Spending his golden years on a prolific pastime

One doesn’t often encounter a 60-something Christian cybersecurity expert committed to writing one song a week for the rest of his life. But Donald Dreigh, the leader of the Pink Roses, is one such fellow. And while he bills himself on the band’s website as the writer of the “world’s greatest mediocre songs,” his songs are actually pretty good. Sometimes they’re even better.

Consider the Pink Roses’ new album It’s Hard To Find a God. Over the course of 41 minutes, the group navigates semi-facetious hard rock (“My Pillow”), topical art(sy) rock (“Echo Chamber Song”), mellow prog rock (the title cut), and mellow, obscure Larry Norman (“With a Love Like Yours”). If you didn’t know better, you’d think the Roses weren’t one band but several. “The guys in the band are truly world-class musicians,” Dreigh says.

It’s Hard To Find a God The Pink Roses

Dreigh is also good at inventing personae that allow him to articulate his it’s-hard-to-find-a-god thesis from various characters’ points of view. There’s a philosophical type conversant with both Hegel and The Wizard of Oz, a self-­owning shill for narcissism, and even a responsibility-averse human perpetual-­motion machine trapped between wanderlust and coddiwomple.

What unites these characters is that they’re simultaneously searching for and running from themselves, all the while oblivious to the God-shaped vacuum at their core. “I don’t do concept albums,” says Dreigh, “but I do do thematic ones. This one was more along the lines of speaking directly to the postmodern world through people that embrace that culture.” Caveat: As postmodernism-­embracing types, Dreigh’s “people” sometimes use PG language. “I’ll include it,” Dreigh says, “if it tells a truthful story.” Besides, he says, the Pink Roses are “not a ‘Christian band.’”

They have the potential, however, to be a very prolific band. Before the nine originals on their latest, there were the 11 originals on their 2023 debut, Guinea Fowl and the Easter Bunny, totaling 20 Dreigh compositions that the Pink Roses have recorded so far. And Dreigh has been writing 52 songs a year—“We have hundreds of songs,” he says. He estimates that even if he were never to write again, the Pink Roses already enough “decent material” for another five or six albums at least.

“I keep ideas on my phone, write things down,” he says. “I could say I’m going to write a song like someone would knit a sweater. But my approach is more like quilt making, taking a few patches from here, a few patches from there, and stitching things together.

“Somehow,” he adds, “things seem to work out.”