Abigail Lapell explores love from all angles through song, tracing elation to heartache
Coming to the BlueShore at CapU, singer-songwriter performs ethereal folk ballads from new album Anniversary
Toronto-based Abigail Lapell looks “beyond the happily-ever-after version of a love story”.
Abigail Lapell performs at the Blueshore Centre at Capilano University on April 13 at 7:30 pm
TORONTO-BASED SINGER-SONGWRITER Abigail Lapell graces the stage at the BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts on April 13 with her new album Anniversary, a series of ethereal folk ballads that detail the fleeting nature of love.
Drawing upon a series of significant personal experiences, Anniversary celebrates love in all its forms, taking the listener on a journey from ephemeral moments of elation to the power of eternal love, to the tragedy of heartache and loss. Underscoring that feel are Lapell’s crystalline voice and solar-flare guitar.
“Anniversary is a concept album based on the theme of love songs,” Lapell says in a Zoom interview with Stir. “So it's a collection of different kinds of love songs—some of them are more sentimental and some of them are a little bit ghostly and kind of spooky. There's some songs about unrequited love and dysfunctional love.”
As for the album’s title, it came in the wake of several personal milestones in the last few years, including an anniversary with her longtime partner, the anniversaries of some deaths in her family, and Lapell’s own 40th birthday.
Through her songwriting, Lapell aspires to challenge the tired notions of love and romance present in pop culture.
“I like the idea of deconstructing some of the love-song tropes,” Lapell says. “There's such a lexicon of love song clichés, and I feel like these songs are both celebrating and skewering that tradition.”
If her music carries a darker, more poignant edge than many of the love songs out there, that may stem, in part, from the fact she’s a realist when it comes to relationships. And she’s all too aware that even good things must, eventually, come to an end.
“In a fairy tale, it's always ‘happily ever after’—that's always the last thing,” she continues. “Whereas in real life, being in love is more so the beginning of a journey. And it can be such a bittersweet thing. I was thinking about the idea that in love, the best you can hope for, if your relationship works out over the very long term, is that one of you is going to die first. Every relationship will end, and there's this finitude that haunts any relationship.
“That idea of finitude is so heartbreaking,” she adds. “And yet at the same time, it's so beautiful, because that's what makes those moments so precious. I was interested in some of those darker themes and looking beyond the happily-ever-after version of a love story.”
Anniversary will be released May 10, in the midst of Lapell’s tour. The album’s single track, “Rattlesnake”, gives a sneak peak into the nuances of Lapell’s heart: an old-timey folk tune, it celebrates the sweetness of romantic gestures and their relationship to cultural tradition. It’s one of Lapell’s favourites.
“It's a little more upbeat, and it's sort of a trad song in terms of the content. It sounds like a very old song, but with an electric folk treatment to it,” she says. “The song was really inspired by nursery rhymes and pitter-patter, rhythmic kinds of songs. The lyrics are about these sort of occult incantations of love, but it's just this really repetitive, spooling, kind of serpentine melody.
“I did a deep dive reading about all these different superstitions,” she continues. “One in particular was this thing I found about a rattlesnake rattle. Apparently, it's good luck to put it in your instrument. For example, the violin is considered to be like the ‘devil's instrument’, so if you put a rattlesnake rattle in your violin, it's an old tradition that it will ward off evil spirits. I thought that was such a cool image, the idea of putting a rattlesnake in your fiddle, and this incantation against the devil.”
The album was recorded in the 200-year-old St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, alongside musician Tony Dekker of the acclaimed Canadian folk band Great Lake Swimmers. The unconventional nature of the album’s production complements the songs’ haunting, resonant feel.
“I was working with Tony Dekker, who co-produced the album. He's recorded and produced all his own albums, often working outside the confines of a traditional studio, so they've recorded in interesting old buildings and halls and things,” Lapell says. “We'd been talking about possibly working together for a few years, and an old church was one of the ideas that popped up.”
Dekker’s touches are evident in many of the intricate details in Lapell’s songs. “Tony is such a wonderful songwriter, and he's also very knowledgeable about music, and way more of a music nerd than me,” she says. “He really championed the songs. We spent hours just going through the songs, really doing a deep dive into the project and how it would come together, every little detail from the arrangements and lyrics of the song structures to the mixing and the sequence of the order of the album. He very much midwifed the project to be what I wanted, to sort of reflect my vision as well. It felt like a really natural collaboration.
“One of the reasons I loved recording at the church was for the acoustics—it was so reverberant in there,” she adds. “And it was also an inspiring space visually, with the beautiful stained glass and light. To be honest, I was a bit intimidated, because I thought it was going to be a pain in the ass to organize all this and rent a space and bring in someone to record it with all their rig. So it was a little outside of my comfort zone compared to a traditional studio, but it worked out so beautifully.”
Lapell embarks on her two-month tour this month, debuting the album before a live audience. The tour kicks off in the B.C. Interior and will take her as far as Brooklyn, New York.
“It's my first time performing a lot of these songs, and I'm going to play some songs from my back catalogue too,” Lapell says. “There are a lot of harmonies on the album, and I'm so stoked to get that into the live show and maybe have some sing-along moments, which I don't normally lean into, but I think in this case it could be fun.
“It sounds cheesy, but I feel like it'll be a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions,” Lapell concludes. “There's really upbeat, fun songs, and then there's some tearjerker material. So, I think it'll be a very intimate and emotionally impactful, but also fun concert experience.” 
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