Bells Larsen is holding hands with the past

The effect is spectacular: a duet album recorded with himself. The creative and emotional implications are many. It is, for one, a remarkably innovative vocal technique – if that’s even what one could call it – that has never really been explored in this way. The Canadian-born Larsen is careful to give credit to several social media creators who have recorded similar duets of themselves casually on the Internet over the years, but neither he nor I are able to pinpoint any label-backed, commercially ambitious project that dives into the concept to this degree. Emotionally, it’s rife with radical acceptance, documenting the seasons of a life marked by change with comforting empathy and bookending its most significant chapter to date. It’s, in many ways, a home run. And, I think, he knows it.

By all accounts, Larsen should be riding high right now but just over a week ago – after we sit down to talk, and in the thick of the record’s final promotional sprint – his release plans were thrown into disarray. The American Federation of Musicians, the body that helps artists across the U.S. and Canada perform internationally, informed him that he would no longer be able to obtain a visa to tour in the United States because of new immigration laws that only recognise forms of identification that correspond to an individual’s assigned sex at birth. For Larsen – who is trans and who has built an entire musical era around that transition – the news was devastating. It meant cancelling the critical American leg of his album release tour, a string of shows meant to open him up to the world’s largest music market.

“It’s cramped my style to say the least,” Larsen tells me on the changing political climate during our first conversation. The world he began this record in is not the one he will release it in. The months since Trump’s second inauguration have been, for him, a series of concerned texts from family and friends, watching policy changes to see what they’ll mean for his safety and his career, and trying to also keep his head above water. Yet he refuses to let all of that be an obstacle. Or temper his ambitions and excitement. “I’m trying not to live in fear as much as possible,” he continues.

After posting about his change in plans, Larsen’s audience exploded overnight. While he’s happy for the new eyes and ears, he’s also adamant that he doesn’t want visa troubles to be the thing that defines him or this record. “I’m so happy that more people have found me through finding out that my tour got cancelled (which is ironic), but as the release of the album draws near, I want to let the music speak for itself,” he writes to me in a text. And he’s right. Blurring Time (and what it represents) is far too great an album to be overshadowed by anything else. Though it may at times deal with complicated emotions and feelings, it’s a fundamentally joyful and celebratory body of work that showcases poise, maturity, and a command of the songwriting craft.

Larsen grew up attending one of the Canada's best arts schools and later went on to complete a prestigious residency in Banff, where he wrote most of the music for his debut record Good Grief. Music, of course, can be a fickle industry. and while Larsen long ago earned his technical stripes, finding the right ways and opportunities to bring his songs to bigger audiences proved at first to be tricky. After Good Grief, he struggled with negative self worth issues and intense comparison, feeling like he perhaps hadn’t gotten out of the release cycle what he would have wanted. Commodifying his art for the first time, he tells me, left him feeling alienated from his songwriting practice.

“I was looking at the musicians in my circle and seeing what they were up to and what they were achieving,” Larsen explains. “It was very hard and sad to release music that was very, very, very personal to me and – with the comparison of it all – feel like maybe the stories that I was singing about or the things that I’d been through were lesser because I was perhaps not receiving the validation that I thought I would or that I was seeing artists in my periphery achieve.”

“I was really attached to the idea of there being a singular way to exist as a musician,” he continues. “It was like, you know, you must have a label. You must have a manager. You must have a band. You must have tour dates. And to a degree, it’s not wrong. But I thought that there were just these unspoken rules that you had to abide by as a ticket to having your seat at the table. I feel like I’ve been really trying to undo that the last couple of years and just kind of let my freak flag fly.”

As he was unpacking the end of the Good Grief era – which he’d written as a teenager in the late 2010s and released in 2022 – he also happened to be sitting on a whole other project, Blurring Time. “Each chapter has really, really, really bled into the one that comes after,” Larsen explains. “It’s been a super non-chronological process. I have already released things that I wrote and recorded after the songs that are yet to come out.”

The first song for Blurring Time was written in 2021, about a month after he finished recording Good Grief. Buoyed by the confidence of finishing his first full-length project, he decided to keep going, exploring a period of introspection around his transition and several other major changes in his personal life. The songs tackle about a year between 2021 and 2022, the first being “Blurring Time” (the song) and the last being “My Brother & Me,” a track written right after Larsen had gotten top surgery and was finding himself at odds with his brother. On both Good Grief and Blurring Time, the broad throughline is change. Except with Good Grief, Larsen unpacks the changes that come after death, while on Blurring Time, he explores change as a living, breathing, lovable thing.

The entire project was written with the intention of being recorded twice. Larsen first came up on TikTok, and, at the time he first started posting, it was a trend for people to duet themselves and others online. “I was thinking about that through a trans lens, and I was like: Whoa, what if I duet myself through a record,” Larsen says. At the time, he was realising a full medical transition was something he wanted, and he felt like a record would be the best way to memorialise that process. Hooked on the plan, he reshaped the entire course of his transition to make this piece of music. To ensure he had enough time to record the “before,” he asked his doctor to push back the start of his hormone therapy from November of 2021 to March 2022, and he had to wait to record the “after” until his voice had settled into its new, low tone.

“It was really important for me to document the before and after together, holding hands in the same song, because I have a lot of love for my past self, and I couldn’t be here without that version of myself,” Larsen tells me. Like his musical career, Larsen’s transition was also nonlinear. Understanding his transness was an iterative process. While, for some folks, the idea of undergoing hormone therapy and having surgery is the obvious path from the start, for Larsen these things took time to reveal themselves to him. Larsen wanted to capture that iterative process on this record, painting his transition more as a passing of the baton than a cut-and-dry cast off.

Larsen traveled to Nova Scotia to track the first versions of the album with his friend Graham Ereaux. He’d been working in a café and planning to quit, but the shop closed before he could even leave. In any case, he had more time on his hands than usual, so he took the chance to spend two weeks soaking up the balm of the Atlantic coast and laying the groundwork for the record. “We oscillated back and forth between spending days in the studio; going to visit this school bus that [Graham] purchased and repaired and turned into this beautiful wood-floored heaven; and going to the ocean. It was really, really nice,” he says of his time out there

Ereaux, a talented producer and musician himself, helped Larsen find the sonic soul of Blurring Time. They settled on an earthy lo-fi sound, Bon Iver style. Larsen says he wanted the album to have that Lo-Fi glow, using pedal steel as a punctuation mark and allowing acoustic guitars to envelope the listener. The effect worked. Blurring Time feels like an albums’ worth of “Thirteen” by Big Star, brimming with childlike innocence, mundane vignettes that contain multitudes, and tightly woven narratives. It’s the type of thing you’d put on to sit peacefully, to drive, to be alone, to be in love, or to hold you gently in times of great need. It’s a record that feels wise beyond its years, partially because that’s a feature of the musical styles it pays homage to and partially because that’s how Larsen himself is.

When his work with Ereaux was done, Larsen waited. He set out promoting Good Grief and sat tight while his voice dropped. Once he felt like he was in a good place to sing again, he teamed up with an old high school friend to track the lower harmonies and round out the record from his apartment in Montreal. All that was left to do next was release.

For most of his career, Larsen has operated relatively independently. He hasn’t had a manager yet, though he has occasionally had various team members giving him a lift at one time or another. But for Blurring Time, he knew that the record deserved something special.

He tried shopping the album around to different labels, but was met at first mostly with silence. “The challenging part is that I perform under my own name. All the emails that I write come from me. And it is really hard to separate the self from the project and remove the ego from it,” Larsen says. With a record that took and represented every piece of him, hearing silence or hearing ‘nos’ could feel like an immovable weight. He was at the point where he thought he’d instead just release the record himself. He could save the money and do it as much justice as possible under his own purview.

Over dinner one night, Larsen’s girlfriend prompted him to give the whole partnership search thing another go. “They were like, ‘Are you sure that everyone got your email? Because I know I’m your girlfriend, but I do think that this is so special and surely there has to have been some kind of flub or something,’” Larsen remembers and laughs. “The next morning, I woke up at eight – crazy style – with my coffee and laptop open and shot out two more emails.”

Turns out Larsen’s girlfriend was right. A rep from Royal Mountain – one of Canada’s premiere indie labels and home of Mac DeMarco and, formerly, Orville Peck – got in touch to say that there had, in fact, been a miscommunication and Larsen’s record had never reached the team the first go around. Within a week, a meeting was set, and just hours after that, Larsen had a deal in his inbox.

If all goes to plan, Blurring Time could be a record that changes Larsen’s life forever and while his modesty in him stops him embracing that thought, he does remain hopeful of widening his audience in some way, both in terms of his own reach and the culture at large. “Something I said the last time we had an interview together is that change is a universal human experience," he says. "That is, of course, still true. I think that even someone who doesn’t understand who I am or what I’m singing about or have the life experience I have can be in agreement with me that change is something we all share,. I think that people fear what they don’t understand. And so I hope in this very, very dark time, the music can educate, unite, bring comfort, and be whatever people need it to be.”