Abigail Lapell - Anniversary & More Songs About Love (2025)

Gentle folk meditations on heartache and healing from the Toronto artist. Toronto songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell returns with More Songs About Love, the extended companion to her acclaimed 2025 JUNO Award Nominated album Anniversary. An evocative collection of original love songs, Anniversary was produced with Great Lake Swimmers’ Tony Dekker and recorded at 200-year-old St Mark’s Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Dekker helped shape the sessions’ spooky, resonant sound and also lent his voice to a couple of spellbinding duets.

Balancing upbeat earworms with elegiac ballads, More Songs About Love adds eight new stripped-down tracks to the collection, including delicate acoustic versions of Anniversary’s standout tracks; a captivating French translation of crowd favourite “Rattlesnake”; and Lapell’s unique take on a handful of beloved classics, including her impassioned version of “Feels Like We Always Go Backwards” by Tame Impala. Combining cynical and sentimental elements, the collection ultimately emerges as an earnest celebration of love.

On Anniversary, Abigail Lapell interrogates the romantic ideal of growing old together. ‘Anniversary’ literally means ‘returning yearly’, and the album’s 11 songs track the revolving days, seasons, and years to celebrate and complicate the notion of eternal love. Across 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.

Anniversary was fittingly recorded in a historic 200-year-old church adjoining a cemetery, complimenting the project’s resonant and hauntingly intimate theme. Lapell tapped Tony Dekker to co-produce the album, and 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. Abigail is the most nominated artist at the 2025 Canadian Folk Music Awards with 4 nominations: Contemporary Album of the Year and Solo Artist of the Year for Anniversary, and Children's Album of the Year and Traditional Singer of the Year - for Lullabies.