INTERVIEW: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.
Chin Up, the first single from Blood and Bones, is out now. www.myspace.com/sjmcardle