Photo Credit: Jen Squires
Single + Video
“Count on Me” ft. Great Lake Swimmers
New Album Anniversary
Out May 10 via Outside Music
Embarking on East Coast US Tour This Spring
More Tour Dates TBA
Tickets + dates available here
Recently-ish, Toronto singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell (323k monthly Spotify listeners) unveiled her new single + video “Count on Me,” a spellbinding duet with the acclaimed indie-folk band Great Lake Swimmers. It’s the latest track from her upcoming album Anniversary, out May 10 via Outside Music.
A love song for both weddings and funerals, “Count on Me” explores the passage of time – celebrating the rhythms of a shared life and coming to terms with its brevity. Through the track, melodic strums breeze across enchanting harmonies offered by Lapell and Tony Dekker of Great Lake Swimmers as lyrics promise an earnest vow to a loved one. “I started writing ‘Count on Me’ for my sister’s wedding and finished it in time for her first anniversary,” Abigail says. “It’s a song for me that evokes marriages or funerals or other life ceremonies.” The scrapbook style video, directed by Krpie, brings the romantic track to life through an array of collage, animations, and rotoscoping, piecing together images of lovers throughout different eras of time.
Abigail Lapell will be embarking on a North American tour this spring, making US stops across the East Coast with more dates to be announced. 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. 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 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 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
Follow Abigail Lapell:
Instagram | Facebook | X | Bandcamp | YouTube | Spotify
