Today, Toronto singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell (340k monthly Spotify listeners) shared her newest single + video “Rattlesnake.” First premiered via Glide Magazine, the hypnotic, trad-inspired track is the latest taste of her upcoming album Anniversary, out May 10 via Outside Music.
An ode to love and superstition, “Rattlesnake” intertwines powerhouse vocals alongside slightly distorted finger-style electric guitar. The serpentine melody unspools around a catchy refrain, doubling vocal lines about archaic love omens and herbalist incantations to timeless yet modern effect. Lapell says, “‘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.” The accompanying video beautifully showcases the recording of the track in a historic 200-year-old church, with dual screens complementing the looping nature of the song.
Abigail 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. Abigail is also the featured vocalist on Best Western‘s new ad campaign “Life’s a Trip,” featuring an original take on The Band’s iconic song “The Weight.”
“Rattlesnake”: Listen / Watch
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 spellbinding 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 13 Chicago, IL @ Schubas Tavern
June 15 Ann Arbor, MI @ The Ark
Follow Abigail Lapell:
Instagram | Facebook | X | Bandcamp | YouTube | Spotify
