Video Premiere: Abigail Lapell, “All Dressed Up”
Canadian singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell’s crisp fingerpicking circles around her crystalline vocals in this airy meditation on liminality, of being “All Dressed Up” with nowhere to go.
The song’s opening notes recall Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train,” and these notes provide a thematic thread through the rest of the song. Lapell’s vocals and guitar playing are also reminiscent of Joni Mitchell, especially in the third verse, when she reaches into her higher register. The sparseness of the song—just guitars and vocals—evokes both the plaintiveness of being caught in a claustrophobic moment (captured by the stasis of the television in the video) and the celebration of movement in a wider world.
All told, “All Dressed Up” offers a snapshot of a pandemic world in which we all felt a bit like Lapell. The song, she explains, is “a fever dream of isolation and claustrophobia, circumscribed by all these obsolete media machines, but with a semi-hopeful note about making the best of an absurd situation. Or, at least, [the notion that] this too shall pass, and spring will come again.”
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“All Dressed Up” is a single from Abigail Lapell’s new album Stolen Time. It’s available HERE
Twitter: @abigaillapell
Instagram: @abigaillapell
Facebook: @AbigailLapell
