The Origin
A kid from Massachusetts
with a 16-track recorder and
something to say.
Before the sold-out shows. Before the Billboard #1s. Before Stick Figure became one of the most important names in American reggae — there was a college freshman from Duxbury, Massachusetts alone in a room, layering tracks on top of each other, chasing a sound he heard in his head.
Scott Woodruff had taught himself drums at 9. Guitar came next. Then a dual-cassette deck. Then a 4-track. By 2006 he'd graduated to a 16-track home studio, and what came out of it was The Sound of My Addiction — every instrument played by him, every note written by him, every beat produced by him. No label infrastructure. No producer. No backing band. Just pure creative will.
The album drew early comparisons to Sublime and was built on the deep bones of roots reggae and dub — but it was distinctly something new. Woodruff had been submitting tracks to a Sublime archive website before anyone knew his name. The moniker "Stick Figure" came from his own high school nickname — he was lanky, quiet, and absolutely obsessed with music.
This wasn't just a debut. It was a blueprint. The layered self-production style Woodruff developed here became the template he'd use for every album that followed — the same approach that would eventually take him to #1 on the Billboard Reggae Chart and #34 on the Billboard 200.
Twenty years later, The Sound of My Addiction stands as the foundation of one of American reggae's most singular careers. This is where it all began.