WATCH / SHARE “SHIPS” HERE
BUY / STREAM “SHIPS” HERE
ABIGAIL LAPELL’S THIRD LP, STOLEN TIME, SET FOR RELEASE APRIL 22, 2022 VIA OUTSIDE MUSIC
PRE-SAVE STOLEN TIME HERE
PERFORMING AT SXSW THIS MARCH
Photo Credit : Jen Squires // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Set for release on April 22 via Outside Music, Abigail Lapell’s third album, Stolen Time, is elemental and powerfully evocative, channeling natural imagery and the revolving seasons to take a longer look over decades and generations, ultimately delivering up the present moment the way only the best music can. Today, the Toronto based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist is releasing another new track from the LP, “Ships”, a song in which opposites attract and repel again.
The song explores the insatiable, contradictory impulses that drive doomed love and other addictions: leaving versus staying, quitting versus relapsing, familiar shores and uncharted waters. Anchored by Lapell’s insistent, slightly distorted guitar riff, the song builds in dynamics with layers of vocal harmonies alongside drums (Dani Nash), bass (Dan Fortin) and guitars (Christine Bougie), sounding like a mellower Sleater-Kinney or Laura Veirs with a horn section. Sketching in waves of sunshine and shadow, the band underscores and meets the power of Lapell’s vocals, a wild sax solo seemingly enticing her higher and louder to meet the crashing waves.
WATCH / SHARE “SHIPS” HERE
BUY / STREAM “SHIPS” HERE
“Ships” Single Art // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
MORE ABOUT STOLEN TIME
Produced by Howard Bilerman at Hotel2Tango Studio in Montreal, a theme of recovery runs through Stolen Time, with lyrics about becoming sober or coping with a partner’s sudden illness, exploring the cycle of relapse and rehabilitation. The album’s title comes from the musical term tempo rubato, which Lapell picked up while teaching herself piano. Referring to the expressive push and pull of tempo in musical phrasing, it’s also a fitting metaphor for the fragile rhythm of uncertain times, darkness hand in hand with escapism. On “Scarlet Fever”, swirling and woozy with Rachael Cardiello’s viola and Peggy Lee’s cello, Lapell recalls a relative’s tales of childhood quarantine; “Sewage” is a fever dream of a loved one recovering from surgery. “All Dressed Up”, a honeyed sweet duet with Montreal’s Chris Velan, echoes how many of us have felt these past two years while waiting to recover our lives.
By turns poetic and painterly, Stolen Time brings a live-off-the-floor, 70s folk-rock vibe and structural experimentation to songs that feel expansive in their scope—unhurried, psychedelic and other-worldly in the vein of Gillian Welch or Karen Dalton. It also marks the meeting of two important music communities for Lapell, who spent formative years living in Montreal’s Mile End before moving back to her hometown. Toronto players include Dan Fortin (bass), Dani Nash (drums, vocals) and Christine Bougie (lap steel, guitars); and from Montreal, Katie Moore (vocals), Pietro Amato (French horn) and Ellwood Epps (trumpet).
WATCH / SHARE “PINES” HERE
BUY / STREAM “PINES” HERE
The twangy guitar of “Stolen Time” recalls the hazy ambivalence of lazy summer days, wasting away in a state between bliss and blitz. “Old Flames”, with Lapell’s melodic fingerstyle guitar mimicking flickering embers, could be read as a bit of an answer song to Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire”.
But many of Stolen Time’s standout tracks are solo guitar or piano ballads, backed by little more than Lapell’s harmonica, antique pump organ or accordion--including “Waterfall”, with its captivating cascade of descending notes; love song closer “I Can’t Believe”, which sounds like a 1950s standard and features Nashville legend Fats Kaplin on pedal steel; and “Land Of Plenty”, which you would be forgiven for mistaking for a lost Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger tune.
Over the past five years and two spellbinding albums, Lapell has garnered two Canadian Folk Music Awards (English Songwriter of the Year in 2020 and Contemporary Album of the Year in 2017), hit number one on Canadian folk radio and accrued a staggering 13 million+ Spotify streams while touring widely across Canada, the United States, and Europe.
PRE-SAVE STOLEN TIME HERE
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
Mar 12 - Dallas, TX - New New Festival - Four Corners Brewing Company
Mar 16 - Austin, TX - SXSW - Stephen F’s Bar
Mar 25 - Boise, ID - Treefort Music Fest - Pengilly’s Saloon
