CW Great Lake Swimmers
City Winery Nashville presents Great Lake Swimmers with Abigail Lapell on Tuesday, January 20th at 7:00pm.
Featuring a blend of acoustic instruments, rural soundscapes, and wistful vocals, Great Lake Swimmers are a critically acclaimed indie-folk group led by Tony Dekker. Based in Southern Ontario, the group emerged in the early 2000s with a succession of heavily atmospheric albums recorded in old silos and rural country churches. The music developed in that pastoral warmth, performed and recorded in acoustically resonant and historical locales with a revolving cast of personnel. They are renowned for homespun folk and lush, intimate Americana in their live shows.
Their newest album, Caught Light, out Oct 10, 2025, is their most immediate and instinctive album to date. Recorded in just five days in Ontario’s Ganaraska Forest with producer Darcy Yates (Bahamas) and engineer Jimmy Bowskill (Blue Rodeo), it draws warmth from early ’70s folk-pop while embracing a new spontaneity and directness in Dekker’s songwriting.
Great Lake Swimmers have been shortlisted for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize and nominated twice for Canada’s Juno Awards, with the CBC calling them “a national treasure.”
“A stunning variety of tones and textures… nothing less than both cerebral and sublime” – American Songwriter, 4/5
“It floats from country to folk to indie rock and back again… a sharp-toothed but achingly beautiful portrait of the natural world and the human condition.” – New Noise Magazine
“Dekker’s preoccupation with the Canadian state of mind flourishes in his lyrics. Few songwriters are able to convey the country’s harsh beauty as well. …Canadian folk tradition personified in the 21st century” – Exclaim!
Toronto songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell returns with More Songs About Love, the extended companion to her JUNO-nominated 2024 album Anniversary. An evocative collection of original love songs, Anniversary was produced with Great Lake Swimmers’ Tony Dekker and recorded at 200-year-old St Mark’s Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Dekker helped shape the sessions’ spooky, resonant sound and also lent his voice to a couple of spellbinding duets. Balancing upbeat earworms with elegiac ballads, More Songs About Love adds eight new stripped-down tracks to the collection. Combining cynical and sentimental elements, the collection ultimately emerges as an earnest celebration of love. Anniversary & More Songs About Love is out May 3, 2025 on Outside Music. Over the past six years and four spellbinding releases, Lapell has garnered four Canadian Folk Music Awards and accrued a staggering 60 million streams across online platforms. She tours regularly across Canada, the U.S. and Europe.
