Stan Ridgway (born April 5, 1954, in Barstow, California) is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and filmmaker whose work combines new wave, electronic music, folk, western music, and film noir. He is best known as the founding singer and principal songwriter of Wall of Voodoo, but his later solo career established him as one of the most distinctive narrative artists in American alternative music.
Ridgway grew up in Los Angeles and developed an early interest in folk music, theatrical performance, sound effects, and unusual instruments. In 1977, he founded Acme Soundtracks, an experimental project initially conceived as a source of music for low-budget science-fiction and horror films. The project gradually evolved into Wall of Voodoo, a band built around drum machines, keyboards, guitar, and deliberately unconventional percussion. Its music joined the stark textures of early electronic rock with the twang and atmosphere of Italian western soundtracks, while Ridgway supplied a dry, nasal vocal delivery and lyrics filled with cinematic characters, overheard dialogue, and darkly comic visions of American life.
Wall of Voodoo released its debut EP in 1980, followed by the albums Dark Continent and Call of the West. The latter produced "Mexican Radio," the band's best-known song and a breakthrough hit that brought its eccentric sound to a much wider audience. Ridgway left the group after its appearance at the 1983 US Festival, choosing to pursue a solo career rather than continue with a changing band lineup.
His first solo album, The Big Heat, presented a more fully developed version of the style suggested by his Wall of Voodoo work. The record balanced electronic arrangements, western motifs, crime-story imagery, and songs about isolated or compromised characters. Tracks such as "The Big Heat," "Salesman," and "Drive, She Said" became important parts of his catalog. "Camouflage," a ghostly Vietnam War narrative, became a major European hit, reaching the Top Five in the United Kingdom and Ireland even though it did not achieve comparable success in the United States.
Ridgway continued to explore different forms on albums including Mosquitos, Partyball, Black Diamond, The Way I Feel Today, Anatomy, Holiday in Dirt, and Snakebite: Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs. His writing often treats ordinary people as figures in miniature movies, placing them in settings marked by bureaucracy, violence, loneliness, superstition, or absurdity. The result is music that can sound humorous and bleak at the same time, with recurring influences from pulp fiction, westerns, folk ballads, and vintage popular cinema.
He has also worked extensively in film and television music. His collaboration with Stewart Copeland produced "Don't Box Me In" for the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish, and the two later worked together on additional screen projects. Ridgway has contributed songs, scores, and musical cues to films including Desperate But Not Serious, Speedway Junky, The Keening, $pent, and Desert Saints.
In addition to his solo work, Ridgway has recorded experimental material under the name Drywall, often in collaboration with musician Pietra Wexstun. Their joint projects include children's music and film-oriented compositions. Albums such as Priestess of the Promised Land and Music for Film, Vol. 1 demonstrate his continuing interest in atmosphere, storytelling, and sound design. Across several decades, Ridgway has remained a singular figure: less a conventional pop star than a composer of strange, vividly staged songs that occupy the border between rock music, radio drama, and cinema.