Highway 19 Concerts final spring concert of the year at Rivercity Stage features “the best folk artist you haven’t yet discovered,” Toronto singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell.
It’s a fitting conclusion to a series of three concerts highlighting a diverse range of new Canadian songwriters including Manitoba’s Sebastian Gaskin and Erica Dee Mah from the Yukon.
Lapell has been compared to iconic artists like Joni Mitchell, Gillian Welch, Carole King, Natalie Merchant, and Frazey Ford. Over the past five years and three spellbinding albums, she has garnered two Canadian Folk Music Awards, hit number one on Canadian folk radio and accrued a staggering 20 million+ Spotify streams while touring widely across Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
Her third album, the elemental and powerfully evocative Stolen Time, was released in the spring of 2022. 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.
Lapell is touring the West Coast this month including a performance at the Canadian Folk Music Awards in Vancouver where she is nominated for English Songwriter of the Year. At the Rivercity Stage (1080 Hemlock St.), she’ll perform two sets of her haunting and gorgeous modern folk songs along with her three-piece band.
Tickets are $24 plus fees and taxes through the Tidemark box office, but like all Highway 19 concerts, teen tickets are a mere $5 and kids get in free with an accompanying adult.
Highway 19 Concerts is supported by the City of Campbell River and CR Live Streets, BC Touring Council and BC Arts Council, and the Anchor Inn & Suites.