Last night, I had the great pleasure of meeting with Justin Morey and Jon Gonnelli of Rye Coalition, my neighbors. I walked up Jersey Avenue, made a left here and a right there, and knocked on their door. They were expecting me, and greeted me with warm handshakes and smiles.
I offered them a bottle of wine, which they were very thankful for, and Justin soon excused himself to the kitchen where he prepared a delicious pot of spaghetti.
But this small article isn’t meant to be about the warmth of their home, or of their talents in the kitchen, or of their passion for making others happy. What I most want to mention now – and I will mention this again – is how incredibly hot and stunningly gorgeous the new album, produced by Dave Grohl for Dreamworks Records, already sounds, even as it is, in the very early stages of its development. The songs haven’t been mixed yet, and I found myself wondering, “What the hell needs to be done? How can these songs sound any better?”
It’s exactly what you might expect if you only expect the best. And I feel confident that you can expect the best from Rye Coalition. They worked extremely hard. And you can hear it, and you can feel it. The songs are definitely Rye, with as much power and urgency as ever, but with a more attractive and embraceable allure. Perhaps you can credit that to Dave Grohl, or perhaps you can credit that to Rye’s maturity. Seems to me that it was the right combination at the right time for everyone involved.
When the new Rye songs were done, Jon popped the Probot CD into the player. Probot is pretty great, too. Yes. But I found myself betting that Dave Grohl felt as honored to work with Rye as Rye felt about working with Dave.
I feel fortunate to finally have the chance to get to know these guys personally, and as I said, I was wildly impressed by the new album. It’s only a shame that we’ll have to wait at all for its release. I don’t want to wait another day, really. I hope that you’ll start talking about it now; I mean for you to spread the word. This is something worth talking about. I hope you’ll feel as privileged as I do to know something about it.