New York, NY (Top40 Charts) 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.
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.
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 7 - Monkton, MD @ Manner Mill
June 10 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Cafe
