2021
“Shenandoah Summer somehow gives us both a hearty amount of introspection and encouragement while also dosing out hints of the ephemeral and the need to enjoy life in the present moment.”
Review by Thomas Mark Peterson, Poet/Artist/Musician:
To call Cardinal Folk just a musician is an awful mistake.
It is only one of the many hats that the multifaceted artist wears.
Cardinal Folk is a musician, graphic artist, professional rhyme-writer, previous bowling alley owner, craftsman, and all around conceptual genius.
His new album, Shenandoah Summer, is filled to the brim with laid back tunes that cross many genres.
The record itself reads like a screenplay. You feel tethered to the driving force behind it all, from beginning to end.
We’re invited into the store with “Coffee in the Morning,” which sets the pace for us with a few solid Summertime Anthems like “Shenandoah Summer” and “Meteor,” while “Whiskey in the Evening,” users us into a rowdy night of good drinks with good friends, with final bon voyage of “Home Sweet Shenandoah.”
Shenandoah Summer somehow gives us both a hearty amount of introspection and encouragement while also dosing out hints of the ephemeral and the need to enjoy life in the present moment. It is the perfect album to finish out the summer with.
2019
“The tunes in this album tell stories of lived experience and dreamed rebellion.” -Mattie Marsh
Bottom Shelf is Cardinal Folk’s debut album. Cardinal Folk takes being a one-man-band to the extreme for his debut release by writing, performing, recording, and mixing the entire record.
Review by Mattie Marsh, WQSV: “Sometimes you get a darn good deal, a good time with no expectations. And, that’s exactly what Cardinal Folk’s “Bottom Shelf” is.
A folk punk compilation of songs sounds off when you choose from the ‘bottom shelf’ with kick drum beats from a suitcase and tongue-in-cheek lyrics that play with vocal dissonance and varying tempos.
Like “ABV” and his crowd-pleaser “Pabst Blue Ribbon,” Cardinal Folk is not high-maintenance about his music or his beer. The tunes in this album, from running away and honkey-tonk daydreaming to love lingo, tell stories of lived experience and dreamed rebellion.
“Forrest Gump” might be considered the most punk on “Bottom Shelf” and he runs right through the soles of this shoes after a spat with his woman. Then, songs such as “ABV” and “Never Been out Ramblin’” hold clearly country-western tones.
“Fraction of Myself Again,” however, is the one tune you might want to crack two beers open for. In a state of melancholy, the writer reflects on his own brokenness and the gradual disintegration of himself by old ghosts as the years go by. It is a stand-alone on a feel-good album.
Last, the album concludes with “Trucker Lingo,” a song about PG coding for getting it on with your lover when company necessitates conversational subtleties.
“Bottom Shelf” is here for a good time and it’s worth picking up.
2017
For Friendly Folk is a mixtape recorded on cassette tape in 2017. Recorded live and unedited, Cardinal Folk takes bluegrass tempos, traditional country melodies, and folk instrumentation to deliver a lo-fi vintage folk sound.
mix·tape – /mikstāp/ – noun: certain types of recordings, typically self-produced and independently released albums that are issued free of charge
Cardinal Folk recorded these songs on cassette tape in a spare room of his house on a portable cassette player. He lined the walls of that room with as many spare blankets as he could find to make a temporary recording studio and recorded five of his favorite songs that he had written. Cardinal Folk played through each song several times until he ran out of cassette tape and then took the best take of each song for this project. These songs were recorded entirely by Cardinal Folk; live and unedited.
Cardinal Folk 