Robert James Ardiff: ‘Modern Love gave me an audience of millions’

The singer on writing songs for the Amazon Prime hit, introducing Serbian skinheads to Irish music and trying not to disturb his daughter when recording at home

‘Once you put them out there, they are open to anyone’s interpretation’: Robert John Ardiff says he has been humbled by the reaction to his songs. Photo by Steve Humphreys

Kitchen recording: Director John Carney featured several songs from Ardiff on Modern Love

Musician Robert John Ardiff. Photo by Steve Humphreys

‘Once you put them out there, they are open to anyone’s interpretation’: Robert John Ardiff says he has been humbled by the reaction to his songs. Photo by Steve Humphreys

Kitchen recording: Director John Carney featured several songs from Ardiff on Modern Love

Musician Robert John Ardiff. Photo by Steve Humphreys

‘Once you put them out there, they are open to anyone’s interpretation’: Robert John Ardiff says he has been humbled by the reaction to his songs. Photo by Steve Humphreys

John Meagher Twitter Email

April 10 2021 02:30 AM

Modern Love began as a column in the New York Times in 2004. It soon became a sensation as writers — anonymous and otherwise — recounted their very personal experiences with love. It spawned a podcast and a TV drama series and is still going today.

The drama series — also called Modern Love — aired on Amazon Prime in 2019. It was the first significant TV project for the Dublin musician-turned-director John Carney.

After his busker film Once, starring Glen Hansard, become a word-of-mouth hit and begat a successful stage musical, Carney became hot property. The whimsical nature of his films made him an ideal candidate to take on the bittersweet Modern Love project.

Carney had a part in everything: not only did he direct each of the eight episodes, but he wrote them as well. He also served as executive producer and had a major part in deciding what music should be used on the soundtrack.

And it was Carney — who cut his teeth as a member of the Hansard-led Frames, when that band was in a fledgling state — who unearthed a comparatively little known Dublin-based singer-songwriter Robert John Ardiff.

The native of Summerhill, Co Meath, Ardiff had made ripples in the Irish music scene with the well-regarded Come On Live Long. They were far from a household name but they did receive a Choice Music Prize nomination for Irish album of the year in 2017.

But it was Ardiff’s solo work that alerted Carney to his talents, and a number of his songs feature on the first season of Modern Love.

“I met John through mutual friends,” Ardiff says, speaking via Zoom from his home near Dublin city centre. “We kind of hit it off talking about music and stuff and I asked him if he would play bass on my first album. He’s an amazing musician as well as being a very good director. So, he came to my house one day and recorded the bass on a couple of the tracks. I gave him the album when it was all mixed and finished and he was like, ‘Oh, I love this song. Can I use this on this series that I’m making?’ I was more than open to that.

“But then, on top of all that, he said, ‘Look, can I send you some scripts? Can you write some songs for this thing that I’m doing?’”

Ardiff jumped at the opportunity to write on demand. “I ended up writing 15, 20 songs and I was just throwing them at him. He ended up choosing one, which was called Somebody to Love, and I recorded a very acoustic-sounding track in my kitchen and he was like, ‘That’s the one I’m going to take’. I had also been doing an upbeat, faster version with the band I play with, but he ended up taking what basically was the demo version.”

The song appears in the first episode — the especially charming one about a lovelorn young woman and her platonic friendship with the doorman of her plush New York City apartment building.

Several of Ardiff’s songs feature across the series and one of his standout compositions, People Talking, can be found on the official soundtrack album — a compilation, incidentally, that features English electro-pop champs Goldfrapp, Supergrass’s Gaz Coombes, Irish compatriot the Divine Comedy and the all-singing acting star Anne Hathaway.

Ardiff says the opportunity given to him by Carney has opened his music up to people all over the world. He regularly receives emails from listeners smitten by his music after first making its acquaintance on Modern Love.

Kitchen recording: Director John Carney featured several songs from Ardiff on Modern Love

“It’s pretty humbling — because it puts you in front of millions of people, essentially. I got an email a couple of weeks ago from this woman in Los Angeles going, ‘My daughter has been going through this really hard moment in her life — she’s suffering from depression and anxiety — and we discovered your song and it’s given her lots of solace. Would you mind telling me a little bit about what the song’s about?’

“That’s the thing about songs — sometimes people can take from them the complete opposite from what you set out to do. But once you put them out there, they are open to anyone’s interpretation. I suppose that’s what we all do with the songs we love.”

Ardiff has been busy at work with songs for the second season of Modern Love. As before, Carney sent him some scripts and, the singer says, there have been few instructions about what sort of songs are required. “I like it that way,” he says. “It’s a different way of writing — there are themes I’m having to think about, but nothing’s forced.”

This weekend, Ardiff releases his second album, The Corridors of Love. It sounds quite different to the homespun work he has done before — the arrangements are expansive thanks to the work of a band of musicians who have been with him on the journey for a couple of years.

If Come On Live Long are missed by many of those who made the band’s acquaintance, Ardiff is circumspect about their future. “It’s sort of on hiatus at the moment,” he says. “I tend to write an awful lot of songs and I had enough for my own collection.”

He writes when his partner, the academic Louisa Carroll, and young daughter are asleep at night. “I have to work quietly or she’ll [his child] will be down to the kitchen where I’m singing and she’ll go, ‘Daddy, that’s just a little bit too loud!’”

Yet it’s at night, over a cup of tea, when Ardiff’s creative juices flow most freely. Despite the constraints of songwriting when there are prosaic domestic matters to think about, it’s a way of working that lends a tender hush to many of his compositions. Several are unabashed love songs and it’s perhaps easy to understand why Carney was so enamoured.

Musician Robert John Ardiff. Photo by Steve Humphreys

Ardiff has been songwriting for years and, until recently, he lived a nomadic existence. “I grew up in a small town and I always longed to live abroad,” he says. “I moved to Barcelona when I was 21 and I was there for a year-and-a-half and wrote an album — as you do, when you’re 21. I didn’t put it out but it was an experience that I was learning from. I busked a lot too, not just in Barcelona but in Valencia too, then the south [of Spain].”

Ardiff began Come On Live Long on his return to Ireland and the band released a pair of compelling albums, 2013’s Everything Fall and 2017’s In the Still.

He says he is happiest creatively right now. There are no bandmates to defer to. But, as with most working musicians, the pandemic has stymied an ability to make a living. He has had to fall back on the language skills he acquired on his pan-European jaunt and language teaching has helped keep the wolf from the door.

He hopes that The Corridors of Love will connect with people who can get him noticed — other John Carneys, so to speak. “There’s so much luck involved in this game,” he says. “There’s a lot of great music that falls through the cracks. You just hope there’s going to be an audience.”

‘The Corridors of Love’ is out now

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