New York, NY (Top40 Charts) On Friday, May 10 Toronto singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell (349k monthly Spotify listeners) will release her highly anticipated new album Anniversary via Outside Music.
Recorded in a 200-year-old church in Ontario, the project is an evocative collection of original love songs that balances buoyant earworms and poignant ballads, ultimately emerging as an earnest celebration of commitment.
Ahead of the release, Abigail revealed a final glimpse into the project with the album's focus track + video "Flowers in my Hair," first premiered via Under the Radar. The track features acclaimed indie-folk band Great Lake Swimmers' frontman Tony Dekker and is a sunny acapella singalong that acts as an ode to summertime.
Lapell expands, "'Flowers In My Hair' is a summery song about skinny dipping and lying around sunbathing, covered in flowers, and feeling carefree and in love - or, at least, in love enough for the moment." Recorded live-off-the-floor in a 200-year-old church, the earworm captures joyful, off-the-cuff harmonies that float across claps and layered stomps, infused with the natural reverb of the unique recording space.
Abigail Lapell will also be embarking on a North American tour this month, with the US leg kicking off on May 30. 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. Throughout 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 the historic 200-year-old St. Mark's Church adjoining a cemetery, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, complimenting the project's resonant and hauntingly intimate theme. Lapell tapped Tony Dekker (Great Lake Swimmers) to co-produce the album, who helped shape the project's spooky, resonant sound while lending his voice to a few mesmerizing duets. 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
Saratoga Springs, NY @ Caffe Lena
May 31 Northampton, MA @ Parlor Room
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 9 Philadelphia, PA @ Abyssinia
June 10 Pittsburgh, PA @ Club Cafe
June 11 Oakland, MD @ Backbone Farm
June 13 Chicago, IL @ Schubas Tavern
June 14 Milwaukee, WI @ Cactus Club
June 15 Ann Arbor, MI @ The Ark
