Stan Ridgway & Pietra Wexstun
Priestess Of The Promised Land

Except for his first solo album, 'The Big Heat' (1986), the production of Stan Ridgway after leaving Wall of Voodoo in 1983 (practically a year after the release of the masterpiece, 'Call of the West') has never received much attention from listeners and critics here in Italy and probably in the rest of the continent. This perhaps because he has never been, nor has he ever wanted to be, what one might call a 'mainstream' artist (on the contrary, when it happened, he somehow renounced it: 'We didn't want no MTV/We didn't want no VH1/It was a time so long ago/ Yeah, we had some fun,' he sings in a song from his album, 'Snakebite) and is instead a free spirit and an independent artist, a person who goes beyond any scheme and perhaps also for this reason then subjected to a kind of 'censorship' by what would be the traditional critique. In this sense, one could, if desired, draw a parallel with what I recently wrote about Jad Fair. I mean, we're practically talking about two artists and singers and songwriters who have always been very productive and continue to make a lot of good music and good records, but for many, all of this is as if it's not happening at all, and that's a shame: they are two old buccaneers, navigating stormy seas today and better than they did in the past. With Stan Ridgway in particular, I admit to having a special relationship. No. I never met him unfortunately and we don't know each other personally, but for what was a true coincidence, a twist of fate, he has been a point of reference for me (as a listener and a musician) since I was just a kid listening to trash like grunge music and English pop music that was on TV. It was at that time that, by pure chance, I borrowed a cassette from a much older friend (this happened in the latter part of the nineties) and on one side, it had 'Pornography' by the Cure and on the other side, incredibly, this album by Wall of Voodoo titled, 'Call' of the West'. I absolutely didn't know what it was naturally, I listened to that album by pure chance and it was something special, magical. After all, right at that time, I had started playing the guitar. Really, it was just something that fate wanted, I believe, and this album is still today obviously one of my absolute favorites. No doubt.

Apart from this personal preface, I have to say that over the years I have tried to trace all the tracks this kind of bandit disguised as a songwriter has left behind throughout his career. Unfortunately, evidently, much of his publications are difficult to find, and at this point, I wouldn't be able to reconstruct a reasoned discography of his. However, of course, in this sense, the internet has helped and helps a lot, giving the usual opportunity in many cases to discover or rediscover old recordings. Something that, after all, the internet, if it works in one sense, can work very well in the opposite direction too. If you are an artist, a musician, a singer-songwriter, you can clearly use the internet to publicize and spread works simply and immediately that otherwise might not have the distribution they deserve and in some cases end up forgotten and definitively lost.

So, who knows, maybe also for this reason, in the last six months, Stan Ridgway has practically released three new albums containing different and anyway never before published material. All three albums have been released exclusively in digital format (for now) and are actually available for unlimited streaming via bandcamp. The last album of the series was 'The Complete Epilogues, released last December and containing a collection of songs dating back to the period when 'Neon Mirage' was recorded in 2010 and which were not included in the album, plus other material released exclusively on iTunes, covers of classic pieces (such as the traditional 'Wayfaring Stranger' and 'Moonshiner', 'Deportee' and 'New Year's Flood' by Woody Guthrie, 'Dindi' by A.C. Jobim and 'Song For Woody' by Bob Dylan), live performances, studio experiments, demos and what Stan has described as a poignant piece and a masterpiece of melancholy, namely 'Over My Shoulder Somewhere', a song that he himself now cannot explain how it could have been left out of the album, 'Neon Mirage'. Basically a kind of gift released during the holiday season.

Previously, in August, Stan had released two other albums, practically making his debut on bandcamp and openly declaring his desire to open a kind of monstrous commune for old lone wolves speeding down Interstate 15, along with Pietra Wexstun, his wife, and also a vocalist and musician, frontman of the futuristic wave and 'cabaret' group Hecate's Angels. 'Rigway & Wexstun Summer Collection', the first of these two albums, actually contains merely songs and old material gathered from some of their previous albums. 'Priestess Of The Promised Land' is the most interesting album of the three, containing completely unreleased material and especially new songs composed by the duo in 2016 in Venice, California, and mastered at Mulholland Sound by Doug Schwartz.

Like all his albums, 'Priestess Of The Promised Land' can be defined as a kind of journey through music and along that same road marked by Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady across the United States of America and in this particular case focusing especially on that microcosm that is California, the city of Los Angeles, which Stan Ridgway reconstructs in his musical stories with dark and cinematic atmospheres, noir tones, and a style full of hard-boiled references.

Stan Ridgway and Pietra Wexstun have defined the contents of the album as, 'New musical horizons': songs and music, soundtracks, experiments. One of the greatest 'storytellers' of the North American continent saga of the last thirty-forty years, Stan Ridgway opens the album with the title-track, one of the new songs, a rock-blues ballad in the style of one of the bands that have most influenced him, the Doors, accompanied by the sound of the organ and with that typical cinematic western approach of many of his other songs, a sunny and dusty dance on the soil of mother-earth California.

'Blue Oceans At Dusk', the second track, is instead the first episode they wanted to be understood as a soundtrack present on the album. In this case, it's inevitable to draw a parallel with the typical atmospheres of David Lynch's films. An artist who certainly has a lot in common with Stan Ridgway, moreover for the same way of being visionaries on the brink of hallucination. Lysergic in the sense intended by Sir Aldous Huxley. A track that makes you feel as if you are walking on the moon's surface alone, staggering with a bottle of rum in your hands and meanwhile looking nostalgically at Earth, distant and abandoned to itself. A science fiction that also resurfaces in 'Nightworld', where atmospheres drawn directly from 'Dune' are mixed with fanfares and peplum genre march tones. 'Error In Judgment' instead takes up more classic themes from French movies combined with noir and jazzy atmospheres and Californian psychedelic hallucinations.

'Pirates' is a remix of a song by Hecate's Angels from the album 'All That Glitters'. Played in the band's typical style, it recreates the dark atmospheres and no-wave attitude as well as that Mitteleuropean and cabaret style that Pietra expertly characterizes with her distinctive use of voice. 'Half Way There' is an alternative version of the piece contained in 'Neon Mirage', one of the best albums released by Stan in recent years, a dusty folk ballad rearranged here in a very 'concrete' version, in the very sense of concrete ('concrete' in English, ed.) and in a manner similar to the way Johnny Cash (another of Stan's main points of reference) rearranged and arranged the pieces that ended up in the various 'American Recordings'.

Obviously, the most interesting moments are the new songs, the unreleased tracks. Having already mentioned the title-track, let's come to 'Slippin' Sideways' and 'All For Love', which almost inevitably sound in a typically Stan Ridgway manner, echoing various moments of his career. The first song could, in fact, easily belong on the album, 'The Big Heat', with that typical thrilling pace and a finale full of western fascinations and in perfect Wall of Voodoo style. 'All For Love', on the other hand, is more of a 'criminal' song, a kind of folk ballad with jazz nuances, a furtive song meant to be listened to while walking barefoot to avoid making noise if you don't want to be caught red-handed by the law.

In short, Stan Ridgway is always the same noir troubadour and sound alchemist we have come to know over the years starting from Wall of Voodoo up to 'Mr. Trouble' or maybe reading Raymond Chandler, beat literature, watching films by David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino or John Carpenter, who effectively shares the same cultural roots with Stan and not by chance has built his entire career and his entire thought on the conceptual vision of a blend of music and images, and not by chance has often (almost always) personally worked on the music of his films. Although there are no particular innovations, even in this album, as in the previous ones, there are original contents. But how could it be otherwise? We are talking about a songwriter, a storyteller, whose vision in space and time knows no boundaries. He has far-sightedness, the eyes of an eagle, and through this deep gaze travels across the continent, flying over deserts and peering into the alleys and most remote corners of the city of Los Angeles like some kind of private investigator. Who knows. Perhaps it's precisely because of his investigative gaze, his being a hallucinated and visionary traveler that he is not as popular as the magnitude of his musical and writing skills would suggest. Despite this, however, it happens (sometimes) that some climb up there where the eagles make their nests and evidently for this reason, last year, he was awarded the 'Premio Tenco', an acknowledgment obtained in our country perhaps also because of the multiple collaborations with good musicians like Luca Faggella and Giorgio Baldi and something that for once might silence those who want to define us as lacking in good taste and musical ear.