ABIGAIL LAPELL’S NEW LP, ANNIVERSARY, OUT MAY 10 VIA OUTSIDE MUSIC
Toronto singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell shares the second single/video, “Rattlesnake” from her upcoming album Anniversary, set for release on May 10 via Outside Music.
“Rattlesnake is an ode to love and superstition,” says the award winning songwriter. “The trad-inspired track combines powerhouse vocals and slightly distorted finger-style electric guitar. The serpentine melody unspools around a catchy refrain, doubling vocal lines about archaic love omens and herbalist incantations to timeless yet modern effect.”
An evocative collection of original love songs, the album balances upbeat earworms with elegiac ballads, ultimately emerging as an earnest celebration of commitment. Anniversary was recorded at the 200-year-old St. Mark’s Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and was produced with Great Lake Swimmers’ Tony Dekker, who helped shape the project’s spooky, resonant sound while lending his voice to a few spellbinding duets.
Abigail will be embarking on a North American tour this spring, making stops across western Canada in April and in central Canada in May with more dates to be announced soon. Tickets for all shows are available HERE. Abigail is also the featured vocalist on Best Western’s new ad campaign “Life’s a Trip,” featuring an original take on The Band’s iconic song “The Weight.”
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.
Across the album, Lapell’s deft lyrics jostle with love song tropes, grappling with love’s finitude and the irony of how codependency and longing are revered in popular music. “I wanted to explore some of the contradictions within the pop culture notion of love,” 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.