They Only Wanted Your Soul

Before The Reds, Pinks & Purples started getting noticed by a larger audience, the "I Should Have Helped You" 4 song EP snuck out on Swedish experimental label I Dischi Del Barone and quickly disappeared, becoming a little-heard but often whispered about piece of the RPPs discography. Recorded around the same time as the material that ended up on his breakthrough LP "Uncommon Weather," it contains some of the best examples of Glenn Donaldson’s melancholy but wry take on indie pop. Needless to say, it's terrific. The original 7" is now a white whale for collectors, trading for silly prices on Discogs when it shows up at all. This music *needs* to be heard, so we've put together this limited reissue that adds six more tracks to make it a mini-LP length grab bag of hits. It has songs about record shopping, religion, worker’s rights, dysfunctional holidays, and of course heartbreak sung over a maze of shimmering fuzzy guitars and drum machine beats -- an essential chapter of the Reds, Pinks & Purples story.

Though the sound evolved, Bay Area musician Glenn Donaldson's earliest work under the name the Reds, Pinks & Purples was heavily informed by the depressive jangle and offhand aesthetic of early independent labels like Sarah Records or the artier releases from K. Though Donaldson updated the format a bit by delivering his frequently released early songs, demos, and EPs digitally for the most part, a 2020 single entitled I Should Have Helped You did stay true to the time-honored indie pop tradition of being released as a super-limited 7" on an obscure label and falling out of print almost immediately. As the project's audience grew over the next few years, this hard-to-find artifact became a sought-after collector's item, and yet another example of Donaldson's seemingly bottomless supply of sadly catchy songwriting perfection that was essential enough to merit re-release. They Only Wanted Your Soul collects the four songs that originally appeared on the I Should Have Helped You 7", and adds and additional six tunes written and recorded around the same 2019-2020 window, some of which appeared online briefly but hadn't seen proper release before now.