Following last year’s ‘Stolen Time’, Abigail Lapell is sharing the news of her new album Lullabies, her first entirely solo recording. The album features eight haunting tracks of seven traditional songs from around the world, sung in English, French, Hebrew, Spanish, Yiddish, German, Japanese and Welsh, and one Abigail original, “Go to Sleep” (based on a fragment of a half-remembered bedtime song from Lapell’s mother).
When we mention a lullaby, most assume that these tranquil tunes feature equally soothing, harmless lyrics solely designed to soothe and lull a young infant to sleep. As Abigail’s album reveals, these songs can be alternately sweet and foreboding, and the songs she has chosen illuminate some of the darker themes lurking beneath the surface of so many beloved folk tunes.
The album’s first song to be shared is “Isabeau”, a traditional French lullaby. “Isabeau s’y promène” (“Isabeau Goes Walking”) tells the story of a young girl who goes walking in her garden by the water’s edge, where she meets 30 sailors aboard a boat. The youngest of them starts singing a beautiful song, which she wants to learn. With its mediaeval feel and repetitive structure, the song casts an enchanting, otherworldly spell. Watch the beautiful accompanying animated video by Tatiana Vaca.
Abigail would have been spoilt for choice in selecting a British Folk song if she’d taken a peek at folklorist Iona & Peter Opie’s The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Among those featured was ‘Naught Baby’, a song Fay Hield selected to end her Orfeo album.
Baby, baby, naughty baby,
Hush, you squalling thing, I say,
Peace this moment, peace, or maybe
Bonaparte will pass this way.
Instead, Abigail chose Suo Gan, a Welsh folk song that offers comfort and protection to a sleeping child. Such contrasts highlight that lullabies were often shaped around deeper cultural memories, spiritual lessons or cautionary tales. Fears, superstitions and misunderstandings surface on ‘changeling’ songs such as Mo Chubhrachan, also known in English as The Fairy Lullaby, which opens Rachel Newton’s 2014 Changeling album. Changeling songs were widespread and found in many different cultures – elves, faeries or other mystical creatures taking a baby and leaving one of their own in its place. It’s thought that many of these songs were a way of coping/explaining infant disability. In his review of Rachel’s Changeling album, Simon Holland also notes that these legends became quite involved and finely nuanced. In some cases, even new mothers could be taken to provide faerie offspring with a wet nurse, which was perhaps a way of explaining things like post-natal depression.
Lullabies is Lapell’s first entirely solo recording; the project was partly inspired by a bout of insomnia during COVID-19 lockdowns and fueled by the exigencies of isolation throughout 2021-2022. With repertoire drawn from her experience as an early childhood music educator, the album also coincided with the arrival of several new babies in Lapell’s extended family and with her and her partner’s own journey trying to conceive.
Produced by Michael Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies at his Toronto Studio, the album will be released on November 17 on digital services and as a digipack CD with a 20-page illustrated booklet.
Lullabies Track Listing
1. Isabeau (French Lullaby)
2. Go To Sleep
3. Ofyn Pripitchek (Yiddish Lullaby)
4. Suo Gan (Welsh Lullaby)
5. Senora Santana (Spanish Lullaby)
6. Lullaby of Takeda (Japanese Lullaby)
7. Numi Numi (Hebrew Lullaby)
8. Der Mond is aufgegangen (German Lullaby)