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“Music is more than just chords and notes to me, it has the ability to make pictures in the mind My records are designed to be seen as well as heard.”—Stan Ridgway
When it comes to writing strange tunes about ghostly marines, strippers with broken arms, and “robbers and bandits and bastards and thieves,” songwriter/guitarist Stan Ridgway is an incomparable noir troubadour. Making musical pictures for 30 years now, from his early days with L.A.'s Wall of Voodoo, this sound alchemist has emerged as a singular voice in contemporary song. And he has developed no small number of friends, fans and followers: he's produced Pixies front man Frank Black, written songs for film with Police drummer Stewart Copeland, shaped soundtracks as well as writing and orchestrating music for the surrealist paintings of Mark Ryden, and both recorded and performed for uber-producer Hal Willner. Truly modern, 21st century folk music, Ridgway's dark, tall tales often take place in the microcosmic miasma of L.A. and its outer desert, where his characters try to wrest meaning from the beautiful catastrophe of their lives.
As he takes to the road, Ridgway is staging a series of retrospective shows and also releasing a new solo CD titled “Desert of Dreams”, set for launch July 31st this summer. In honor of over 25 years of musical mystery from the House of Ridgway, he'll be screening his vivid stories in concert starring his classic cast of anti-heroes, dreamers and schemers lost in the darkened drive-in theater of America. The jungle-bound soldier from “Camouflage” (a surprise Top 5 Hit in Europe from Ridgway's 1986 solo debut The Big Heat), the runaway driver of “King for a Day” (from his most recent offering Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs), and the frustrated outsider in “Don't Box Me In” (written with Stewart Copeland of the Police for the Francis Ford Coppola film Rumblefish) are but three of Ridgway's creations that persist, long after the song is over and the curtain has dropped.
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