Abigail Lapell May 5 @Mills Hardware

ABIGAIL LAPELL
Friday May 5, 2023 • 7pm door, 8pm show
Mills Hardware (95 King St. E., Hamilton)
GA 19+ • $15 (+SC/HST) advance

Tickets: https://abigaillapell-millshardware.eventbrite.ca/?aff=fb

Call it prairie noir, or Canadiana desert rock: Abigail Lapell sings haunting, gorgeous modern folk songs, mapping epic natural landscapes and deeply intimate, personal territory. Her albums have won two Canadian Folk Music Awards — English Songwriter of the Year (2020) and Contemporary Album of the Year (2017) — reaching #1 on Canadian folk radio and over 14 million Spotify streams. Lapell tours widely across Canada, the U.S., and Europe, performing on vocals, piano, harmonica, and finger-style guitar. Her 2022 album, Stolen Time, was produced by Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire) at Hotel2Tango Studio in Montreal. 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. A theme of recovery runs through the album, with songs about becoming sober, or a partner’s sudden illness, exploring the cycle of rehabilitation and relapse. The title comes from tempo rubato, a music term referring to the loose push and pull of expressive phrasing—a fitting metaphor for the shifting rhythm of uncertain times. An eclectic cast of musicians underscores the power of Lapell’s vocals on live-off-the-floor, 70s folk rock arrangements featuring bass, drums, horns, strings and steel. But many of Stolen Time’s standout tracks are solo guitar or piano songs, backed by little more than ghostly accordion or harmonica. The result is Lapell’s most ambitious and confident album to date.

“Somewhere between Gillian Welch and Laura Veir” – Rolling Stone

“Abigail writes songs that stop you right in your tracks” — Brooklyn Vegan

“Lapell mines traditional approaches while drawing discerningly from the contemporary folk, rock, and country playbooks” — No Depression

Mills Hardware

95 King St. E., Hamilton, ON, Canada, Ontario

(905) 777-1223

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