SJ McArdle

"SJ McArdle brings a welcome bit of grit into proceedings, singing with a voice of such world-weary authority that it's a crying shame he's having to battle it out on a small indie label" - Phil Udell, Hot Press

"SJ McArdle has carved out an enviable reputation as one of the finest musicians in the country. A unique and intriguing talent" - dublinsingersongwriters.com

"Highly intelligent and literate, yet admirably accessible ... damn good" - Jackie Hayden, Hot Press

"SJ sounds like The Stunning took a year out to travel Australia, shared a flat with some Bad Seeds for a spell and spent the remaining time in the Outback contemplating their lot with nothing but a bottle of red and a Husker Du compilation for company" - Connected magazine

"Warm, wry and sonorous" - Irish Times - Various

SJ McARDLE IS careful with his words, which are cast with a hint of his hometown Drogheda accent. His speaking voice is not quite as bone dry as his singing voice, though it still carries a certain hollow weight, writes LAURENCE MACKIN.

Sitting in a Dublin pub, he is full of praise, but only for others, particularly the musicians he works with. He is perhaps that rarest thing among frontmen – a bona fide gentleman.

Even at this stage in his career, with two albums released and another recorded and due in early 2010, he has enough stories to keep most musicians going for a decade or so.

They start with his debut, 2003’s Lancelot , a well received record that earned plenty of approving nods, and lead to Blood and Bones , an altogether more accomplished work recorded in Nashville, a city where dreams are made and broken. Surprisingly, his road to Tennessee came via Hollywood, that other town shored up by the hopes of millions.

“I went to play at this Oscar Wilde thing in 2006,” he says of the party that takes place in the run up to the Oscars. It’s where industry bigwigs and the cream of Irish entertainment get together for a case, or 10, of champagne. Last year, Kate Winslet turned up to present her Irish agent, Hylda Queally, with an award, and the past few years have seen Glen Hansard and Van Morrison take to the stage.

This brought him to the attention of Jewel DC Publishing, set up by Tralee native Rea Garvey, the frontman of European rock giants Reamonn. They might regularly tour sell-out stadiums with capacities of tens of thousands on the Continent, but in Ireland, Reamonn play humbler venues.

“Reamonn were playing in Whelan’s. I opened for them and it went from there. [Garvey] introduced me to the guy in Nashville who produced [Blood and Bones] and to the guy who is now my manager.”

It’s all very well pitching up to Nashville, but contacts are crucial. For McArdle, it was producer Tim Lauer who threw him the keys to the city.

“In Nashville, you’re not really allowed to do more than one thing. [Tim Lauer] is a piano and organ player, and he’s not really known in Nashville as a writer or producer. He has worked as a session musician with all these Nashville players, and these guys are his buddies. They think it’s great fun that Tim is making a record. He said ‘Rodney Crowell should sing on this’, and I thought ‘he’s taking the piss’. And he picks up his phone and says ‘Hey Rodney, it’s Tim Lauer, I wondered if you could do vocal on this record’.”

So Lauer not only produced the album, co-wrote the lyrics and music, he also gave McArdle a direct line to Nashville royalty.

“All the new stuff I co-wrote with Tim Lauer, which was a lot more like being in a band,” says McArdle. “He had all sorts of musical ideas and I’m really into co-writing now. When I write on my own it can tend to be quite dense, it’s a great way of opening me up.”

The idea, it seems, was to record in Nashville, tap into its gold mine of musicians, but not come away with a country record.

“The last thing you want is for it to sound like a classic Nashville album where you go in, give everybody the charts, they play and everyone goes home,” says McArdle.

That’s not the only danger of recording in a town built on broken hearts. “Richard Bennett calls it Nash Vegas. You know, in Nashville there’s an awful lot of broken-hearted people who have put their life savings into getting their 19-year-old daughter to make a demo in some top studio, because they think she has got real talent. And she does, she’s a great singer, but it’s so crowded and jammed. You meet these people and you think they’ve got very little chance. It leads to a lot of sadness.

“I was incredibly lucky that somebody wanted to pay for me to do that, and incredibly lucky it was Tim I was working with. I’m so aware that the dark, haunted side of the city is there, and the side of the city that turns out big glossy records that all sound alike and sell 45 million copies.”

Although still a fairly unknown quantity in Ireland, McArdle has built a reputation abroad, thanks to a support slot with Reamonn on their Million Miles tour, playing to audiences of 5,000-10,000 on successive nights. Here, though, he has been working the regular gig circuit in anticipation of the release of Blood and Bones.

“In so many ways I’m very, very Irish. Even the stuff on the record is very Irish, which is important to me. The Irish certainly do have a different way of appreciating things. As a performer, you don’t get anything for free in Ireland. You really have to earn it.”

The album itself is deceptive. What seem like straight-ahead alt-country tracks reveal half bars and odd turns; guitar riffs bubble up from the background and disappear without being repeated. Bass lines groove and pop around a tightly reined kit, and sudden bursts of gospel backing vocals or synthy texture take you by surprise. And then there are the guest appearances by music luminaries such as Rea Garvey, Richard Bennett, Rodney Crowell, Dan Dugmore and others.

The album also features a few covers, one of which is something of a show-stopper. “I was back in Ireland, and Tim would ring up at 1am and go: ‘Let’s do a cover, let’s do something really so obvious that no one would think you would ever touch it.’ So I made acoustic demos of all these covers that are never going to come out, stuff like Winds of Change .”

The one that did make it is a somewhat thrilling version of Annie Lennox’s Why that revels in its devotion to the original. “Why is so robust and strong and has such character, we didn’t want to break it down. [Lauer] scored all the parts. They are all synth parts on the original and we put them on real instruments. The great thing about doing a cover is that you immediately stop thinking ‘maybe I should have written that line differently’, or ‘that guitar part is not great’. You forget all that.” The result is a song that, with McArdle’s arid vocal, sounds gruff and, well, a whole lot more masculine. But not a whole lot more Nashville. - The Irish Times

They say you should never meet your heroes. Often this is true. In SJ McArdle's case however, meeting a group of musicians he had long admired from afar in Nashville turned into the catalyst that has seen him emerge as one of the true international hopes from the Irish music scene.

Not that SJ has been part of a 'scene'. The Drogheda songwriter has eschewed some of the more traditional routes in the music industry, preferring instead to trust that his instincts and his talents would lead him to a fateful day such as that when he recorded in Nashville's legendary Sound Emporium.

The product of a music-besotted family at a time when vinyl was carefully listened to, SJ McArdle's first musical purchase was Bowie's 'Heroes' - a record that would open the doors to a host of early influences and ensure that the idea of the maverick was firmly implanted in his head from an early age. He began playing guitar at the tender age of fourteen, and went on to combine a love of music with that of poetry which saw him pen his own compositions and spend his teenage years playing in various bands.

The Irish music scene at the time was awash with groups desperately trying to follow in U2's giant footsteps, but SJ continued his musical upbringing by taking in the sounds of Talking Heads, Pixies and REM, while embracing both the Irish and international folk movements. The poetry of William Blake, Thomas Kinsella and WB Yeats also figured largely, ensuring that the written word would figure as largely in his creations as the music.

As the music progressed, SJ's interest in performance reached to the stage, joining the renowned Irish Calipo Theatre Company and acting in roles in national tours with the company. Taking roles in plays such as David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, SJ's comfort in stage performance matured on a different level, ensuring a new comfort with the audience that he had been slowly building through his own music. Live music and songwriting, however, was really where it was at.

During this time, SJ was still writing the music that would eventually determine where his path lay, and he also began work as a session musician, lending his talents to musicians such as Ricky Warwick, on tours supporting the likes of Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow, biding his time until that crucial opportunity might come his way.

Being invited to play at an Oscar party in LA in the company of legendary Irish film director Neil Jordan was perhaps the long awaited, but hardly expected, break that sometimes separates those who try and those who die. A high point no doubt, but in reality a start. As a result of the Los Angeles appearance, the wheels were set in motion and contacts made that would lead to a subsequent world wide publishing deal and the faith that would put SJ in a studio with the likes of Rodney Crowell, Bryan Sutton, Dan Dugmore and Richard Bennett.

These men, who had worked with the likes of Emmylou Harris, Warren Zevon and Steve Earle would provide the musical backbone for SJ McArdle's debut record. The publishing deal with Jewel DC Publishing, set up by the front man of European rock giants, Reamonn, allowed SJ to make several trips to the US and also record in Sound Emporium, where he would rub shoulders with a newly wrought musical duo about to take the world by storm, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

The setting and the company would bring out the best in SJ's songwriting talents, lending a mature and rootsy template that would allow his extraordinary voice to shine through. At times revealing its true Irish heart and at others meandering into Americana, SJ's debut has collected and absorbed much of the musical journey that the artist has been on until this point, and forged them into something uniquely his own.

- Michael Carr
- Southern News Network