SKYSCRAPER STAN

Writer: Keeley Thompson

His shoes are shined to perfection, reflecting the pavement underfoot with near mirror-precision while his hair is an ode to trusting your housemate after eight beers each. A jagged breeze nips at his cheeks and toys with the hem of his second hand blazer. He’s a Melbourne blend of nonchalant, “vintage gangster” cool and haphazard, "Centrelink-funded" op-shop purchases.

Walking down Brunswick Street with his lanky, knee-knocking gait somehow managing to pull off “swagger”, he opens the door to his favourite timber-lined café. He rests his guitar bag down and takes a seat at his favourite corner table. Pulling out his notebook and a hip flask full of whiskey, he pours a generous nip into his espresso and begins to write. 

If the sonic tapestry of Skyscraper Stan were to coalesce into human form, this is the kind of person you would encounter. 

Skyscraper Stan wields language like a sculptor shapes stone. Based in Naarm (Melbourne), the band find stories in the mundane, bringing sonic life to the gossip and tales you might overhear at a  bustling intersection or in the back of a small-town bowls club.

Self-defined as “troubadour rock’n’roll", Skyscraper Stan makes music that is feverish in its desire to be pinned down. The band makes tunes that feels like an antique messenger bag full of 50mL Fireball’s and blooming flowers. Stan and his band sound somehow on a street-corner, a pre-war music bar and a dimly lit theatre playhouse - all at the same time. 

Led by Stan Woodhouse and co-owned by Oskar Herbig, the Melbourne group are an instrument of razor-sharp storytelling, instrumental unpredictability and of (real or perceived) charismatic showmanship. 

KEELEY: We’ll start at the start, tell me a bit about yourself, how did your relationship with music begin?

STAN: Well, I grew up in Auckland, in Aotearoa, in New Zealand, and got into music firstly through some cassettes of my grandfathers that my cousin and I found hidden in his workshop. He was a carpenter, and we found a “Best of” Sam Cooke, and a “Best of” Johnny Cash, which was mainly just the live at Folsom Prison album. We thrashed those. There was also a rock and roll anthology and stuff, just some various cassettes. We got really into music that way, and it sort of evolved through our parents' record collections.

That really was the introduction to music. Also, my father played the acoustic guitar and sang, and my mum played the piano, so there was music in the house you know.

KEELEY: How do you think your relationship with music has changed over time? 

STAN: Parts of it have changed and parts of it have remained the same. I think as a listener to music, what I want out of music has certainly changed.

The more I have learned about music and the anatomy of music, the less easily impressed I am, or maybe the more demanding of music I have become. But having said that, there are certain things about music that have not changed. Like, a really good lyric will always get me in the feels, straight away.

Certain chordal changes will always make me feel good or, you know, tingly or whatever it might be. And certain instruments will always have my heart. So certain things have stayed the same, certain things have changed.

In some ways I've become less of a snob, in some ways I've become more of one.

KEELEY: What is your favourite instrument? 

STAN: Well, at the moment, I think my favourite instrument is the Hammond organ. 

I love the organ and particularly love the Hammond, especially when you see someone who really knows how to play it, which is not me. I play guitar organ, you know, like, it's very clear to anyone watching that I learned the guitar and then learned the organ.

KEELEY: I love the Violin, especially when it’s played unconventionally. 

STAN: Well that's the problem I reckon, because the violin is so versatile, but a lot of bands that use one will just go full fiddle vibes. 

Irish music is like my kryptonite. I hear Irish music and I just start smashing stuff, no offense to the Irish but I hate their music.

KEELEY: How was your holidays?

STAN: They were lovely. Manisha, my partner and my soon to be wife (lucky me) went back to back home to New Zealand. She’s from Auckland as well. 

We spent heaps of time with the family and did lots of wedding planning because our wedding is happening over there at the Mahatma Ghandi Centre in Auckland. It goes for three days.

It's gonna be really colourful and beautiful and amazing. So we were doing a fair bit of planning for that and then just hanging out with the family and spending a lot of time in the ocean. 

We're both really keen snorkelers and free-divers and stuff.

KEELEY: Congratulations! Sounds like a beautiful wedding you’ve got planned! 

KEELEY: I get the sense you’re a bit of a word-nerd. What’s your favourite word? 

STAN: My favourite word. Oh, man. That's actually quite tough because there are different ways you can use language, you know? There's language being used for really dogmatic, specific purposes, like I'm a marine biology major at university. And so, I learn words in there that I really like, like “crepuscular”, which is an organism that's active at dawn and dusk, but not during the day or during the night, just those two. I think it means something else in English though. But there we go. Crepuscular, beautiful in the word of science. It's a really lovely word.

But then we've got fantastic colloquial words over here. You know, if someone's a bit stupid, they're a Drongo.

I feel like if I was given more time to think about it, I could come up with a list of particularly excellent words, but off the top of the dome, I'm struggling.

KEELEY: You’ve travelled a lot! How has your travelling shaped or changed your music? 

STAN: Because I’m such a rabid greenie, a lot of my travelling revolves around touring, and I’m always working while travelling because I’d feel guilty travelling for any other reason. 

But, that does mean I’m often touring solo, so I end up meeting a lot of people and those people often become the basis for a story, which is a song. 

I read a really good Joan Didion book called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and there was a great intro where she said that writers are always selling someone out, so if you’re with a writer in a bar you’re running the risk of becoming a song or story. So I think travelling doesn’t inspire the songs, more the people who I run into along the way.

KEELEY: So was the song writing on your new Album inspired by the people you met on your solo travels?

STAN: No actually, this album is the exception to the rule. Like so many new albums, most of it was written during lockdown, so it’s the opposite. There was certainly no travelling then, although maybe some astral travelling. 

It’s less of an album inspired by the outside world, and more of an introspective one. Except I’m not a huge fan of navel gazing, so a lot of it is really just about falling in love with my fiancé. 

KEELEY: I suppose then, what experience would you like people to have when they listen to your music?

STAN: If I could distil an album down to one song, I would want people to feel curious. A little bit of elation would be good. I’d like that in there, get curious then get elated, then get somewhat concerned and philosophical about things followed by a whimsical feeling. 

Then once the whimsy wraps up, I’d want people to feel profoundly moved and then I would like them to feel thoroughly impressed. 

It always depends on the song though doesn’t it? Something I find a real challenge is when I’m playing live shows, I tell a lot of jokes and I sing some silly songs that I’ve written that will never be recorded. I like to throw them in there for a bit of fun. It gets the crowd laughing, and I definitely do that when I feel like I’m losing a crowd, so I’ll make sure to get them laughing. 

Following on from that point, I’ll be playing a song that I want people to be moved by and they’ll laugh at the lines in that song, because they’re in the mood to laugh. And I always feel like:

“No, no no, you’ve got this all wrong, you’re supposed to be feeling sad in this one!”

But it’s too late. They’re laughing now.

KEELEY: So does musicianship come naturally to you?

STAN: Musicianship in all honesty does not come naturally to me, it’s a hard one. I can more or less hold my own now, I’m a decent songwriter but I’m not a naturally gifted musician. I’ve really had to push uphill to get anywhere near palatable on any given instrument. 

A lot of the people I play with are so intuitive when it comes to melodic structures, harmonies and rhythm. Like I said, I can hold my own with them but I can’t compete with them in terms of the landscape that they see when I show them a song. They’ll see a much broader landscape than I do. 

KEELEY: Do you think your lack of natural musicianship benefits you to an extent?

STAN: Yes, I’ve had conversations with my cousin who plays with me about that. We both agree that schooled musicians can sometimes struggle to sound like anything other than schooled musicians. 

Not saying that applies to everyone, but your Jonie Mitchell’s and Neil Young’s didn’t go through classical training, they came out of coffee houses and churches and other places where music was being played for the sake of playing music, not for the sake of knowing everything about music. 

KEELEY: What kind of music do you enjoy, and do you think what you listen to gets carried into your own music?

STAN: While I’ve been working on this new album I’ve been listening to a lot of soul music, which to me is structurally similar to a lot of country, pop as well as rock and roll. It just has a certain sizzle to it. I don’t know why soul music is so appealing to me now, but I cannot feel sad whenever soul music is playing. I just always feel good.

I’ve also been listening to lots of really nicely produced live instrumental bands. Glass Beams, Bad Bad Not Good, those sort of groovy instrumental bands. Surprise Chef and stuff like that. 

KEELEY: If you were going to get sponsored by anyone, who would you want it to be?

STAN: If I was going to get sponsored by anyone, it might be a really prominent scuba diving brand, or something like that. That way my band and I could all play a show on the bottom of Port Phillip Bay.

KEELEY: What is your favourite song off the new album that we haven't heard, and what is your favourite song that you've written pre-new album? 

STAN: They are both the same song, I think. My favourite song that I have written, both because I think it's a good song and also because it is dear to me, is a song that is going to come out on the new album, but it is actually already out as a single.

And it's also on the soundtrack to the second series of this TV show, Colin from Accounts. So it's already sort of made its way around the world. It hasn't really seemed to impress that many people, but I don't care because it means a lot to me.

It's called 21st Century Lullaby.

I wrote it for my niece. I think a large part of the reason it's my favourite is that it was inspired by this exciting thing that was happening in my family - my sister was about to have a baby. I love my sister very much and I was really looking forward to this child emerging.

My dear friend Sam Boone, who plays saxophone in the band wrote these string parts for it, for a concert that we were doing in Ballarat. It was just like a one off thing. But, then a few days later, he got in touch with me and he was doing a string session with a major label artist at a little studio in Collingwood.  He had a string quartet from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra there and he asked if we wanted to record the song with the strings and all. 

I’m not a spiritual person but the whole thing sort of felt preordained, like it was supposed to happen that way.

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