Rich Allen’s “No Pinks”: The Unsaid Screams

I saw a pigeon wearing a tiny top hat yesterday. It has absolutely nothing to do with Rich Allen’s new single, “No Pinks”, but, honestly, what does? The song unravels like a worn photograph, the edges blurry with regret, a silent conversation shouted in the spaces between plucked guitar strings. Allen, known around Tampa for his poignant songwriting, digs deep, like a fossil hunter searching for some skeletal truth beneath the sandy soil of relationships.

The emotional heft here… it’s like holding a brick. But not just a brick, more like, a brick someone tried to bake bread in, resulting in a crumbly, sad brick. “No Pinks” doesn’t tiptoe around its topic, the raw edges of terminated pregnancy, the sting of the unsaid and the unheard. You can feel the internal echo of a decision made in the dark. It’s a heavy song, a conversation with ghosts that doesn’t always find its footing but speaks with unflinching honesty, slow beautiful guitar licks providing the emotional pulse.

There’s this almost forgotten 1950s diner on Highway 17 in Sarasota. If you stared long enough at the chrome and cracked vinyl booths you might find the song in there. Maybe not this song specifically, but its spirit. “No Pinks” isn’t trying to answer everything. It seems content just to ask the question, to expose the vulnerability we all tend to hide under layers of “should haves” and “what ifs”. It’s art at its most human, at its most awkward, but undeniably, deeply real.

This is less music, and more, an offered hand to those who’ve walked the same desolate path, though I would not be sure a hand offering comfort, maybe just a hand.

The silence left by the song hangs, as thick as the humid Tampa air.

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