ABIGAIL LAPELL’S NEW LP, ANNIVERSARY, OUT NOW VIA OUTSIDE MUSIC
Abigail Lapell is sharing “Serpent à sonnette”, the French version of her infectious singalong “Rattlesnake”, from her latest LP, Anniversary, an evocative collection of original love songs that balances buoyant earworms and poignant ballads, ultimately emerging as an earnest celebration of commitment.
This stripped-down acoustic rendition features an enchanting translation – celebrating love omens, marriage vows, and seasonal superstitions – entwined with serpentine layers of steel-string guitar.
On Anniversary, Abigail Lapell interrogates the romantic ideal of growing old together. ‘Anniversary’ means literally ‘returning yearly’, and the album’s 11 songs track the revolving days, seasons, and years to celebrate and complicate the notion of eternal love. Across the project, Lapell drew inspiration from a series of personal milestones, including turning 40, along with the fifteenth anniversary of her father’s death – and, more recently, several weddings and births in her family. She offers a 40-something vision of love, haunted by the ghosts of departed loved ones, past relationships, or even the spectre of faded youth.
Anniversary was fittingly recorded in a historic 200-year-old church adjoining a cemetery, complimenting the project’s resonant and hauntingly intimate theme. Lapell tapped Tony Dekker to co-produce the album, and the two assembled a stellar cast of musicians to round out Lapell’s vocals, piano, harmonica, and fingerstyle electric guitar. The ensemble’s sensitive, orchestral country-jazz arrangements reveal the depth of Lapell’s musical palette – making use of the church’s in-house piano, harpsichord, and several antique organs.
Lapell says.
“These dichotomies of light and dark, love and loss, fleeting and eternal – even in the traditional wedding vows, ‘sickness and health, richer or poorer.’”
Ultimately, while deconstructing the myths of romantic love, Anniversary emerges as an earnest celebration of commitment – acknowledging its tragedy and hope, and its power to haunt and console at the same time.
Anniversary comes on the heels of Abigail Lapell’s critically acclaimed 2022 album Stolen Time, and her project Lullabies, released in November of 2023. Over the course of her musical journey, Lapell has garnered three Canadian Folk Music Awards, hit number one on Canadian folk radio, and reached a staggering 40 million+ streams on Spotify alone.