Waiting on a Ghost to Haunt You — The Reds, Pinks and Purples

#365Songs: January 28th

Frontman Glenn Donaldson has been around for three decades — Horrid Red, the Skygreen Leopards. Basically, bands I’ve never heard of even though he is for me a local artist. He formed the Reds, Pinks and Purples back in 2018, but the band’s music sounds like a haunting from the 1980s. Also a photographer, I first fell in love with the album covers, bursts of color on quiet west San Francisco streets, and now every new release pulls me back in with its very distinct playful melancholy.

The Town That Cursed Your Name is a concept album of sorts, one that mourns the fading days of a band aged out of time — the dying record labels, empty concert halls, snarky reviews, those end late stages after years of sleeping in vans on couches in sad living rooms. This is a different sort of breakup, a playful homage to the dreary frazzled end of a career that never quite took off, long before you’re ready to give up. Mourning the success that never quite arrived, the audience that never discovered you. This isn’t about a storied band that lost relevance, but rather one of the countless many that never made it all. A story of finding meaning in your own failures, poking at it, universalizing a feeling even the most successful amongst us feel when we stare at own meager legacy.

I feel like that sometimes, stuck between my own expectations and the reality that I haven’t yet struck the chord of my potential. Perhaps this is the price every artist pays, whether those who had early successes and faded off, hit the perfect note late in life, or never found the perfect rhythm at all. I do know that the most talented musicians, writers, filmmakers, artists, photographers I’ve met in this life are often the ones we don’t know yet. It’s not always a question of talent, but timing, luck, a lot of stubbornness, and the willingness to keep making even if the audience never comes. In the end, I’d rather be staggering down the road doing what I love than fading away doing what I don’t care about.

who cares if you fall
when nothing moves you at all
the blues win the game
too many fuck-ups when you play
as you make your way down the road to oblivion

With age comes wisdom, as we’re told, and with wisdom comes a certain perspective that unapologetic resilience screams at us to keep going, continue making, no matter who is there to listen. Even if nobody ever does.

Sometimes what haunts us is the ghost of our own failures, the words that nobody reads, the songs with no listens, the unseen films. But perhaps a different shade of success resides in the stubbornness to carry on.

waiting on a ghost to haunt you
you’re still waiting on a ghost to haunt you
waiting on a ghost to haunt you
you’re still waiting on a ghost to haunt you