Toronto songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell returns to the NAC with Anniversary, an evocative collection of original love songs. Produced with Great Lake Swimmers’ Tony Dekker, the album was 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.

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. Balancing upbeat earworms with elegiac ballads, Anniversary ultimately emerges as an earnest celebration of commitment.

A stellar cast of musicians rounds out Lapell’s powerhouse vocals, piano, harmonica and fingerstyle guitar. The ensemble’s sensitive orchestral country-jazz arrangements feature bass, drums, viola, trumpet and pedal steel along with the church’s own harpsichord and organ. Anniversary is out May 10, 2024, on Outside Music.