engineer was recommended to mix his first solo outing, Natural High. They had an instant musical connection.

Soon after the memorial service, Bryson invited the two to the New Jersey home she and Mellett had shared to take a look at the audio files in his studio above the garage. What they found were songs in various stages of development; they had no idea what an immense challenge the project would turn into. “It was a labor of love, for sure,” Miles says.

THE STATE OF THE SONG

There were vocals, guitar parts, drum machine references, and synth bass done by Mellett, except for one or two where a friend played bass and a few others with Miles’ piano parts. Some songs were incomplete sketches, others nearly ready to record. “Rainy Days,” Miles recalls, was the most complete, featuring Mellett on nearly everything, with Miles’ brother, Terry Silverlight, on drums.

“I remember Coley said, ‘I want you to replace all of the keyboard stuff,’” Miles recalls, “and I said, ‘Ya know what? All the Rhodes parts you did are very basic, but they’re right for this. Not only that, but you’re already playing guitar on it and you’re playing lines with the singing, and to have any more than that wouldn’t be right.’ On that song, it’s pretty much what it was, except for the drums.”

“Honey Kiss” was an actual demo. “Morning Line” and “What You Are To Me” were incomplete. Each track brought its own challenges. Ironically, “Digibob,” a song about technology, had the most complicated technological issues, according to DiCesare, due to the fact that it was recorded in 1991 to Nuendo. DiCesare didn’t have the Steinberg software, and the original engineer could not recover it. “We were forced to kind of forensically re-create the audio files,” he says.

Over the following months, Miles and DiCesare sent files back and forth. DiCesare knew the material they had unearthed was raw, with scratch vocals, the intent being to re-record all of them. Instead, in places, he was forced to use pitch correction software. Back then, it was Waves Tune, and in one treasured song, it came in particularly handy.

Bryson wanted to include “You Got Me Too,” a duet she recorded with Mellett in 1999, the first time Mellett actually sang on a recording. Even though she had deferred to a key better suited to Mellett, she very much wanted the song on the album. Miles’ concern was that the sound was noticeably different from the rest of the material.

So he went to work in Logic, separating their voices and Mellett’s guitar from the rest of the recording, slowing the tempo but keeping it in the same key so as not to distort the sound. “I had to take little snippets of their vocal lines and slow it down proportionately to the tempo I wanted it to be at. If I did the whole thing, I’d hear all kinds of formant sounds and it would be grainy. The idea was to keep the quality and take out the reverb and keep it dry. The same thing with the guitar.”

AN ALL-STAR BAND

By late summer, they began calling musicians, all of them happy to donate their time and talent. “The challenge was to strip away everything else and just have his voice and the guitar, then just like he wanted to do, add musicians,” Miles explains.

Bassist Will Lee was the first to lay down his parts at Ultra-Sound, the now-defunct Manhattan studio where DiCesare worked. Chuck Mangione was next, replacing a synth trumpet line Mellett had played on “Everymornin’.” Miles says Bryson mentioned that Mellett expressed that he could envision Steve Gadd on drums. Gadd, who coincidentally had played with Mangione early in his career, generously contributed his parts at Tempest Recording in Tempe, Ariz., near his home.

James Scholfield recorded guitar in Berlin, Germany, with Larry Goldings (organ) and Terry Silverlight (drums) tracking at their home studios. Miles recorded his keyboards and some of the background vocals at his studio in Cape May, N.J.

When Miles first heard the song “Come On Home,” he says, he thought to himself, “If Carole King and James Taylor had a kid and he wrote a song, that’s what it would sound like.” Both Gadd and Golding were touring with Taylor, so Bryson asked Gadd if he would forward a note, explaining Mellett’s vision for the song. In early winter 2009, Taylor’s engineer sent Bryson not only a rhythm guitar part, but also background vocals that Taylor had laid down as a bonus.

SIXTEEN YEARS LATER

DiCesare says that the mix turned out to be the easiest part of the project, as most of the complexities had been resolved during production. By March 2010, the final mixes were sent to be mastered by Zack Kornhauser. Everything was finished, and in just 13 months.

Thirteen months…and 16 years! Why did it take that long?

Bryson explains: At the time, she wanted the release of the record to coincide with the release of the documentary (with Michael McDonald, narrating) they had been filming on the making of the album. However, the filmmaker, she says, delivered a version that was not what she envisioned, setting the entire timetable askew. It had to be re-done but, through a connection, she was able to secure Bob DeMaio to make the film they wanted. In 2019, the film was released to rave reviews and a few awards from film festivals. Then COVID hit.

Ultimately, waxing philosophical, Bryson considers the fact that the release these many years later might serve to rekindle Mellett’s memory and his musical legacy in a way that could not have occurred had the record come out a year after his death.

Also, she admits, the delay might have been better for her. “I’m ready now,” she says. “I was broken for a long time. This is the right time.”