Music Blog

Greg Cardi has spent the last year in Portland quietly making a name for himself within the Portland music scene. Playing under the name Leonard Mynx, Cardi crafts elegiac tracks that pull in the influence of folk, blues, country and pop, rolling out tales of desperation, death and heartbreak over slow heartbeat tempos. He recently self-released his second full-length, Vesper, a gloomy but enthralling collection of songs recorded with Adam Selzer (Norfolk & Western, M. Ward), which he will be touring behind across the U.S. over the next few months. Before he left, I was able to sit down with Cardi at Fresh Pot on N Mississippi and find out what inspires this unique artist’s work.

How did you get started playing music?

I think just how every teenager gets started, one of my friends played guitar I thought it was pretty cool. No one in my family was musical at all. My uncle bought me a guitar once when I was young gave me a disc of Smithsonian box set of old blues. I heard guys playing that stuff, and I wanted to know, "How can one person make this much noise with just one guitar?" That is pretty much what set me in that direction rather than the rock path.

What is it that attracted you to those old blues singers?

The emotion of it all. It's so raw and I think that the fact that it's not clouded up. It's just a voice and an instrument you get a lot of the impact of a song that way.

So when did you then start playing your own music?

I Just started playing out about a year and a half ago. I didn't really every play in bands, which when I started playing in bands was kind of a detriment, not having to keep time with people. I just started going to open mics and then I decided I wanted to book some shows.

A lot of the songs that you write are fictional. Where do you get the inspiration for these songs?

With "Robert" - the long one about the kid who dies in the war - I was listening to NPR right around when I first moved to Portland. It was a year after the whole "Mission Accomplished" thing, and they were doing a story about how it had been the deadliest month in Iraq for US soldiers. The whole song came from there. I didn't know anybody that went over there so I was just trying to take on the role of a family member affected by that because they had people on the radio - family members - talking about losing somebody. As for "Mary"... when I housesit for people, I end up catching up on some TV. I ended up seeing one of those crime shows was one where they're investigating a corpse. This was my take on the modern crime investigation genre.

Do any of your songs come from some place personal or from personal experience?

They're mostly fictional on this album, but I definitely have personal songs. A lot of them that express some doom and gloom on certain songs, or are kind of just a collection of images than a story. A lot of that has personal stuff in it. General stuff, not like a particular thing like a mood you get in once a while when you're swamped with day to day. I think I listen to the news too much. I'm not gloomy at all. People who hear this music assume I'm dark, but it's the total opposite. Maybe that's why I'm not, I get a certain amount of that out through the songs.