Stan Ridgway’s Songs Depict a World of Harshness

Stan Ridgway is that rare pop songwriter whose knack for character, detail, inner dialogue and atmospheric soundscaping lets him create the kind of fictional world usually reserved for short-story writers.

Eavesdropping on Ridgway’s shady, nighttime world can be a lot of fun. But living in it is no picnic.

At almost every turn, the characters on Ridgway’s new album, “Mosquitos,” find themselves being balked, double-crossed, coerced, frustrated or isolated. Two of them end up just plain dead--one murdered by his scheming vamp of a wife, and the other (the real mosquito of the piece) squashed by a falling piano in the punch line of a sardonic musical joke.

“Sometimes I think it’d be nice to write a whole series of songs about the morning and little daisies and little bees lighting on a flower,” Ridgway said over the phone recently, his voice dripping honey-coated irony. “I could call it ‘Love Is All Around Us.”’

While things may be bleak in the imaginary world that Ridgway will paint tonight at the Coach House, the politely talkative singer from Los Angeles reports that his real-life existence has been moving along on an upbeat.

“Maybe I’m too happy with it,” Ridgway said, speaking from his home in North Hollywood. “Maybe something’s going to happen soon. I should look up and see whether something’s hanging over my head”--like that fatal piano in the song, “Can’t Complain.” But Ridgway said he isn’t inclined to complain or worry. At 34, he said, “I’ve become aware that life is a problem you can’t solve, so while things are going right, enjoy it.”

When Ridgway played the Coach House last year, his career was in flux and his finances were iffy enough for him wryly to name his backup band Chapter 11--as in bankruptcy. The band name remains the same, but Ridgway said his balance sheet has been looking better. Three years lapsed between Ridgway’s first solo album, “The Big Heat” on I.R.S. Records, and “Mosquitos,” which he recorded after switching labels to Geffen.

Now that the album is out, the former Wall of Voodoo member is looking forward to touring more extensively than he did after the release of “The Big Heat.” The Coach House show is a warm-up for a 6-week European tour, to be followed by a busy schedule of U.S. club dates.

That prospect also makes Ridgway happy. “The best way to travel is when you’re doing what you like to do,” he said. And he finds hotel rooms conducive to writing songs. “Writing songs can be very distracting for the neighbors, when they hear the man next door muttering to himself. In a hotel in Lubbock, Tex., and you’re moving out that afternoon, I don’t care.”

The neighborhood in Ridgway’s mind is populated by characters who could have stepped out of a detective novel: cabbies, bar keeps, strippers, crooks and traveling salesmen. Their lives are often chaotic, lonely, or at a dead end, but Ridgway lets a good measure of humor and sympathy lighten the gloom. On “Mosquitos,” he introduces us to such memorable figures as the newspaper deliveryman who dreams in “Newspapers” of turning into a Batman-type super-hero and cleaning up the mean streets on his route, and the crusty gin-mill owner in “Mission in Life,” a poignant mix of entropy, self-contempt and failed idealism. Their monologues are played out against airy but off-kilter music that often evokes a sense of emptiness.

Ridgway says his lyrical settings and the disoriented figures who drift through them are shaped by the life of his hometown. “There is that atmosphere to Los Angeles that is so unplanned and disorganized. It’s a modern city. When you get there, there is no there. Where’s the center? So the center becomes you as you move through this landscape.”

Randy Newman, one of Ridgway’s favorite songwriters, also specializes in character studies. But while Newman’s songs usually have a satiric center and hint at his underlying opinion of the people in his songs, Ridgway says he tries to let his song-scenarios play themselves out without commenting on the implications of his slices of life.

“I don’t know if I’m there making moral judgments on things. My opinion on things is not very important--not as important as what’s coming through” from the characters, who tend to be too adrift to draw any clear conclusions about their lives. “If I suddenly take over in the song, pointing fingers and saying the way things should be, I feel it’s less a portrayal. I feel cheated.”

One new song, “The Last Honest Man,” does take editorial swipes at various scoundrels and hypocrites, including that now-ubiquitous pop target, television evangelists.

“That’s probably my least favorite song on the record,” Ridgway said. “I wanted to write a song that had just four chords in it. I probably had too much television that day. I tried to turn it around in the end to where I was dishonest, too. I kept trying to work the ending, but I just couldn’t get there, and time was running out in the studio. Five years ago, those kinds of lines would kill me. But you’ve got to let things go. Right behind perfection is paralysis.”

Ridgway’s style of songwriting suggests that he also could be capable of writing good prose stories, but he has no yearning to put down his guitar and keyboards in favor of a word processor.

“If they were stories by themselves, I don’t think anybody would think a thing about them,” Ridgway said. “I don’t think they’re terribly unusual. They’d be sad, stupid stories. Writing books and things like that, I’m not as drawn to it. But I am strongly drawn to the balance between words and music. I don’t think I could live without it. It’s a way of keeping my equilibrium.”

Stan Ridgway plays tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $17.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.