Have you ever envisioned having a conversation with your past self? On his newest record Blurring Time, indie-folk musician Bells Larsen alternates between his past and present by harmonizing recordings of his vocals before and after beginning gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy. His conversation weaves through transitions of all kinds, with Larsen’s gender transition being at the forefront. By marrying these voices, Larsen establishes a uniquely nuanced perspective on the culmination of his selves. 

During the production process, Larsen categorized each track on the record as either “high voice,” “low voice,” or an equilibrium of the two to dictate which “version” of himself would command the narration. This allows listeners to navigate through his alternating perspectives and observe as he reaches powerful conclusions about his identity. On the title track, “Blurring Time,” both his “high voice” and “low voice” duet as he sings, “It's not as simple as either or/I am both and I'm more.” 

Shortly after announcing his North American tour for the release of Blurring Time, Larsen shared on his social media that he was forced to cancel all of his American tour dates. Newly implemented laws under the Trump administration target transgender individuals such as Larsen, preventing him from applying for a US work visa due to the sex on his passport not matching the one on his birth certificate. While he anticipated needing to take precautions during his tour, he was shocked and disturbed to be given the confirmation that his application for a visa would not even be processed. 

Ironically, his inability to play for American audiences has allowed him to gain traction through what Larsen refers to as "Visa Gate." Fellow musicians such as Clairo and Dan Mangan showed their support on Larsen's social media and directed their shared outrage towards these bigoted laws. While Larsen reached an all-time high in his Spotify monthly listener count in May at 100,000 listeners, he shared that his biggest grievance is not being able to “perform [his] album for queer and trans people in the US who saw their stories reflected in [his] own.”

I had the opportunity to chat with Larsen about his creative process in conceptualizing the artistic vision for this record and how it has both shaped and been shaped by his lived experiences. The following conversation has been edited for clarity.

MT: It’s been almost one month since the release of Blurring Time. What has the overall response been like both on social media and at your shows?

BL: Really positive. My favourite thing in the world is being able to play my songs in a live setting and see the response from people in person. So much of my world exists online right now and I understand that that’s part of the game, but I also kind of resist it as well. I’m so touched by really nice things that people say on TikTok or Instagram, but especially with how much of the story of the record (including Visa Gate) is online, it’s been the best playing these shows in person and seeing people mouthing the words. It’s been a really wild month but a really good one too.

MT: In between the two recordings of Blurring Time, you released your EP If I Was, I Am. How was your experience balancing both these projects? Was there any overlap in the process?

BL: Yeah, 100%. The timeline of the last couple of years has been pretty strange. The songs on If I Was, I Am, with the exception of a Nick Drake cover, are all written after the songs on Blurring Time. At the very beginning of 2022, I recorded the high vocals of Blurring Time and then put out Good Grief a couple months later, and then wrote the songs for If I Was, I Am. So, it’s been really strange to put out music and be like, “Enjoy this but also I’ve got some really good stuff coming that I wrote way before.” But also, in some ways If I Was, I Am is more indicative of my writing style now. It's been a pretty odd timeline. Though a lot of artists I look up to release songs or still play songs that they wrote when they were seventeen. I think it’s okay to have a jumbled timeline. 

MT: The assertion was that If I Was, I Am aligns with the messaging throughout Blurring Time. Does that EP feel at all like a prologue to the record?

BL: Big time. That’s a really good way of putting it. Blurring Time has been such a long time in the making and by the time I was getting ready to put out If I Was, I Am—it was a very short turnaround between writing the songs and putting them out—I was feeling really tired and frustrated with the process of Blurring Time. I wanted to be putting the album out to have a more chronological timeline. 

If I Was, I Am felt a bit more like an amuse-bouche or an appetizer, but there’s a lot of similar things I reference in that very short body of music such as change, becoming, and identity. Even the aesthetics of If I Was, I Am: a lot of the music videos were filmed on this VHS but the reason I have it is because I documented my entire transition for the purpose of Blurring Time, so I’m kind of dipping into the same footage. I think a prologue is a really good way of putting it.

MT: Your “Blurring Time” music video is the second one you’ve released in collaboration with Daniel Crawford. What was the process from him sending you his initial sketches to fleshing out the concept for the entire video?

BL: Daniel is such a visual person, and he can almost hear things and then immediately translate them into something visual. I watched Twilight last night and, in the same way Alice sees things in the future and then she draws them, Daniel hears something and then instantly thinks, “This is the Theseus Minotaur myth but trans.” I’m such an auditory person. I feel like I have a pretty strong idea of the world in which I want my music to live, visually speaking, but in terms of the specific concepts that he’s able to create and pull out of thin air, it’s crazy. I would’ve never thought of that. I just sent him the record, and he gravitated towards that song in particular and wrote the entire narrative of the music video in an email. It was so beautiful. To have someone be able to turn my lived experiences as a trans person into an allegory in which you essentially befriend your inner monster is wild. He’s one of the only creatives I’ve ever worked with where I trust him to do his thing and I’m hands-off. 

MT: There’s a lot of discussion about dichotomies surrounding this album and you feature songs in two different languages: English and French. What inspired you to begin songwriting in a second language and how was this process different from writing in English?

BL: I’ve always wanted to write in French. I’ve been speaking French since I was around five. I learned how to read in French before I learned how to read in English. It’s always been baked into the way I think in some regard. French is also a lot more flowery; run-on sentences are not really a thing in French. Their expressions are very beautiful and poetic in their own right. I didn’t really have an excuse to write in French until four years ago when I started seeing the person who would become my partner, and they’re Québécois. I wanted to write a song in their native language, kind of as an exercise for me but also as a way to woo them. 

There are two songs on the record that are in French, and I wrote them in chronological order. The first one is “Calme Incertain” and my poetry skills in French were not good enough for me to just wing it. I bought a newspaper at the dépanneur and then cut it up and screenshotted a bunch of texts from my partner, printed them out, and then made this collage, and that is the song. 

On the second one, “143,” those are all my words, so I guess my French had become better in the six months in between writing the two songs. I love writing in French. I find that writing in French and playing guitar in open tunings are very similar. I’ve written in English so much and written so many songs in standard tuning that—I can still do it, for sure—but you can only rhyme “you,” “too,” “do,” and “through” so many times before you don’t know what to say. In the same way, I can only play a C chord in standard before it gets old. But then you tune your guitar to this open tuning and there’s all these new chord shapes that I’ve never explored before. When I’m writing in French, it feels like I’m discovering something new for the first time in a really exciting way.

MT: You covered Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” at your show in Toronto this month, which feels like the perfect addition to Blurring Time. Were there any other songs that resonated with you while writing this record?

It is a very Blurring Time song and I didn’t think to cover it until quite recently. I watched the movie CODA in December, and it just broke my heart. In its own way, it’s a dichotomy between hearing and not hearing or speaking in sign to speaking out loud. I was so touched by the performance of “Both Sides Now” in the movie and I can’t even think about it without tearing up. And then I heard my grandmother sing that song with her choir at the Jewish Community Centre and was so blown away by watching this person in my life that I’ve known for so long perform it. It’s also emotional to hear Joni sing it too now that she’s older and she wrote it when she was so young, so I was thinking a lot about before/after and this/that. That’s the only song I sang at the show with just the singers, both of whom are trans, and we each took a verse. It felt really important for that to be a trans-only song. I took the last verse which is “I’ve looked at life from both sides now” which felt really lovely, important, and fun. 

I wouldn’t say it was necessarily an inspiration while I was writing the record but I kind of grew up on 2010s “White people folk” like The Paper Kites, The Head and the Heart, The Lumineers, and Vance Joy. I think there’s a part of me that’s always been gravitated towards overwhelmingly male voice acoustic with a little bit of girl voice in that too, and all of those bands kind of have that. That was a huge inspiration for Blurring Time. There’s a bunch of songs on my inspiration playlist that are like that: the band Porches, but you can hear Frankie Cosmos in there too. Just low voice/high voice where you can hear it’s two different people and it’s folky. There’s a lot of inspiration from Elliott Smith and Adrianne Lenker. There’s a lyric in “anything” where Adrianne says, “I just want to be a part of your family” and in “143” I say “Je veux faire partie de ta famille” which is essentially the same thing. There’s a lot of Elliott Smith-isms that made their way into the record by accident. 

MT: You wrote the songs on this album as far as four years ago. Has the meaning of any of them changed for you now that you can look back on that time?

BL: For sure. The most obvious ones are “My Brother and Me” and “Might.” “Might” because my voice has gotten deep and the hook is “my voice might get deep.” It always feels funny singing that song now. “My Brother and Me” was written at a time when my brother and I weren’t really speaking, and now he is one of my dearest people. I think it’s still a bit confusing and hurtful for him to hear the song, but when I hear it or play it now it’s very loving whereas when I first wrote it, it was steeped in anger and sadness. Even if it’s the same recording, it feels different to me now.

Larsen’s ability to intertwine his selves over the span of his transition has resulted in a timeless record which will continue to evolve along with him and his listeners. His distinct voices capture the intersection between anxiety and acceptance, relinquishing control to the future. His degree of wisdom and deliberation towards actualizing this concept indicates an innate attention to detail which listeners can continue to anticipate in his future releases.