SJ McArdle

Contemporary Irish folk artist Stephen Joseph McArdle is a songwriter, musician and curator, critically-acclaimed at home and abroad.

He is known for his PORT project (a touring live show and album song-cycle) and its accompanying RTÉ Radio 1 Album of The Week, Old Ghosts In The Water as well as his previous work in award-winning Irish folk band Kern from 2013 to 2020 and his career as a singer-songwriter in Nashville and Germany, which produced 2014’s critically-acclaimed Blood and Bones album. SJ is also one third of Long Woman’s Grave, featuring Nuala Kennedy and Trevor Hutchinson.

SJ’s songs and performances have been featured in radio, film and television and he has toured and recorded extensively in Ireland, Europe and North America, gathering a loyal following and critical accolades along the way.

His new album, All My Dream Companions Gone, is a new song cycle set in Drogheda during World War I.
Contributors to the album include Lisa Lambe, Trevor Hutchinson (Lúnasa, The Waterboys), Graham Henderson (Fairground Attraction, Moving Hearts) and Nuala Kennedy (Solas, The Alt)

Praise for Old Ghosts in the Water:

“An impressive song cycle … the songs are intriguing and evocative; they are rooted in folk but coloured by expansive and imaginative arrangements.” – The Irish Times

“What a great, great collection of songs this is from SJ McArdle. I urge you to go out and get it.” – Fiachna Ó Braonáin (The Hothouse Flowers, RTÉ)

“All the ingredients of great folk songs” – Lynette Fay (BBC)

Other reviews:

“A talented writer of both contemporary and traditional-style songs with immediate earworm qualities.” – Seamas Shiels, Fonn magazine

“SJ McArdle, who has had a successful solo career cultivating a rootsy folk-rock sound, can’t fail to capture your attention, with a sonorous voice – not unlike Garnet Rogers’s – that can be gritty and gruff yet also unexpectedly tender, even vulnerable. His writing exhibits a similar versatility.” – Sean Smith, Boston Irish

“A singer-songwriter with gravelly vocals and some gut-wrenching original songs about emigration and the hometown blues.” – Tom Keller, Folkworld.eu

“Quite lovely … McArdle’s voice has a breathy gruffness to it that is commanding without being loud, and it sets a strong tone. ‘The Hard Wind’, a McArdle original, is a lively, cutting song about Irish soldiers who returned to Ireland after World War I to acrimony and indifference.” – Daniel Neely, The Irish Echo

“(In ‘The Hard Wind’) SJ McArdle has written a really fine and brave song … really interesting, powerful and complex”– Mike Harding

“His smoky voice seems to have the very patina of life itself ingrained within his vocal cords and this gives his recordings real identity.” – TradConnect

“Bravo for an artist who has taken contemporary Irish music to parts it far too seldom reaches” – Hot Press

“SJ’s deep, sonorous voice brings authority to the songs. If Whipping Boy were raised in Nashville they might sound like this” – Mail On Sunday

“Spare couplets conjuring entire vistas with the focus of David Lynch” – The Irish Times