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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, “little cannibals,” reproductive health, acquiring language, 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.”

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 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. Abigail Lapell has garnered three Canadian Folk Music Awards, hit number one on Canadian folk radio and reached a staggering 40 million + streams across digital services. She has toured widely across Canada and the U.S, and will be touring internationally (UK, EU, AUS and more) in 2024.