Today The Reds, Pinks and Purples announces its first east coast tour ever as a band, with dates supporting Dan Bejar’s Destroyer in May. The band’s most recent releases are the Dust In The Path of Love EP and last year’s They Only Wanted Your Soul mini LP on Slumberland.
TOUR DATES:
Thu 2/16 – San Francisco, CA – Rickshaw Stop *
Thu 5/4 – Atlanta, GA – The Earl #
Fri 5/5 – Asheville, NC – The Grey Eagle #
Sat 5/6 – Carrboro, NC – Cat’s Cradle #
Sun 5/7 – Richmond, VA – Richmond Music Hall #
Mon 5/8 – Baltimore, MA – Ottobar #
Tue 5/9 – Hamden, CT – Space Ballroom #
Thu 5/11 – Burlington, VT – Higher Ground #
Fri 5/12 – Woodstock, NY – Levon Helm Studios #
* = w/ Rex, Chime School
# = w/ Destroyer (solo)
Bio:
From the many musical lives of artist Glenn Donaldson emerges The Reds, Pinks & Purples, a project that sifts out the purest elements of pop music and in the process chronicles the point of view of an assiduous San Francisco-based songwriter.
How The Reds, Pinks & Purples arrived here is a story with many roots, the most consequential of which is perhaps the musical aftermath of his earlier band, The Art Museums, whose brief tenure in the late ’00s coincided with an explosive period of the Bay Area rock scene and was followed by a hermetic musical period of Donaldson’s.
Disenchanted with the dissolution of his band, Donaldson averted the DIY-pop sound with an instrumental, conceptual project called FWY! but meanwhile started a habitual songwriting practice, sharing nascent songs with friends in an email exchange. In
2013–2014, The Reds, Pinks & Purples took shape as the moniker for Glenn’s most direct
expressions in the DIY-pop mode, enabled by this new disciplined output. By then, San Francisco was already a changed place. The tragic loss of his former bandmate in Art Museums was another source of discontinuity and rupture.
You can hear in The Reds, Pinks & Purples’ earliest songs this grappling with life, anxiety, and atrophying subcultures. For an artist with an overriding interest in the aesthetic principles of discrete musical genres, this turn toward his immediate world for subject matter was a major shift, setting The Reds, Pinks & Purples apart from Donaldson’s other musical ventures.
THE REDS, PINKS AND PURPLES LINKS: