Abigail Lapell Announces New Album "Anniversary" / Shares Title Track + Video
Abigail Lapell
Announces New Album Anniversary
Out May 10 via Outside Music
Shares Tender Single + Video
“Anniversary Song”
Embarking on East Coast US Tour This Spring
Tickets + dates available here
"(‘Stolen Time’) A disc of pure, impalpable beauty, weightless notes
and melodies that pierce our hearts.... And the young woman, prey to a vagueness in the soul that she sublimates in a handful of magical songs, to offer us a twilight album, somewhere between Gillian Welch and Laura Veir." - Rolling Stone
“[Lapell’s] beautiful fourth album ‘Stolen Time’ is a moving collection of songs
inspired by nature, the seasons, and her family’s experience as refugees fleeing eastern Europe during the Holocaust.” - The Guardian
"Lapell is to be applauded for highlighting just how the simplest form of communication can be the most powerful. Regardless of language she exudes kindness and peace, both in short supply these days” - Americana UK
“(‘Stolen Time’) The album’s apparent simplicities belie an emotionally complex set, a sequence that addresses an assortment of difficult subjects, energized throughout by Lapell’s sober yet deeply expressive voice.” - No Depression
“Lapell’s masterful skills on finger-style guitar, harmonica, piano once again return to effortlessly complement her eerily beautiful vocals.” - KUTX (NPR)
“Abigail writes songs that stop you right in your tracks.” - BrooklynVegan
Today, Toronto singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell (330k monthly Spotify listeners) returns with the announcement of her new album Anniversary, set for release on May 10 via Outside Music. 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.
Alongside the announcement, Abigail Lapell also shared the album’s lead single + video, “Anniversary Song.” Recorded live with her band in a 200-year-old church, the track features an in-house harpsichord along with drums, bass, electric guitar and layers of doubled vocals and harmonies, brought together with lyrics that celebrate the syntax and symbolism of commitment. Lapell says, “‘Anniversary Song’ was inspired by the idea of mashing-up traditional anniversary gifts (cotton, leather, diamonds) with the periodic table of elements (iron, carbon, silver) to celebrate the physical and symbolic bonds of togetherness.” A play on romantic “chemistry,” “Anniversary Song” highlights some of the album’s recurring dualities: literal and symbolic, earthly and otherworldly.
Abigail also announced plans for a North American tour this spring, making US stops across the East Coast. Tickets for all shows are available here.
“Anniversary Song”: Listen / Watch
On her upcoming album 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 (Great Lake Swimmers) 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. She tours widely across Canada and the US.
AnniversaryTracklist:
1. Anniversary Song
2. Footsteps
3. Count On Me (feat. Great Lake Swimmers)
4. Rattlesnake
5. Blue Blaze
6. Someone Like You
7. 3am
8. Flowers In My Hair (feat. Great Lake Swimmers)
9. Blue Electric Skies
10. Wait Up
11. Stars (feat. Great Lake Swimmers)
US Tour Dates:
May 30 Northampton, MA @ Parlor Room
May 31 Saratoga Springs, NY @ Caffe Lena
June 1 Cambridge, MA @ Club Passim
June 2 Exeter, NH @ The Wordbarn
June 4 Portland, ME @ Oxbow
June 5 New Haven, CT @ Cafe Nine
June 6 New York, NY @ Cafe Wha?
June 10 Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Cafe
