Craig Cardiff

Craig Cardiff (born 9 July 1976) is a Canadian folk singer from Waterloo, Ontario who lives in Arnprior, Ontario. He has released sixteen albums, both live and studio-based since 1997. He has toured North America and Europe. In 2012, Cardiff was nominated for a Juno Award for Roots and Traditional Album of the Year: Solo and for a Canadian Folk Music Award as Contemporary Singer of the Year.

Biography

Early life

Craig Cardiff was born July, 1976 to Judy and Charles Cardiff. He grew up with his younger sisters Catherine, Susan and Elizabeth in Waterloo, Ontario, where both his parents were school teachers. Music was important during his upbringing and he was motivated by his parents to play an instrument. His parents bought him his first guitar, a Gibson J-30, when he was 15, while one of his high school teachers, taught him the guitar during his lunch hour. Cardiff began to perform at coffeehouses and with some bands in high school. While studying at the University of Waterloo, he performed at local pubs, open mic events, and coffeehouses. He also worked as a booking agent, organizing shows at Fed Hall, including The Guess Who.

1997-2010s In September 1997, Cardiff debuted with the album Judy Garland (You're Never Home) which included Deanna Knight, Tom Murray, Danny Michel, Joel Stouffer, Paul Mathew and Catherine Cardiff. It was re-released in August 2006. Cardiff released his album Goodnight (Go Home) in 2007. In 2007, View Magazine stated that while Cardiff "...maintains a dedicated fan base", he "...is more a secret than a household name, despite his songs revealing the craft of one of the best in the business". View Magazine stated in 2007 that he was "playing bigger rooms, touring more and receiving more critical acclaim" after his 11th release, Good Night (Go Home)." The magazine called Goodnight (Go Home) "arguably Cardiff's most accomplished release to date."

He released Floods & Fires in November 2011. The album earned a Juno Award nomination as Roots and Traditional Album of the Year: Solo, as well as a Canadian Folk Music Awards nomination as Contemporary Singer of the Year. The album was in the SoundScan Top 10 for a week, and Exclaim! magazine called it "a major breakthrough." When Cardiff released his latest album, Love Is Louder (Than All This Noise) Part 1 & 2, in November 2013, Exclaim! magazine stated: "With a catalogue now well into double digits and a national fan base that is surely the envy of his singer-songwriter peers, Ottawa's Craig Cardiff has been the model of how to be a successful independent Canadian musician. However, with his new double album, Love Is Louder (Than All This Noise) Parts 1 & 2, he seems better poised than ever to break into the mainstream, having recorded with a full band for the first time." When Love Is Louder (Than All This Noise) Part 1 & 2 was released, it reached as high as No. 8 on the iTunes singer-songwriter charts and for a time was the only independent Canadian album in the Top 20.

Recording Cardiff has offered at least one new release almost every year, and his catalogue includes live albums, studio albums, collaborations with other artists and tributes to songwriters he admires. Over the years, he has experimented with various recording styles and distribution platforms for his albums – one release, Mistletoe (Kissing Songs), was recorded entirely on an iPod Touch. While making the album, Leggett and Wahl challenged Cardiff to step outside his "comfort zone" and record with a full band for the first time. Cardiff called the live band recordings "very uncomfortable" yet very exciting", particularly noting his work with members of Lindi Ortega's band and piano player and singer-songwriter Mike Evin for Part 1.

Floods & Fires

While critics called Love Is Louder (Than All This Noise) Part 1 & 2 different than anything Cardiff has released before, the team behind it is familiar. Ben Leggett (Faraway Neighbours, Ben Hermann) and Andre Wahl (Hawksley Workman, Luke Doucet) also produced Floods & Fires, the album that earned Cardiff a nomination for a 2012 Juno Award for Roots and Traditional Album of the Year: Solo and a Canadian Folk Music Award nomination as 2012 Contemporary Singer of the Year. He called the recordings a "phenomenal experience", and says he gave himself "...permission to explore songs" with "anything from beat boxing to full horn sections."

For Floods & Fires, Cardiff and Leggett spent 18 months working in Cardiff's home studio in Arnprior. This was the longest period of time Cardiff spent on any of his releases, which are often recorded live or "off the floor" in the studio. For this album, Leggett re-jigged Cardiff's home studio, co-wrote some of the material and even moved into Cardiff's house to get the job done. "The green focus for us is just in reducing the amount of plastic we were using in CDs," says Cardiff, who offered album inserts and art to fans who purchased digital music for their USB so they would still have a physical connection to the album.

Cardiff wrote the "jaunty song about death" with a chorus that states "goodnight, go home, there is nothing more to see here," for his daughter, who was 17 months old at the time, to explain to her what happens to people when they die. After hearing the song, DJs at campus bars in British Columbia and Ontario asked to use it as their last song of the night. "She was trying to hitchhike, to catch a ride back in, and couldn't," explains Cardiff. "She ended up passing from exposure. The worst part is that it's all over … Each community has a story like that; it's difficult. So there was that story that existed, and then there was the Bruce McDonald film Dance Me Outside. I hadn't seen the film, but it just had this idea that even in hard things, still having dignity, still standing up tall, even to a very bitter, sad end. That was the idea." Cardiff's song tells the story of two parents welcoming a newborn into the world, only to be told that the child will only survive for a few hours. "A lot of people share their experiences with me in regards to that," Cardiff has said of the song.

Live albums Cardiff has released a number of live albums. Songs For Lucy was recorded at the Blacksheep Inn in Wakefield, Quebec, and released in 2010. Easter Eggs, released in 2007, is a collection of live recordings from various performances. Featuring songs by Cardiff and by Toronto's Les Cooper, Bombshelter Livingroom was recorded live at the University of Waterloo Bombshelter Pub and was released in 2005. Gingers on Barrington Street, which was released in 2003, is a shared album featuring songs by Cardiff and by Rose Cousins. It was recorded at Ginger's Tavern above the Granite Brewery in downtown Halifax.

Collaborations and covers Cardiff often pays tribute to his favourite songwriters in his performances and on his albums. In 2010, Cardiff released the album Mothers & Daughters, featuring 11 covers of songs written by some of his favourite female songwriters. These include Ani Difranco, Cyndi Lauper, Joni Mitchell, Gillian Welch, Patty Griffin, Sinéad O'Connor, Björk, Indigo Girls and Suzanne Vega. Cardiff's album Fistful of Flowers, released in 2005, features his version of songs written by Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega, Martin Sexton and others. In 2018, Cardiff released a five-song album of exclusively Bob Dylan covers.

"I'm a huge fan of other songwriters, and this album is a way to reinterpret what they've done and lend my signature," Cardiff told the Queen's Journal. "I've had a lot of requests from listeners who've attended shows over the past few years to put out an album like this, and all of the pieces of the project just fell together." "I'm very proud of how it ended up feeling like a cohesive show," he adds. "And it features musicians I love playing with—Paul Mathew on double bass, Les Cooper on Rhodes piano and guitar, Joel Stouffer on drums. It feels like a hug." He recorded with a band for the first time for his latest album, Love Is Louder (Than All This Noise) Part 1 & 2. Recording live off the floor with musicians James Robertson, Paul Mathew, Sly Juhas, Mike Evin and Robbie Grunwald, Cardiff found himself far outside his comfort zone, intimidated and amazed. With Floods & Fires, Cardiff and Leggett also worked with mixer/producer/engineer Andre Wahl, who provided additional production and mixing.

The trio joined forces once again for Cardiff's project Love Is Louder (Than All This Noise) Part 1 & 2. Together, Wahl and Leggett pushed Cardiff to make an album that didn't sound like anything he had recorded before. In 2003, Cardiff and Cousins released Gingers on Barrington Street, a joint live album they recorded in Halifax. What takes Cardiff into unique performance venues and into so many living rooms is a willingness to go where his fans want to see him. In 2007, while booking a Canadian tour, he turned to his fans to help him. Through his website, Cardiff asked fans to suggest where he should play and then booked shows through MySpace and Facebook. His friendships with local people keeps Cardiff coming back to "alternate" locations that are more difficult to reach, he explains. "Does it make sense financially? Not always. But it's about the connections you form with different people, the friends of friends who help you out."

Cardiff can turn any setting into an intimate affair. And while he's touring, he makes a point of keeping the relationship with his fans personal, as he invites and accepts any opportunity to make his audience as much a part of the performance as he is. Cardiff has played with and opened for Glen Phillips, Lucy Kaplansky, Dan Bern, Natalia Zukerman, Andy Stochansky, Sarah Harmer, Kathleen Edwards, Blue Rodeo, Gordon Downie, Hawksley Workman, Sarah Slean, Skydiggers, 54-40 and more.

House concerts

Cardiff includes many house concerts on his tours, frequently preceding a larger public show with an intimate performance in a fan's living room. "There are people connecting, people introducing themselves to each other", "all these different groups of friends." Cardiff has been bringing his music into his fans' homes since the early 2000s. Cardiff told Carleton University's Capital Arts Online that he was inspired when, as a teenager in Waterloo, he began volunteering with a woman who organized performances in churches. Trying to expand on that theme, he began playing music and telling stories in an intimate environment by performing in his fans' living rooms. Fans regularly reach invite him to perform in their homes. Lisanna Sullivan, an artist living outside of Whitehorse, Yukon, hosted a house concert in June 2013 and called it "one of the best nights of her life." "It is an element" he is comfortable in, she says of having Cardiff perform in her home. She calls it "one of the best ways to listen to a musician because it is so intimate."

Festivals Cardiff has performed at The Tim Hortons Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival, POP Montreal, the Shelter Valley Folk Festival, Hay Days, Hillside Festival, Ottawa Bluesfest and Waterloo Sounds Of Summer.

Art and activism Whether he's performing to a smaller house concert crowd or at a large public gathering, Cardiff isn't afraid to mix music with a bit of community activism. Cardiff played a last-minute concert in the living room of PhD students in Victoria to help them raise funds for their AIDS outreach exchange to Africa. He has also performed at the University of Western Ontario's mob vote, alongside Rick Mercer. Throughout his career, Cardiff has volunteered his time to support organizations such as Extend-A-Family Waterloo Region, Canuck Place, the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation's Maplesoft Centre for Cancer Survivorship Care, Elephant Thoughts Educational Outreach, the Oxford People Against the Landfill Alliance and many others. In 2010, he performed at the first-ever Canada Without Poverty Dig'n'it(y) Busking Event in Brantford, Ontario.

Workshops For the past 12 years, Cardiff has made a point of taking the time to offer workshops at schools, camps, festivals and churches throughout North America. In the fall of 2012, he did one day-long workshop with students at Churchill Alternative School in Ottawa that impacted the entire school community. Inspired by Cardiff's song Safe Here, teachers Dana Campbell and Natalie Shorkey wanted to incorporate the messages they heard in the song about safety, community and contribution into their classrooms, and they invited Cardiff to come to their school. Leading up to Cardiff's visit, they brought their Grade 2/3 and Grade 4/5 classes together to talk about what the song meant to them and brainstorm ideas for a song of their own that would reflect many of the same ideas. Cardiff spent a day at Churchill Alternative School, and the entire school community had a chance to learn about "Music as Magic" with him and to contribute ideas to a song they wrote together that day called Love Turns I Into We.

He splits workshop participants into smaller groups to create "a smaller, more comfortable space for sharing their own pieces," giving individuals feedback in a "positive and enriching environment".

Awards Cardiff was nominated for a 2012 Juno Award for Roots and Traditional Album of the Year: Solo for Floods and Fires in a category with eventual winner Bruce Cockburn, David Francey, Dave Gunning and Lindi Ortega. Floods & Fires also garnered a nomination for Cardiff as Contemporary Singer of the Year at the 2012 Canadian Folk Music Awards. Rose Cousins won the award, while Keri Latimer, Geraldine Hollett for The Once, and Catherine MacLellan were also nominated. Cardiff won the Canadian Organization of Campus Activities (COCA) Campus Entertainment Award as best singer-songwriter in both 2014 and 2013. COCA also recognized Cardiff in 2007, awarding him the Contemporary Music (Independent) Award.

2012 Juno Awards In the lead-up to the 2012 Juno Awards ceremony in Ottawa, Cardiff had the opportunity to perform his song Safe Here (from his 2011 album Foods & Fires) with former Canadian governor general Michaëlle Jean and pianist Nick Roy at the University of Ottawa. On 26 March 2012, the trio kicked off the Juno Pianos project – which encouraged Juno nominees and members of the public to celebrate Juno Week by playing pianos that had been placed in public spaces all around Ottawa - with this performance. Jean translated the chorus of Safe Here into French, and, after singing, she told the audience that this is a song she can relate to, as she would ask herself on several occasions "am I safe here?" when she arrived in Canada in 1968 after leaving her native country of Haiti. "I ended up recording little bits of the song for her as YouTube links and then we just shared them back and forth and then when we got together she had translated them," says Cardiff. "It was pretty sweet. She's a very lovely person and I feel lucky that that happened." "The nature of performing is very egotistical," he has said in the past. "There is one microphone and generally I get to have it for most of the time … the book just came from a place of wanting to give people an outlet to write down some of these stories."

"Whatever magic happens when people are opened up a bit and just being with each other is a pretty special thing, and that requires the person performing to invite that from the audience, rather than simply pushing noise to them," he adds.

Cardiff integrates live looping, beatboxing and other non-traditional performance techniques into his live performances. "A storyteller at heart, Cardiff is renowned for his acoustic guitar-playing and soft voice, as well as the ingenious use of a digital looping pedal he performs with, which he uses to layer guitar and vocal effects over top of each other," Nick Roy noted in the Queen's Journal. Cardiff has a wide variety of influences, and he has listed B.B. King, Ani DiFranco and Scott Merritt among them. Elvis Costello and Paul Simon are also among his favourite musicians. "I tend to like somebody whose lyrics will stand up on their own without the melody," says Cardiff.

Film soundtracks In 2010, Cardiff and Leggett re-recorded Cardiff's song Barney and Miriam, a tribute to the Mordecai Richler novel Barney's Version that had previously been released on Ginger's on Barrington Street with Rose Cousins in 2003, during sessions for the album Floods and Fires. The song was featured on the soundtrack for the Canadian comedy-drama Barney's Version. Cardiff's work was featured in the soundtrack for an independent Canadian film that was named Audience Choice Best Feature at the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival in September 2012. Cardiff teamed up with Leggett once again to compose the soundtrack for In Return, a dark romantic comedy written and directed by Chris Dymond. The film features original compositions by Cardiff and Leggett, Cardiff's songs from Floods & Fires, and songs by Ontario bands The Famly and Faraway Neighbours.

Discography Upstream Fishing All The Words, He Is: Birthday Cards For Bob Dylan (2018) Novemberish (Songs From The Rain) (2017) Love Is Louder (Than All This Noise) Part 1 & 2 (2013) Floods & Fires (2011) Songs for Lucy (2010 – Live) Mothers and Daughters (2010) Kissing Songs (Mistletoe) (2009) Easter Eggs (2007 – Live) Goodnight (Go Home) (2007) Auberge Blacksheep (2006) Bombshelter Livingroom w/ Les Cooper (2005 – Live) Fistful of Flowers (2005) Soda (2003) Ginger's on Barrington Street w/ Rose Cousins (2003 – Live) Happy (2001) Live at the Boehmer Box Company (2000 – Live) Great American White Trash Novel (1997) Judy Garland (You're Never Home....) (1997)