On her new album of love songs, 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. 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 spectre 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. “I was intrigued by his approach to recording his own music, using unique locations like a grain silo,” Lapell recalls. Leaving the comfort zone of a traditional studio paid off: “St. Mark’s was such an inspiring, resonant space, with sunlight streaming through vaulted stained-glass windows. We’d record late into the night, with the lights down low, which gave the sessions an intimate, haunted feeling.”
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.
The fifteenth anniversary of her father’s death served as a touchstone for Lapell’s songwriting process. “The lyrics explore grief, memory and the power of love to haunt and console at the same time,” she explains. “Footsteps,” for instance, was inspired by her mother’s recurring dreams of Lapell’s late father: “She dreamed he’d come back to the house, and she couldn’t figure out how to tell him she’d thrown out all his stuff. There was something darkly comical about it.” That awkward punchline illustrates the clash between spiritual and mundane, and the way humour and grief can often coexist.
Anniversary draws from religious imagery, too, like lighting a memorial candle or singing the mourner’s Kaddish. Growing up in a religious family, Lapell says, “songs and incantations marked the cycles of days, years and generations.” She also worked as a preschool music teacher, with a repertoire of songs moving through the calendar of birthdays and developmental landmarks. “In both cases, there’s a lot of stylized language, recurring imagery and ritualized movement,” she notes – influences evident in the sing-song patter of “Rattlesnake” or “Flowers in my Hair.” “Songs are a mnemonic, and a repository of cultural memory.”
The power of songs to memorialize is, itself, a recurring motif on Anniversary. Most tracks reference a song, sometimes a song that never ends, defying mortality. “It’s a metaphor for love and its continuity over time,” Lapell says. “The song represents something eternal, even as individual singers come and go.” On lead single “Anniversary Song,” a radio scores the passing of another year “frozen in amber, for eternity.” The lyrics overlay a list of traditional anniversary gifts (cotton, leather) with the periodic table of elements (iron, carbon, silver) that bind together matter. A play on romantic “chemistry”, the line highlights some of the album’s recurring dualities: literal and symbolic, earthly and otherworldly.
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.
