Post Description

Acoustic, folk.

Een werkelijk alleraardigst album van de zangeres uit Toronto. Laat je niet in slaap sussen.

Hot on the heels of last year’s Stolen Time album, Torontonian vocalist, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell has just released her latest 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).

The album, which is actually more EP length in nature (weighing in at only 25 minutes), is Lapell’s first entirely solo recording, this time recorded and mixed by Michael Timmins, renowned for his role in the Cowboy Junkies, alongside his production work with the likes of the excellent Jerry Leger and John Murry.

With a repertoire drawn from her experience as an early childhood music educator, Lullabies also coincided with the arrival of several new babies in Lapell’s extended family and with her and her partner’s journey trying to conceive.

While most people tend to think of lullabies as a way to soothe babies to sleep, they are often a means of passing down cultural knowledge and traditions, the oldest being a Babylonian (no pun intended) lullaby found inscribed on a clay tablet around 4000 years ago.

Lullabies are renowned for their soothing, hypnotic qualities, so perhaps it isn’t a huge surprise to find that the anxieties wrought by Covid, along with a bout of insomnia, found their perfect antidote for Lapell in songs that help distract the mind from stressors – research having found lullabies to be beneficial for adults as well as young children. Research has also shown that the characteristics of lullabies – their shared patterns and rhythms – are consistent across diverse cultures, traversing both time and continents, something that Abigal Lapell’s choices perfectly exemplify, perhaps reflecting her own extensive travels.

Although lullabies can both soothe and reassure, their lyrics are often of a dark and foreboding nature, something the opening number on this record shares: Isabeau, a lullaby sung in its native French, with beautiful accompanying classical, finger-picked guitar. This song recounts how its protagonist, Isabel, walks by the seaside. There, she meets a sailor who sings sweetly to her. She joins him on his boat but then grieves because she’s lost her gold ring. He dives three times to try to find it, only to tragically lose his life from drowning at the final attempt.

The lyrical content of this song is in marked contrast to the second number, Go To Sleep, a half-remembered lullaby that Lapell’s mother used to sing to her. The solution to any worries and concerns is to “Laugh at all your troubles and kiss away your cares – and go to sleep“. It has the same sort of lovely refrain as the song, Dream A Little Dream of Me.

Other songs share similar subject matter; Numi Numi, a traditional Hebrew lullaby, reassures a little girl that her father will return from the orchard with an apple, while the Hispanic, Senora Satanta, is a lament about a child’s lost apple.

From the British Isles, Lapell decided to pick Suo Gân, a Welsh Lullaby, which she sings initially in its native Welsh and then in English. This lullaby was written by an anonymous composer in Wales during the early 1800s and was intended to provide comfort and solace in times of distress or uncertainty.

Criss-crossing continents, The Lullaby Of Takeda, a Japanese lullaby, is a simple lament, half-sung in Japanese and English. In this beautiful song, a young girl is forcibly sent away to work in a village for a wealthy family. Every day, as she works with a baby on her back, she is reminded of her family, looking wistfully at the silhouette of the mountains in the direction of her homeland: “Over the distant mountain soon I will return/Back to the land I came from/For my home I yearn“.

The final number, Der Mond Ist Aufgegangen (The Moon is Risen), a German lullaby, is the perfect sign-off, pondering on the silent wonders of the night.

The sparse nature of the arrangements on this album, which are largely restricted to finger-picked guitar, doesn’t detract from the quality of the material on show here. Lapell is also blessed with a deeply expressive and mellifluous alto that has drawn not unfair comparisons to the likes of Natalie Merchant, Linda Thompson, Sandy Denny, and Gillian Welch.

It’s often said that lullabies exist in a liminal space, on the ill-defined boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. On this fine album, Lapell continues to push her own musical boundaries.

Tracks:
01. Isabeau (French Lullaby)
02. Go To Sleep ( ? ? ?  Lullaby)
03. Oyfn Pripitchek (Yiddish Lullaby)
04. Suo Gân (Welsh Lullaby)
05. Señora Santana (Spanish Lullaby)
06. Lullaby of Takeda (Japanese Lullaby)
07. Numi Numi (Hebrew Lullaby)
08. Der Mond ist aufgegangen (German Lullaby)

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNkTKGkZlTg