On her new album of love songs, Anniversary (due out May 10th via Outside Music), 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. 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 the family. She offers a 40-something vision of love, haunted by the ghosts of departed loved ones, past relationships or even the specter of faded youth.
Lapell’s lyrics jostle deftly with love song tropes, grappling with mortality and the irony of how youthful passion – along with co-dependency and dysfunction – 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.’”
Fittingly, Anniversary was recorded in a historic church adjoining a cemetery – 200-year-old St. Mark’s in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Lapell enlisted Great Lake Swimmers frontman Tony Dekker as co-producer, his first time producing another artist.
That tension between dark and light, night and day, echoed the record’s lyrical themes and helped to shape its spooky, resonant sound. Dekker and Lapell assembled a stellar cast of musicians to round out Lapell’s vocals, piano, harmonica and fingerstyle electric guitar, and 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.
Ultimately, while deconstructing the myths of romantic love, Anniversary emerges as an earnest celebration of commitment – acknowledging its tragedy and hope, and its power of to haunt and console at the same time.
Today Glide is excited to offer an exclusive premiere of the video for the standout track “Rattlesnake,” which begins with a slowly ramping up guitar that is sparse and haunting yet upbeat. Lapell lays down vocals that feel rooted and soulful with an element of blues running through her unique style of folk-noir. Backed by a minimal yet powerful wave of stomping drums and steady bass, she layers in harmonies to give the song its spiritual quality. This may also come from the video that captures her performing the song in a church.
Lapell describes the inspiration behind the song:
“‘Rattlesnake’ weaves together fragments of lore and superstition with a long-distance love story. It came out of a fascination with different superstitious traditions, love omens, herbalist incantations – in the song, these are offered as a series of aphorisms to a beloved out on some kind of journey, hopefully soon to return.”
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