Biography

CONTACT
Record Label: Eric@truenorthrecords.com
Publicity: Mark@markpuccimedia.com
Radio: KARI ESTRIN 615-262-0883 / Kari@kariestrin.com (Folk)
Radio: BRAD PAUL 617-413-7821 / bradpaul56@gmail.com (AAA, Americana)

Record Label: https://truenorthrecords.com
AIRPLAY DIRECT: https://airplaydirect.com/music/TrueNorthRec/

VIDEOS
Dirty Old Town: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsTffo4KDmY
All This Time Running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqj5WrAezm8
Emm & May: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV4s9MDErD0
Yellowknife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb_XThDn_jU
To Be Safe Loved Home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_0h2zw6_fg

BIOGRAPHY
For years, Craig Cardiff has been a man on the move. Some might say a man on a mission. But now he's finally arrived. Right where he belongs.

The 44-year-old singer-songwriter's fittingly titled new album All This Time Running is what brought him here. It's the umpteenth release of his decades-long career, his first album of new songs in six years, and his debut effort for True North Records. One spin will tell you it's also the latest brilliant offering from a prolific, award-worthy artist who has been one of Canada's best-kept musical secrets for far too long. But really, it's so much more than that. The culmination of a lifetime spent learning the ropes, honing his skills, finding his voice, striving for truth and reaching for the light, All This Time Running is nothing short of an artistic triumph. A stylistic high-water mark. And a career-defining work that should introduce Cardiff to the wider audience he richly deserves, while elevating him once and for all into the pantheon of great Canadian artists.

"It's the biggest thing I've ever done," the humble, soft-spoken father agrees in a rare moment of pride. "It didn't start out that way. I didn't have that scope and scale in mind at the beginning. It just kind of grew that way. It was actually kind of a gift."

Ironically, he has COVID to thank. Although all the songwriting and much of the recording for All This Time Running was completed before the pandemic, last spring's shutdown forced Cardiff and his collaborators — led by producer/engineers and multi-instrumentalists Steven Ryan and David Campbell — to slow down. Rethink. Take stock.

For a fiercely independent artist used to cutting albums on the fly and off the cuff between endless tours, it was a drastic change. And a revelation. "I never had time to pause like this before," he says. "It scared the hell out of me at first. Everything went out the window; we had to rejig and scramble. It was like Mad Max. But it became a positive. We were able to access some players we wouldn't have been able to otherwise. And the time to sit with the songs and
the recordings — that was critical."

The result? The most coherent, conceptual, cohesive and creative entry in Cardiff's long, lauded catalog. These 11 songs — along with half a dozen bonus tracks, including his signature hit “Dirty Old Town” — are impeccably crafted, artfully arranged and narratively sequenced into a folk-pop song cycle decorated with mandolin and banjo, horns and strings, synths and programmed drums. At the centre of it all sit Cardiff's warmly weathered pipes, nimble fretwork and poetic lyrics.

A storyteller at heart, the troubadour continues to chronicle the human condition and all its joys and tragedies, inspired by real people, real places, real lives — and real journeys. Simultaneously serving as a reminder of what we're all missing and an antidote to our year-long bout of cabin fever, All This Time Running offers a restless, fast-paced travelogue for the housebound. Cardiff takes us to Wyoming during a snowfall. To Saskatchewan on a frozen night and the midwest during a brutal heat wave. To Yellowknife and Bryant Park. To boathouses, beaches and bars. To wrong places at the wrong time. And most importantly, to the place where all travels begin and end: Home. "All of the movement and all the activity," he says, "is only to arrive where we've been for a long time.”

Cardiff's own journey has been just as eventful. Growing up in Waterloo, Ont., he fell under the spell of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Elvis Costello, "not knowing it wasn't cool to listen to Paul Simon at the time." His earliest forays into music were equally out of step. He was "fired" by his piano teacher — "She politely said, 'You don't have come back any more’ ” — and during his first high-school gig, he ended up humming for five minutes when he forgot the words to the Dylan song he was covering. Almost as embarrassing: Learning that his mother once wrote Leonard Cohen, repeatedly asking him to bring the teenage Cardiff onstage to sing at his next local concert. Thankfully, Cohen didn't bite. "I would have just gotten sweaty and tried to hide," Cardiff laughs.

There was nowhere to go but up. And he has. Overcoming his performance jitters — "There came a point where I began to occupy the space and got more comfortable in directing the room" — Cardiff delivered his first album in 1997. Since then, he has independently released nearly 25 albums and EPs in as many years, including live recordings, holiday sets, collaborations and tribute discs. He's covered Dylan and The Pogues, Tears For Fears and Peter Gabriel. His songs have been streamed more than 100 million times and heard on TV shows like This Is Us. His album Floods and Fires was nominated in 2012 for a Juno Award in the Roots And Traditional Album category, and also earned him a nomination for Contemporary Singer of the Year at the 2012 Canadian Folk Music Awards.

But for him, it isn't about achievements and accolades. It's about community and connection. And songwriting isn't just a profession. It's a calling. A commitment. Something he has to do — for himself and others. “How many songs have saved your life?” he asks. "I can think of six that have saved mine. And I think, ‘What if Iron and Wine had gotten lazy, or what if Scott Merritt didn't finish that?’ We wouldn't have those songs to pull us forward. I think about that with my writing. I still feel like I'm trying to beat songs. Trying to capture an idea in my own voice. Trying to fix something or take something outside of my head and put it into the world so that it makes sense or it helps somebody or it has some meaning.”