page_title: Craig Cardiff
section_title: Floods & Fires
hierarchical_section_title: Craig Cardiff / Recording / Floods & Fires
caption_attribution_description: English: for more information please visit http://craigcardiff.com
context_page_description: Craig Cardiff 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.
context_section_description: 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. "I warned him there would be a lot of scope creep with this album because I had an idea how big I wanted it to be, and I wanted to spend a lot of time," says Cardiff. "I didn't want to set parameters ... I wanted to feel confident that the songs are fully realized." Floods & Fires represents a new approach to recording for Cardiff.
  "A lot of my albums have been done off the cuff," Cardiff explains. For this album, he took the time and made accepting challenges part of the process and made sure he would not have any regrets after the process. Floods & Fires is considered an ambitious album, as it features a horn section, bowed strings, electronic instrument programming and guest performers, including a high school choir. Cardiff has explained that the title (Floods & Fires) alludes to Biblical plagues which bring both destruction and opportunity. The album's 14 tracks examine "love and love's leaving, celebrate parenthood and... explore the balance between heartbreak and joy." Cardiff says the songs were "...crafted during a difficult period of my life," says Cardiff. "When hard things happened, I kept reminding myself to choose joy instead of choosing to be afraid and closing up. That's what I kept coming back to – fear rents the cheapest room in the house. I didn't want to live like that anymore."
caption: Craig Cardiff - House Concert 1 - Photography by Jeff Epp
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