Cycling Celebrity
The bike has taken the folk-noir musician to gigs and on tour
The bike has taken folk-noir musician Abigail Lapell to gigs and on tour
Ten years ago, Abigail Lapell’s father passed away. She still catches glimpses of his spirit when she is out riding around the city and she sees an old guy with a beard on a bike. “I always think it is him for a second,” says the Toronto-based folk-noir musician. “As a kid, we would go camping in Prince Edward County, and the whole family would take our bikes. I remember cycling on these country roads and biking for hours; it brought us closer together.” Lapell came of age in the Toronto suburbs i n the 1980s. At 12, she bought her first bike with her bat mitzvah money at Sporting Life. Before she ever considered a career as a musician, cycling gave the artist her first taste of freedom and brought her closer to the city. “I remember the day I discovered that I could bike downtown,” she recalls. “I always took the subway everywhere, but it was slow. The first time I realized that if you just bike far enough that eventually you will get downtown, there was such a sense of freedom.
“There was this feeling that if you live in the suburbs, the city, life and the world was another place,” Lapell adds. “Then, you get on the subway and it magically transports you there. Biking for the first time felt like it was all connected. It made my world feel smaller.”
These days, Lapell travels the world – sometimes by bicycle – sharing her music and making connections. This past February, she put out her third release, Getaway. Recorded at Union Sound in Toronto with Chris Stringer, the album speaks to this universal theme of freedom and the nomadic life of a touring musician.
“I had been on the road a lot touring and had all of these road songs,” Lapell explains. “That’s one of the great clichés of rock music: songs about leaving your baby at home or whatever. It wasn’t exactly a concept album, but retroactively, I realized many of the songs fit with the Getaway theme. That gave me some structure on how to curate the songs. The word getaway has a broad interpretation because it is ambiguous; it can mean escape as a vacation or escape as fleeing from a bank robbery.”
Lapell didn’t get her driver’s licence until five years ago; she would often bike around town with a bike trailer. She says it was so much easier travelling to some of her gigs this way. “You don’t have to worry about parking and you can bring everything straight to the stage.”
In 2013, Lapell did a cycling tour with Tune Your Ride, a Toronto organization that puts on music festivals and sustainable shows. The audience even pedals bikes to power the PA systems. Artists play several city parks in one day, riding to the next venue after their sets. The tour also went from Toronto to Ottawa over the course of roughly two weeks, riding about 50 km each day, and doing some outdoor shows in various towns along the way.
“It’s a novelty thing here, but in Europe you can do your full tour by bike there. It is quite practical,” Lapell says. “It’s on my bucket list to tour Europe by bike someday. That would be so neat.”
“You don’t have to worry about parking and you can bring everything straight to the stage.”