SATURDAY MAY 23 | Abigail Lapell | 8:00PM
- Dec 8, 2025
- 2 min read
Award-winning Toronto singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell captures the urgency and beauty of motherhood on her new album Shadow Child, a nine-song journey written and recorded during her pregnancy.
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Dinner is available with our kitchen open until 9pm. Reservations are strongly suggested—make yours HERE. We are an intimate 85-seat venue, so every seat is a great seat! While we do our best to accommodate all seating requests, they cannot be guaranteed. For the best experience, we recommend making reservations in even numbers (for example, a party of three may be seated with an additional guest). Doors open half an hour before showtime for those who will not be dining with us.
Every mother has a unique story. One thing is true for every mother, though: There’s no deadline quite like a pregnancy.
Award-winning Toronto singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell was pregnant with her first child when she booked studio time on Vancouver Island to make an album about motherhood. The nine songs on Shadow Child — one for each month of gestation — had to be ready before then, and her return flight was booked on the last day she could safely fly in her third trimester.
Working with producer Colin Stewart (Dan Mangan, Black Mountain), Lapell finished her songs in the studio and on rural walks beside the Pacific Ocean. She enlisted some of her favourite singers, all British Columbians, all mothers: Frazey Ford, Jill Barber, Pharis Romero. “They’re all people with unique, distinctive voices,” she says, “which is what I’m drawn to.”
Musically, Lapell was looking for a stark, acoustic sound, as opposed to 2024’s Juno Award-nominated Anniversary (recorded in Niagara with Great Lake Swimmers’ Tony Dekker) and 2022’s acclaimed Stolen Time (recorded in Montreal with Howard Bilerman, featuring E Street Band saxophonist Jake Clemons).
Lapell’s road to motherhood was fraught, involving years of IVF and a 2023 miscarriage — that she experienced on stage while on tour. (She finished her set.) Her son was born in November 2024. The song cycle of Shadow Child covers joy and loss, using metaphors from Maritime tragedy, reproductive health, and lives altered by the arrival of a newborn. The title track refers to ultrasound imaging of “a liminal person that doesn’t quite exist yet,” says Lapell. “Their status is ontologically blurry.”
Shadow Child arrives May 8 – just in time for Abigail's second Mother’s Day.
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