Abigail Lapell - Stolen Time (2022)

"Just listen" - Toronto songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell offers this prompt at the end of synesthetic piano tune 'I See Music', but the invitation could apply to her entire third album, "Stolen Time". Produced by Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire) at Hotel2Tango Studio in Montreal, "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. 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. 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.