Doubts and hopes haunt nine long months.
It is perhaps not so much of a surprise to find that Shadow Child is a concept album, and the theme was also somewhat foretold by last year’s album Lullabies. Abigail Lapell has produced an album of nine songs, each in their different ways reflecting on different aspects of a pregnancy and impending motherhood. It was recorded on Vancouver Island during the third trimester of the pregnancy that led to Lapell’s first child. Since Lapell’s journey to motherhood was not an easy one; her background material for this album cites years of IVF and a 2023 miscarriage that she experienced on stage while on tour (she finished her set), the music that this pregnancy inspired is not the purely joyful celebration of the new life to come, there’s tentativeness at embracing the possibility of a child becoming a reality, there are doubts before a reassuring calm can actually arrive after nine months. Even the album title hints at this slightly protective detachment, Shadow Child being a reference to an ultrasound image of what Lapell describes as “a liminal person that doesn’t quite exist yet – their status is ontologically blurry.”
Album opener Whistle Song (One In A Million) alludes directly to this with a devastating line delivered without any additional drama: “sing a song for the one I carry / a little prayer for the ones I buried” it’s combination of guitar and piano with Lapell’s powerful vocals supported with a chorus of backing singers remains totally grounded with the inclusion of a brief whistled refrain which acts as a counterpoint to the implied dread of “I still believe in a miracle ending / … / hear the magic numbers banded One in a Million.”
The title track, which features a duet with Frazey Ford, is a pure folk reflection which entwines and contrasts the imagery of the ultrasound, “your heartbeat like an underwater“, with longings for the future: “I laid my head on the river bed and the dream of the world to come.” The ultrasound recording that features at the end of the song serves to cap these feelings with a sense that a wish is getting closer, day by day, to a reality. So Long is another duet, this time with Pharis Romero, that blends a folk sensibility with just a touch of an “old timey” feel. It sounds like a traditional lament for a sailor so long at sea, in the way it longs for the arrival of a lover, but with the twist that when the ship eventually arrives, the sailor is not aboard. In the context of the album, sitting at the seventh song position, it has that additional frisson of perpetual worry: six months gone, three long months still to go. The album closer, though, is a happy throwback to last year’s Lullabies since Sing A Rainbow is exactly that, a gentle rendition of Arthur Hamilton’s well-known children’s song. The message is clear: a mother singing to her child, and the future looking bright.
Amongst the many positives around Shadow Child, songs that lightly carry a sense of significance, musical collaborators who only add to the sound of the album, there’s also that the particular meaning of the songs doesn’t weigh them down. Some, certainly, could be given different meanings – Mockingbird captures a feeling of indecision and doubt that’s universal. It’s definitely an album that has merit beyond the specific journey it documents, and anyone leaning into the folkier end of americana will find plenty here to enjoy.
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