The Toronto singer-songwriter sits down with Paste ahead of his new album Blurring Time to talk about change, creating from a place of positivity, and the role of trans narratives in music in 2025.
There’s rarely a moment when I’m not writing—or at least thinking about writing. As I tie up the loose ends of my college career, I find myself juggling not just full-time school work, but concert reviews, album retrospectives, and press releases for my senior thesis. It’s a lot, sure, but I love it. I wouldn’t choose this life if I didn’t. If there’s one drawback to being knee-deep in all of it, though, it’s that I see new voices slip through my inbox every single day.
That almost happened with Bells Larsen.
Back in January, when I was first given the opportunity to talk about him, I was waist-deep in deadlines. I nearly passed on the opportunity out of stress alone, but then that voice in my head spoke up: “What if this artist has a story only they can tell? Are you really okay letting that pass you by?” I’m glad I didn’t.
Since that first listen, Bells Larsen has become my Roman Empire—the artist I find myself thinking about on the quiet walks to class and on crowded buses on the way to concerts. He’s been the sole name I bring up whenever I’m asked, “What have you been listening to lately?” And for good reason: His sophomore album, Blurring Time, arrives this Friday via Royal Mountain Records, and it’s a record three years in the making—not out of choice, but out of necessity. It eclipses the typical indie-folk patchwork, anchored by a concept as intimate as it is brilliantly innovative. As Larsen readied his journey with hormone replacement therapy, he recorded his higher range of vocals, only to return to the studio three years later to add harmonies with a newly-deepened vocal register. The result is a tender duet between two selves, past and present.
Still, whenever I introduce someone to Larsen’s music, I let the songs speak for themselves. To have the patience and creativity to embark on such an endeavor is proof enough that Larsen holds something truly special in his music—it’s the keystone of his current artistry, after all—but the songs are still the foundation. My entryway was the sweet, subtle melancholy of “514-415,” the album’s lead single, but with every release since, my admiration has only grown. His sound calls out to the ghosts of Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, yet it’s undeniably rooted in the present—further reinforcing the intent of the album’s title.
Last month, I had the chance to sit down with Larsen and map out his journey—from the sparks of his songwriting to the imminent release of Blurring Time and beyond. At only 27, he carries a sense of clarity and purpose that, even while speaking about the future, keeps a hopeful glint in his eyes—a sense that his best work is still on the way. The following conversation has been edited for clarity.
Paste Magazine: You got your first guitar when you turned 8. Can you take us back to those early years of playing? What drew you to songwriting, and when did you know you wanted to pursue music fully?
Bells Larsen: So, I come from a creative family. My mom studied acting in college. My dad is a children’s author. A lot of my mom’s family has worked in film or TV, so storytelling through artistic means has always been something I’m drawn to, but no one else in my family is a musician. I feel like music was always present, though. There was always music playing, largely folk from the second half of the 20th century, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Cat Stevens, tons of Beatles. My parents still have this coffee book that’s a Beatles anthology, and I swear to God it’s thicker than my head. It’s got every single photo of them from every era. Seeing the different ways of storytelling through song was inspiring, specifically with the Beatles and seeing how they embodied different sounds and characters and moods and all that.
Then my cousin was gifted a guitar for her birthday and I was jealous, so I asked for a guitar and that was [my] eighth birthday present. I didn’t understand that you would actually have to learn, so many years later when I learned what open D tuning was, I was like, “This is what I was looking for when I was a kid! You just strum it and play chords that are pressing down on all of the strings in the same fret. That’s amazing.” I was initially not that stoked to have to go to guitar class and for a while it felt like a chore. I wanted to develop a personalized relationship with my instrument.
That came through taking guitar lessons with this guy who went house-to-house in my neighborhood in Toronto and met the kids where they were at. He wasn’t interested in teaching scales. It was more, “What do you want to learn? What do you want to sound like? What makes music interesting for you?” I learned finger-picking through him. I learned a lot of Beatles songs through him. Then, around high school, I stopped taking guitar lessons and I went to an arts-based high school in Toronto—so, by virtue of being around other artistic people, and also being at the age where I was experiencing life for the first time, that was my foray into songwriting.
How has Toronto, and your later move to Montreal, shaped your sound?
I don’t know about my sound quite as much as my lyrics. I love to pepper hints of where I am or where I’m writing from in my lyrics, and I do think that Toronto has a sound. There’s this awesome venue a stone’s throw from my parents place called the Tranzac in Toronto. It’s a lot of [University of Toronto] music grads and their pals and extended community, and you can tell when someone is a Tranzac musician, because there’s a sound and they’re really talented, but there’s also a level of weirdness there that’s very cool. It’s a perfect example of needing to know the rules to break them. I do feel like Toronto has a sound, but I don’t think I sound like Toronto.
I think Montreal sounds a little bit more DIY. I watch The Great British Baking Show a lot, and when Paul Hollywood is looking at a cake that’s really good but rough around the edges, he describes it as “rough and ready,” and I feel a lot of Montreal music is like that. It’s very high quality, but it’s a little more rough around the edges than Toronto, which is more polished.
But yeah, I would say it’s more of a lyrical thing. I love to name drop streets or neighborhoods. I lived on the east coast of Canada for a couple of years for school, and there are a lot of references to the Maritimes in that. I name Bloor Street in one of my songs on the first record [Good Grief]. I mentioned the neighborhood Outremont in “People Who Mean So Much to Me.” On the third track of Blurring Time, I mentioned the intersection of Clark and Duluth in Montreal, which is where my old apartment was.
Your work maintains this distinct, very intimate atmosphere—do you find writing to be a therapeutic process?
Exactly that. It’s therapy through which I process the happenings of my life. I’m at this point right now where I’m two records and an EP in, and they’ve all been very different things, and I think very much in terms of concepts and chapters. My first record was about processing a loss that I’d been through, but also it was my coming-of-age record. I was losing a sense of innocence. I’d been through a couple of breakups. Blurring Time is about the whiplash of changing so much in such a short amount of time and how to love and be loved in that process. I would be curious as to how I’d be feeling about both the losses that I had been through and my experience with my transition if I hadn’t had songwriting to turn to.
Now, I’m in this moment where, despite the state of the world, I’m in a pretty OK place. I’m in love. I have wonderful friendships. I’m trying to lean into processing the good as well— having more love songs, more friendship songs. Good vibes only.
Outside of songwriting, do you feel like you’ve refined your recording process for Blurring Time?
I think the nature of Blurring Time is that the rules have to be broken, but art also takes time. It’s reassuring to see some of the people I look up to talk about the fact that their records took them three years to record, because that was my case recording a complete project and then needing to wait for the hormones to do their thing. Having things that are super polished or produced doesn’t really appeal to me, though. I like to be a pretty lo-fi guy. I want the rawness and candidness to be translated in the final recording—the rawness that’s there when someone has just written a song and is capturing it through a voice memo for the first time. So, on both records, I have had certain tracks be voice memos, whether that’s an ocean noise or a guitar track or a harmony, I love for the stuff of life to be in the recordings. I spent a lot of time and energy thinking about ways in which I could do the professional artist drag, both with regards to the industry and with regards to my artistry, but being most true to myself is going about things in a relatively DIY way.
Nowadays there’s a lot of conversation around visibility and representation in music. Your bio talked about you just “being” as a political act, so how do you hope that your work contributes to that dialogue?
Oh, that’s a good question. It’s something that I’ve been trying to figure out over the last couple of years. Tying into what I was saying before about the way I approach music, I felt I needed to do things a certain way with regards to my artistry and the industry, because I felt like I needed to fight to have a seat at the table—this imaginary table that doesn’t really exist.
What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a trans artist, and when I was first conceiving of how I would go about releasing [Blurring Time] and sharing it with the world, I struggled trying to find the line of how much I include my identity in that. I’m very much singing about my experience as a trans person. I’m naked on the cover—it’s pretty vulnerable. Still, I want it to be accessible to everyone regardless of what their lived experience is because, at the end of the day, it’s a record about change and what it means to be your most authentic self. That’s why I wanted to be naked on the cover.
It can be tricky with the visibility piece, because I know people who stand by the fact that they write music only for their community. I do love the concept of writing music that would have spoken to my inner-child or to who I was as a teenager—who I was as a queer kid. So, I’m happy to be offering that representation to my younger self and to other queer and trans people who see their stories reflected in mine. But one of the reasons the word “trans” doesn’t show up in my bio is because I don’t want to be “Bells Larsen, the trans artist.” Yes, my record is very much steeped in my experience and my identity as a trans person, but I hope that anyone who’s experienced change, which is everyone, can relate to the fact that it can be a jarring and blurry experience.
That’s what drew me to your music in the first place. “514-415” was my introduction, as well as the first song you shared from Blurring Time. Can you speak more about the story behind it?
That was the second song that I wrote for the project, and the record is more or less in chronological order of writing. “Blurring Time” was the first song I wrote for the album, and it was about myself in the context of all of the changes that I was going through—it’s a very questioning song. So with “514-415,” I was more interested in looking outward at what it meant to love someone and be loved through those changes. It’s a song about a person that I had known before my changes and pre-transition, who I was still in contact with after these changes, and just trying to split the difference. We cared for each other then. We care for each other now. Circumstance has it that we are far away from each other and, therefore, it can’t work out right now, but the care has always been there and I think it will always be there, and that that will stand the test of time.
How has the concept for Blurring Time grown since you wrote the title track, and was there a key moment of inspiration for the overarching project?
I started writing Blurring Time before I knew I was. I had come back from recording my first project and dove right into writing again. I think, at the time, I was captured by the idea of working within limitations, or working within a concept, for better or for worse. I was spending a lot of time on TikTok seeing people sing harmonies with themselves, and I was like, “What if I harmonized with myself?” I was pretty sure that I was going to pursue hormone replacement therapy in the form of T, and it felt like an interesting crossroad where I’ve got all of these songs about change and identity and I feel like I need to pursue certain changes, but I wasn’t sure if I should do that now and then go through a second puberty or if I go through a second puberty without knowing how my voice is going to sound and having no control over it, so why not marry the two?
I’ve seen a lot of trans narratives that highlight the before and highlight the after. Oftentimes it’s with an understandably sad lens when exploring the before—which I get, because the people are not their most authentic self, but I have a lot of love for my past self and for what they went through. I think of Blurring Time less as a concept and more as a parting gift to my past self and a homecoming for my new self.
How collaborative has Blurring Time been in that case then? I saw the names Graham Ereaux and Georgia Harmer mentioned throughout the album credits.
Graham and I worked together for Good Grief, too. I feel very comfortable working with him. He’s one of the only people that I’ve ever worked with where I feel no degree of imposter syndrome. I feel heard and seen and comfortable, and he’s such a talented musician. He also is very gravitated towards folk stuff, but he’s not afraid to get weird and use plug-ins and be funky. On the third track, my friend Dan had an electric guitar, and Graham flipped it on its side, so it was looking like an August Rush kind of thing, and we just started banging on it—a lot of the percussion in that song is just whacking a guitar and putting a mic to it. Graham thinks of these sorts of things. He thinks outside of the box while also thinking within a box that I’m comfortable with. He understands that I want things to sound raw, and I want things to sound unpolished, but he’s able to hear things instrumentally that I just can’t. Graham engineered and produced the first half of the album, meaning my high voice and all of the instrumentation.
Georgia is a dear friend and someone that I have been making music with since I was a teenager. She went to my high school too. She’s an amazing singer-songwriter and understands harmony in a way that I don’t think a lot of people do, and we sang together as kids so I thought, “If you knew my voice then, you’ll understand the way it works now”—where I ought to sing with myself, which songs should be old Bells taking the lead, or what have you. So, I think that both Graham and Georgia played crucial roles in the actual making of the music.
If a listener could take away just one feeling from Blurring Time, what would you want it to be? In a broader sense, what do you hope people think of when they hear Bells Larsen?
A whole slew of things, right? I think that the main thing, which I feel ties in a lot of parts of our conversation, is that, on a larger scale, everyone goes through change, no matter what those changes are, and life is but a series of changes. I hope that people can find comfort in that. I hope that people can see themselves reflected in these songs even if these songs are not necessarily pertinent or relatable because of the changes that I’m singing about. And if we zoom in, I hope that for people who don’t understand transition or the kind of transition that I’m singing about, it humanizes my community, because I think that we are being profoundly dehumanized right now. At the end of the day, trans people are just trying to move closer to who they are. And that’s it: We’re just going through changes like everybody is.
Blurring Time is out Friday, April 25 via Royal Mountain Records.
