June 2010

April 2010

Stan Ridgway & Pietra Wexstun

"Silly Songs For Kids" Vol. 1

Online Review

Listen to samples, read more and purchase from this direct link at:

"Silly Songs" CD for purchase @ CDBABY.com

"A Child’s Sense Of Wonder And Fantasy"

"One of the world’s most original and creative musical couples recently introduced their newest album, and it is aimed at listeners who think Wall of Voodoo is something that Hecate’s Angels once used to decorate a Drywall Project. While one never knows what to expect from longtime musical partners Stan Ridgway and Pietra Wexstun, Silly Songs For Kids: Volume 1 may not have come from the proverbial “left field” as one might suppose; it was only last year that the vocalist/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire released a musically superb standards album: The Way I Feel Today (Crooning the Classics). Should children be deprived of what other generations are enjoying?

Established artists who sing tunes aimed at the younger set tend to mellow down their music, losing the very elements that endeared them to fans in the first place. The results of such works are inevitably hollow and offer the impression that the performer(s) in question are being sung down to. This kind of music is invariably accompanied by what it known as the “Disney keyboard sound” — the mellow safe electronic piano backup that we children of the 1980s had become all too familiar with thanks to songs like “Somewhere Out There” from the movie An American Tail, the vast majority of “boy-band ballads” and loads of Celine Dion songs. That kind of sound is not found on Silly Songs For Kids, Volume 1.

Ridgway and Wexstun take the approach that music directed to children can also be enjoyed and sung along to by adults while still charming the young ones. The duo lead off the CD with the impressively bluegrass/jug band reminiscent “Bring It On In the House.” Ridgway plucks away at the banjo as he sings the happy tune about taking a car ride to someone’s house. He and the rest of the band seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves even though they might have dropped their cake twice according to the lyrics. Ridgway, Wexstun and the rest of the band, which includes Drywall partner Rick King (slide guitar, bass), Ralph Carney (woodwinds) and the zany “Teak” Lazar (credited: sandpaper, complaints), treat youngsters to high quality but kid-friendly music that takes a cue from recent trends in family movies that purposely appeal to both adults and children alike.

Ridgway and Wexstun switch vocal parts in the quirky “Sing Along Song,” which could also be titled: ‘Fun With the Voice Synth and Ducky Impersonations,” “Mountain Top” and the strange-but-whimsical “Jenny’s Pixie Garden.” The latter two might inadvertently be interesting endorsements for breathing helium, but truly are geared to appeal to a child’s sense of wonder and fantasy. For the third track, “Spider’s Web,” Ridgway employs an eerie tone over a prominent bass, piano and muted trumpet arrangement reminiscent to 1920s jazz. After five tracks of fun on the six-song EP, Ridgway closes with the calming lullaby “Mr. Moon Man,” an ode to the Earth’s natural satellite on a cloudy evening The songs may be silly, but not campy and patronizing as much of today’s music for kids womds up becoming. Silly Songs For Kids, Volume 1 is ripe with the classic Ridgway sound and storytelling that his fans have come to know as well as splendid musicianhip all around from him, Wextun and the band.

One should not be put off from listening to this album by its title. Though the CD is really aimed at children, this well-performed EP should ideally be considered more a masterpiece built for the next generation of Stan Ridgway fans. While parents would do well to have Silly Songs in their library, those without small children around will also enjoy this enchantful offering from Ridgway and Wexstun."

A Review from "Revenge of The 80's"

website: http://www.revengeofthe80sradio.com/?p=302

Album Cover by Mark Ryden

March 2010

Ridgway’s Storm blows through 30 years of song By ANDREW DANSBY / Houston Chronicle

Stan Ridgway opens up with a downpour of words while driving a van 90 mph past Barstow, the California desert town that partially inspired the smart, eerie pop music he’s been making for the past three decades.

“In some way, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized what Barstow did to me,” he says on a cell phone that eventually blinks out a few minutes after he passes the town. “I think it scarred me. There was literally nothing out there in front our house of me to see. Your eye could wander for miles. So in a sense, I don’t know, maybe I filled in those gaps with my imagination.”

Ridgway’s imagination was initially drawn to creatures like werewolves and Frankenstein’s monster, “who just wanders the earth trying to make friends until an angry populace tries to stop him … you can see why a kid would be drawn to that.” His family moved to Los Angeles, and his parents split. He had a grandmother who told tall tales that often turned out to be true, or at least partially true. He watched a lot of “great movies that academics called film noir.”

Those influences are all evident in Ridgway’s writing. He’s a unique stylist and arguably the most under-appreciated songwriter of the past 25 years. His songs are deliciously musical, with big melodic parts and snappy instrumentation that suggests a love for pop, garage rock, country and Broadway in equal measure. They’re lyrically dense, too: Sometimes they’re intricate fictions about characters that seem to have wandered in from a Jim Thompson novel; other times they’re Ridgway’s take on historical figures like Wild Bill Donovan, the OSS head who became the “father” of the CIA.

Admittedly Ridgway’s voice isn’t what you’d call traditionally pretty. It’s a deep, nasal thing, with an touch of robotic detachment that perfectly suits his chilly narratives. It’s bracing on first exposure, not cold, exactly, but perhaps a little like a voice you’d expect to hear in a David Lynch film.

“Maybe I’m weird,” he says. “I don’t feel weird, though. I think the rest of the world is weird. I’m doing exactly what I should be doing and it makes perfect sense to me.

“I think everybody else is out of their mind.”

Like an able but doomed gumshoe in one of those films noir, Ridgway can’t entirely get away from the perception that he’s a one-off voice and author of a weird solitary hit. In a way, he’s spent two decades trying to get away from the ’80s. It was during that decade that he made two excellent albums and an EP with the band Wall of Voodoo only to be relegated unwillingly to novelty status for the single Mexican Radio, a song about alienation that has, over time, been inexplicably cast as an oddball party anthem. Its presence on compilations alongside work by the likes of Flock of Seagulls is akin to Nick Drake’s Pink Moon being forced to bunk up with Lynn Anderson’s Rose Garden.

Escaping the ’80s is difficult for musicians whose first prominent impressions were made during that decade. Duran Duran endured more than a decade of ridicule (much of it justifiable) before being swept up into a new New Wave a few years ago. Aimee Mann of ’Til Tuesday got through because of an independent streak and a lucky film break. Colin Hay of Men at Work required a patron in Zach Braff to get a second chance. Ridgway, like Hay and Mann, parted ways with his band in the ’80s and has released consistently excellent recordings since. But several of his albums have fallen out of print, which is troubling because the songs deserve better. And for all the huzzahs cast upon DD, the modern skinny-tie set that includes bands like Interpol owe more stylistically to Ridgway and Wall of Voodoo than to Simon Le Bon and the Durans.

“First impressions are hard to beat,” Ridgway admits. “If you come up at a time where most people discover you on MTV, that’s a lasting impression. It’s hard to change an actual picture if people haven’t kept up with you.”

Ridgway calls en route to Utah. He’s on the Sandstorm of Song Tour, which passes through the Dosey Doe tonight. Joined by wife and long-time collaborator Pietra Wextun (keys, melodica, vocals) and Rick King (guitar, bass), Ridgway is running through nearly three decades of his music including songs from Desert of Dreams, a new album that isn’t due until July. “It’s a little like going to a theater and seeing clips from a movie coming next summer,” he says.

The show will offer an opportunity to hear Wall of Voodoo songs, while still showcasing Ridgway’s work in the years since. For someone who so often looks back for inspiration, Ridgway has been prolific in moving forward, releasing something new every two to three years. He recalls an interview the late Ed Bradley did with Bob Dylan. Bradley asked the songwriter if he thought he could write songs like a few of his ’60s classics again. Ridgway says, “Bob looked up from his pants and said, ‘No, but I can do other things.’

“What happens is you move along. I wouldn’t mind repeating myself, but I don’t try to. I guess it’s all united because it comes from my attraction to the darker side of the road … a kind of Americana from a bygone era.”

That duality creates an intriguing tension in Ridgway’s work: Stylistically, he’s fascinated by yesterday, thematically he’s worried about the day to come. He is, after all, the guy who wrote, “what’s wrong with tomorrow?,” knowing full well that tomorrow is a yard full of rakes.

So he takes his cinematic visions of the future and crunches them into three-minute songs so full of music history as to seem almost era-less. “I like the idea of the condensed idea,” he says. “And I’ll let you in on a secret: The ideas come to me when I’m driving 90 miles per hour toward Utah.”

January 2010

November 2009

NPR Interview link click HERE

NPR Interview link click HERE

"The Mystery Train" Click here

pic: Mike Lynch

August 2009

The Wire (UK)
SNAKEBITE: BLACKTOP BALLADS AND FUGITIVE SONGS
REDFLY RECORDS 84812

Former Wall Of Voodoo singer/songwriter Stan Ridgway's eighth solo album is a glorious hard-boiled Hollywood road movie for the ears (complete with suitable sound effects) which takes the listener on a tumbleweed journey in three acts through his dark imagination. Ridgway's lyrical talent for detail, combined with a cactus spiked humor and sense of melancholy, is what gives Snakebite its fang, and his songs ripple with observation and atmosphere. The best of these are "King For A Day". a wild ride in a stolen car that ends up crashing into the side of a house. A chance meeting with Andy Warhol that develops into "Our Manhattan Moment ", and "Talkin' Wall Of Voodoo Blues Pt. 1" where Ridgway scathingly relates the rise and fall of his old band and the various record company and managerial rip offs that eventually tore them apart. If you are only familiar with Ridgway's work through, what he refers to here as "that radio song", then Snakebite is an invitation to get better acquainted. Long may he run.

Purchase it here

July 2009

"Keeping it Strange"

One-of-a-kind frontman and Wall of Voodoo mastermind Stan Ridgway

comes to East Hartford By John Adamian ( pic: Mike Lynch)

http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=12161

An Evening with Stan Ridgway

Saturday, March 21, 8 p.m, E. Hartford Cultural Center

Stan Ridgway is an unapologetic eclectic and an unreformed noncomformist. Ridgway, who brings his music to East Hartford's Cultural Center on March 21, logged time as a jazz guy and dabbled in blues and country and just about everything else. He wanted to be a guitarist with Miles Davis's famously funky electric bands in the early '70s. He also wanted to make film soundtracks for second-tier schlock movies, setting up a music company in Hollywood. Now he's making kids music.

You may know Ridgway as the idiosyncratic frontman and voice behind the '80s group Wall of Voodoo. Their song "Mexican Radio" — with its weird mix of noir, vintage rock, harmonica, dub effects and quirky pop — remains one of those oddball one-hit wonders that is still genuinely good, and played on the (American) radio with real nostalgic fondness, more than 25 years later. Ridgway and his unorthodox blend of styles — what he calls his "sonic succotash" — can be heard as a direct forefather of quirky bands like They Might Be Giants and the Mountain Goats. He may have pioneered that clipped, nasally town-crier delivery that became a calling card of "alternative rock."

Ridgway spoke with the Advocate recently from his studio in southern California, as he put the finishing touches on a record of children's music and readied himself for the cross-country roadtrip that would bring him to Connecticut. Ridgway's musical detours have always been interesting ones. As a kid he studied guitar with David Lindley, a wide-ranging guitarist who's backed everyone from Dylan to Curtis Mayfield and Rod Stewart but who's known mostly for his work with Jackson Browne.

Ridgway tells of getting to jam with pioneering cool tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh. Eventually he wound up in L.A. as the nascent punk scene took shape there, bringing together leftover elements of the hippie scene and the underground avant garde. Meanwhile, Ridgway had devoted himself to soundtrack music.

"I rented this office space, and I had all these recorders," says Ridgway. "I got myself a phone with several lights on it, so when people came over they thought people were on hold and business was booming. ... I wanted to build my own Brill Building. I wanted my own 42nd Street. I wanted my Greenwich Village or Paris 1910, but the problem was I was in Los Angeles — still am — and at that time nobody could get anything going musically unless you had a coveted recording contract and were 'professional,' and this thing built up to a point where it was just so constricting to everyone."

His movie music company was going to be sci-fi and cheap horror films, and he called the company Wall of Voodoo. And eventually he spun that into his band with a crew of fellow eclectics from the movie music project as well as from the local punk club. Since then and since "Mexican Radio," Ridgway did end up doing soundtrack music, perhaps most famously with Stewart Copeland of the Police in Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish.

Ridgway has always had a compelling narrative element to his songs, which sound at home next to the sand-blasted California aesthetic of fellow nonconformists like Tom Waits and David Lynch.

"Music has an ability to conjure up images and moods," he says. He calls this tour the Desert of Dreams: A Sandstorm of Song. And he continues to push against expectations with his original material. "It's always a musician's struggle. You have to take the audience, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the new thing. You really just have to spring it on them."

His spirit remains intact. "You have to try out things and do something, or you're just sitting there letting pop culture and the world at large steamroll over your life. That's really the drive, to make something original, to try and throw that custard pie back in the face of the opposition, which is conformity."

April 2009

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