100
Following last year’s Lullabies album, Toronto songstress Abigail Lapell returns to her own material for Anniversary, an album of love songs variously inspired by turning 40, the fifteenth anniversary of her father’s passing and several family weddings and births. She addresses the romantic ideal of growing old together, tracking the revolving days, seasons and years in reflecting the notion of eternal love and the attendant dichotomies of light and dark, love and loss, such as the wedding vows ‘in sickness and health and for richer or poorer’.
Recorded in a 200-year-old Ontario church adjoining a cemetery (and using the in-house harpsichord on the opener) with Great Lake Swimmers frontman Tony Dekker as co-producer as well as featuring on three tracks, a mix of folksy and orchestral country-jazz arrangements, it begins, her vocals double-tracked, with the sort of title track, Anniversary Song and lyrics celebrating the symbolism of commitment as, playing on the idea of chemistry, they overlay traditional anniversary gifts with the periodic table of elements (“Will it be cotton or leather?/Mercury and iron, carbon, silver/bind us together”).
Lapell on piano, augmented by double bass, pipe organs and viola, the slowly building Bronte-esque Footsteps was inspired by her mother’s recurring dreams of her late husband coming back to the house (“I hear the echo of your footsteps on the floor/I feel a shiver in my bones/How can I tell you you don’t live here anymore”) and the power of love to simultaneously haunt and console (“I hear you calling out my name/I light a candle in the darkness/I’m just the keeper of the flame/Keeping time as you fade to silence”).
Featuring Michael Davidson on marimba and vibraphone, echoey drums introduce the rumbling folksy Americana of Count On Me, a duetted vow of constancy with Dekker (“Walk in sunshine walk in shadow/Where you go you know I will follow/Fortune I can only guess/A change of heart or just a change of address/I will be there”) and the brevity but sweetness of time shared (“Our joys are countless though the years are few/And all my days/I will always count on you”).
The traditional flavoured foot stomping Rattlesnake, with its distorted finger-style electric guitar, handclap percussion, and wordless wailings, is an ode to love and the superstition of omens and herbalist incantations (“Sew a penny in your shoe/Blessings on the journey/I’ll cut a lock of hair for you / And keep the fire burning…If you find a rattlesnake/Put it in your fiddle/Play it at the funeral wake/To keep away the devil”).
Lapell on harmonica and Tania Gill on barroom piano with Joe Lapinski playing pedal steel, the lovelorn Blue Blaze (“I woke up in an indigo cloud/You were long gone [my love was gone], with the faded dawn/Left me lying there, crying out loud”) has an old school prairie cowboy country slow sway that draws its lyrical inspiration from Plaisir d’amour, the line “A sad song lasts a whole life long/When the pleasure of love is so brief” expressing how music can memorialise the joy and pain of love.
Chiming guitar carries the slow-walking folk pop Someone Like You, which picks up that idea (“I’ll sing you a song that never ends/When it’s done begin again”) and comes with undercurrent themes of insecurity and endings (“When you’re gone there’s no replacement”), Lapell’s warbling evocative of a fusion of Sandy Denny and Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Rebecca Hennessy brings trumpet to the insomnia-haunted piano hymnal 3am with its lost love ache (“I wanna turn my life around/Maybe then we’ll meet again/Move to a different town/Or maybe you’ll call me up/You used to call me up/Just to try to calm me down/Gonna get back on my feet, gotta get back/On solid ground …I guess I’ve lived alone too long/To live any other way”)
In musical and lyrical contrast, again featuring Dekker, and recorded live-off-the-floor with claps and stomps Flowers In My Hair is an a capella singalong in the tradition of children’s playground songs (“I don’t need a diamond ring/Don’t need much of anything/I don’t have a thing to wear/I got flowers in my hair”), Dekker then contributing saw to the strum-along Blue Electric Skies, a haunting ballad of ambivalence and infatuation that veers between love song and breakup (“Love is impatient/Love is so unkind/The only consolation/I could ever find/It’s all I could ever find/All that could ever bind us together”) and suggests she may have a few Neil Young records in the collection. It’s also quite probably the only song to ever have the word ‘cyanotic’ in the lyrics.
After the generally acoustic and laid-back nature of the preceding tracks, she gets gnarly for Wait Up with throaty electric guitar and Hennessy’s on trumpet for a love story that’s both dysfunctional and irresistible as she declares “I was a cold hearted bastard/With a gunmetal grin/You were a natural disaster/Rattling the door till I let you in… I was a hard-headed hypocrite/You a two-faced/two-faced layabout/I don’t know how I can live with it/I don’t know how I can live without it”.
It ends with one more round for Dekker on vocals, with the again hymnal Stars, a stripped back guitar and piano companion to I Can’t Believe on 2022’s Stolen Time, a dreamily romantic image of staring up at the night sky stars (“One for every song I wish I’d sung/Every love I’ve never known”) with the one you love (“I know you’re here now beside me dear/And I’ll never sing alone… there is no place I’d rather be, nothing I would rather do/Than to hold you tight on an August night and count the stars with you”).
With music and songs such as these, let’s hope that albums by Abigail Lapell will continue to be an annual event.
Anniversary – 10th May 2024 on Outside Music – https://ffm.to/anniversary
