Following years of IVF and an on-stage miscarriage during a 2023 tour (she finished her set), Abigail Lapell was pregnant with her first child when she booked studio time to make her new album, Shadow Child. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the songs on Toronto singer-songwriter’s new album pivot around the theme of motherhood, with nine of the songs representing a month of gestation – her son was born in November 2024. The album features several special guests, embraces moments of joy and loss and addresses issues such as reproductive health.
Opening with a tolling bell and, inevitably featuring whistling, Whistle Song (One In A Million) is a dreamily strummed bluesy musing on loss, mortality, resilience, hope and new beginnings that references the child she was carrying and the one she lost.
The first of her guest vocalists, Jill Barber, joins her on Hazel, a gentle summery lullabying love letter to an unborn or future child, etched with plucked electric guitar and adorned with nature and childhood imagery, she sings of castles in the sand and angels in the snow, and a lyrical reference to the nursery rhyme ‘Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross’.
Featuring theremin, baritone guitar and vocals from fellow Canadian Frazey Ford of Be Good Tanyas fame, the musically upbeat title track refers to ultrasound imaging, a scan of the baby in the womb, described by Lapell as “a liminal person that doesn’t quite exist yet …their status ontologically blurry”, the song catching understandable pregnancy anxieties as she sings “will you ever find your way/Ever lift your eyes to the blood red skies/And walk in the light of the day”.
Introduced with chirping, Lapell on harmonica and featuring guest vocals from Dana Sipos, the swayingly fingerpicked Mockingbird (“Prettiest sad song that I ever heard”) is a meditation on indecision, uncertainty and tough choices captured in the refrain “Forward or back can’t make up my mind/So what if I stay?/Where would I go?/Maybe I will, maybe I won’t/Maybe I do and maybe I don’t/Say what you will, say what I won’t/Say damned if I do, damned if I don’t”.
Conjuring dreamy thoughts of romantic but melancholic 40s movies, a stripped back number with Vancouver’s Peggy Lee on cello and Lapell on Rhodes piano and recorder solo, Talking To Myself has the song’s narrator wandering through the woods, reflecting on solitude and grief, hope coming with sunlight through the trees and “a picture of your face”.
Again featuring Lee with congas from Blake Howard and Lapell on electric guitar, Cannibal has a vaguely tribal feel to the music with complementary imagery and lyrics that touch on the almost parasitic nature of the relationship between newborn and mother (“My body is a feast and a famine/Saltwater in my open veins…I will wrap you in the skin of an animal/Feed you from my own breast/Grow strong and wild, little cannibal”).
Again with baritone guitar and shaded by accordion, the final guest voice comes from Pharis Romero on So Long, a slow swaying acoustic waltz ballad in the trad-folk genre of lovers who never return from sea, the tragedy compounded with lines about her drinking pennyroyal, a bitter herb used to induce abortion (“My blood upon the soil my tears into the sea”).
A double-vocal, totally solo track with keys and guitar, Mother Tongue sketches a portrait of family life that balances domestic imagery with the nomadic life of a touring musician (“sing you to sleep in a foreign language/Waking you up in your mother tongue”) and “three little pilgrims on the interstate”.
It ends, just guitar and Lee’s cello, with a lovely reading of I Can Sing A Rainbow, the Arthur Hamilton evergreen that featured in the 1955 film ‘Pete Kelly’s Blues’ by the other Peggy Lee, which, pertinently, echoes the term “rainbow baby”– a child that comes after a loss.
Sweet and tender, tinged with sadness but coming to full term with hope and joy, its primary colours, mother and her musical baby, are doing very well indeed.
Shadow Child (May 8th, 2026) Outside Music
Bandcamp: https://abigaillapell.bandcamp.com/album/shadow-child
ABIGAIL LAPELL ON TOUR
Fri May 8 – Richards Landing, ON – Algoma Trad
Thu May 14 – Saratoga Springs, NY – Caffe Lena
Fri May 15 – Exeter, NH – Word Barn
Sat May 16 – Cambridge, MA – Club Passim
Sun May 17 – New York, NY – Cafe Wha?
Fri May 22 – Toronto, ON – Hugh’s Room
Sat May 23 – Chelsea, ON – Motel Chelsea
Sun May 24 – Ottawa, ON – Tennis Club West
August 7-9 – Red Rock ON – Live from the Rock Folk Festival
UK & European Tour Nov 2026
Netherlands
Thu 5 Nov – Amen – Cultureel Café de Amer
Fri 6 Nov – Nisse – Mariakerk
Sat 7 Nov – Groningen – Take Root Festival
Sun 8 Nov – Nijmegen – Thiemeloods
Tue 10 Nov – Utrecht – TivoliVredenburg
Germany
Mon 9 Nov – Cologne – United Lied
Mon 23 Nov – Munich – The Vintage Pub
France
Thu 12 Nov – Paris – Les Femmes s’en Mêlent
United Kingdom
Sat 14 Nov – London – West Hampstead Arts Centre
Sun 15 Nov – Birmingham – The Kitchen Garden Café
Mon 16 Nov – Brighton – The Folklore Rooms
Tue 17 Nov – Bristol – The Hen & Chicken Studio
Wed 18 Nov – Cambridge – The Portland Arms
Thu 19 Nov – Newcastle – Cluny 2 (Jumping Hot Club)
ITALY
Thu 26 Nov – Castelvetro di Modena – Lambruscheria Ca’ Berti
Fri 27 Nov – Piangipane – Teatro Socjale
Sat 28 Nov – Torino – Folk Club
Sun 29 Nov – Cortemaggiore – Teatro Eleonora Duse