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Storytelling songwriter Craig Cardiff at Acoustic Emporium

Cardiff’s songs are about audience members’ stories, confessions, and secrets
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Craig Cardiff performs Friday, Oct. 13 at the Acoustic Emporium on Wellington Avenue in Chilliwack. (Submitted photo)

A unique musician will be performing at the Acoustic Emporium in Chilliwack on Oct. 13.

For the past two and a half years, Ontario-based folk singer Craig Cardiff has been passing around a notebook called the Book of Truths during his shows, asking audience members to share something truthful – a story, confession, hope, or secret. The book gives fans a chance to write down something they may be too afraid to say out loud, and it gives Cardiff an opportunity to connect with the people who come to hear him play.

These stories can be heartbreaking, they can leave Cardiff wanting to do something, to find the person who wrote about it just tell them to hold on for tomorrow, reassuring them that things will be OK. The sense of reassurance can be heard in Craig’s newest collection of songs.

“I didn’t realize it at first, but this collection of songs is just really to help people be OK and to let them know to just wait until tomorrow, stay here and push on through,” says Cardiff. “Every song has that kernel of hope and joy, even if it’s not apparent at first. I think the purpose of each song is to remind people to make sure they remember to remember that they’re OK and that things are good. Don’t give up.”

Cardiff worked with producers Ben Leggett (Faraway Neighbours, Ben Hermann) and Andre Wahl (Hawksley Workman, Luke Doucet) to record an album that is quite different than anything he has released before. Love Is Louder (Than All This Noise) is one-part boisterous group sing-along, one-part gentle lullaby. One album features full live band recordings, while the other is more subdued, with acoustic guitar, cello, clarinet and violin.

This is the same team that produced Floods and 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.

Craig Cardiff performs Friday, Oct. 13 at the Acoustic Emporium (45892 Wellington Ave.). Doors open at 6:30 p.m., show is at 7 p.m.

Tickets: $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Available at the venue or through Eventbrite.