Abigail Lapell • Van Orman & Helwin
Fri 06/14/24
5:30PM
All Ages
music
$15 standing + $20 seated ADV // $25 DOS
Show Lineup
Abigail Lapell
(Toronto)
Genre: Americana
“A disc of pure, impalpable beauty, weightless notes and melodies that pierce our hearts…. And the young woman, prey to a vagueness in the soul that she sublimates in a handful of magical songs, to offer us a twilight album, somewhere between Gillian Welch and Laura Veir.” – Rolling Stone
“Abigail writes songs that stop you right in your tracks.” — Brooklyn Vegan
Toronto songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell returns 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. A ghost story is woven through the album: waltzing in the dusty barroom country of “Blue Blaze,” buried in the superstitious lyrical streak of “Rattlesnake” and audible in a wheezing organ as it shuts down at the end of “Footsteps.” Still, Anniversary emerges as an earnest celebration of commitment. Earworms like “Anniversary Song” and “Someone Like You” showcase intricately layered harmonies, while closer “Stars” affirms that there’s no place the speaker would rather be than with the one she loves.
Dekker and Lapell assembled a stellar cast of musicians to support Lapell’s powerhouse vocals, piano, harmonica and signature fingerstyle guitar. The core band includes Dan Fortin on bass, Jake Oelrichs on drums, and Tania Gill on the church’s piano, harpsichord and organ. Rounding out the ensemble’s sensitive orchestral country-jazz arrangements are Rebecca Hennessy (trumpet), Rachael Cardiello (viola), Michael Davidson (marimba and vibraphone) and Joe Lapinsky (pedal steel), who also engineered and mixed the record. Lapell has garnered three Canadian Folk Music Awards, hit number one on Canadian folk radio and reached a staggering 40 million + streams on Spotify alone. She tours widely
across Canada and the U.S.
Anniversary is out May 10, 2024 on Outside Music.
Van Orman & Helwin
(Iowa County, WI)
Genre: Americana, Folk
A veteran of the folk music scene since 1973, John C. Van Orman supplies vocals, and plays an array of instruments, including six and seven string guitars, hurdy-gurdy, harmonium, Anglo concertina, jaw harps, and others. John has shared stages with folk luminaries such as Mike Seeger, Lou Killen, and Peter Bellamy. He has performed solo, and in other ensembles including the long lived band Finnegans Wake; and is former Music Director of the Ozark Folk Center in Arkansas. His songs have been recorded by Boiled in Lead, The Flash Girls, Sherry Minnick, and Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson. John’s instrument building skills are on display during a Van Orman & Helwin performance – as both members play instruments John has created including guitar, gourd banjo, and hurdy gurdy.
Adam Helwin, who cut his teeth on the Milwaukee punk music scene, provides both lead and back-up vocals, and plays guitar, acoustic bass, gourd banjo, harmonium, jaw harps, and harmonica. He is a remarkable singer-songwriter with a powerful and often haunting delivery of his own material, as well as his original interpretations of compositions by others.
Besides being performers of traditional material, John and Adam are modern bards whose lyrics reflect both the humor and the pathos of human experience.