About

What’s the story of Soul Selects?

Soul Selects is a label with a storied past and a vision for the future. More than a business, it’s an idea that represents both continuity and change in music and culture.

Soul Selects grew out of Boston in the mid-1980s, when the band Three Colors founded the label to release their own music. In 1986 it extended its hometown roster with the release of Treat Her Right, the self-titled debut album by a band fronted by singer/songwriter Mark Sandman.

When the nucleus of Three Colors — Chris Harford, Hub Moore, and Dana Colley — divided toward the end of that decade, all three went on to make music in a variety of settings while continuing to collaborate on each other’s projects.

Colley and Treat Her Right’s Sandman formed Morphine (and were later joined by Treat Her Right drummer Billy Conway). Harford and Hub both went on to solo deals with major labels before finding their way back to independent releases. In 2000, Harford put out Wake, the first of five Band of Changes albums on Soul Selects. The next year, Hub released Daylight (produced by Harford) on the label.

2020 marked a new chapter in the story of Soul Selects. Two new full-length dub albums by Blanc du Blanc took the label into new musical terrain, and yet the sound of these albums shares the signature organic warmth of earlier Soul Selects releases. The Blanc du Blanc albums feature Soul Selects alums Dana Colley and Chris Harford working together in a very different context than their earlier recordings for the label.

Soul Selects has a social mission borne out of awareness that the music it releases owes a debt to cultural influences shaped by systemic racism, injustice, and inequality. A share of all profits will be donated to Campaign Zero, which is dedicated to ending police violence in America, and the Native American Rights Fund.

Where does the name come from?

When founding the label with his Three Colors bandmates in the mid-1980s, Chris Harford took inspiration from this poem written by Emily Dickinson in 1862:

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I've known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —