"I can hear Noah talking, so I'm going to change rooms," folk singer and songwriter Bells Larsen says before carrying me, in his laptop, deeper into the home he shares with his long-time partner in Montreal. We're both sneaking a break from our respective day jobs for the interview, slated to take up no more than 30 minutes. But as we parse through his sophomore album, Blurring Time, time itself becomes hazy, constraints lax their hold, and we end up talking for about an hour.
A part of the reason is that we're playing catch-up. I first saw Larsen play a set at Highlands Music Festival in 2023, standing alone at dusk on a yawning wooden gazebo, dressed in full denim and singing with his acoustic guitar in an unforgettable — and now indelibly his own — husky whisper, so redolent of Sufjan Stevens's timbre. Then, he was singing songs off his debut, 2022's Good Grief, and when I went up to him afterwards and told him he made me teary-eyed in the way Stevens's music does, Larsen's ocean eyes lit up.
Larsen loves Sufjan Stevens, a love made more visceral and urgent upon the release of Stevens's Javelin just a week later in October 2023 — Stevens dedicated it to his partner who had passed away earlier in 2023. Larsen's own Good Grief was written in an effort to articulate and make sense of the inchoate grief simmering within him after his first love died by suicide. The album, Larsen said in an interview in 2022, was "a way to very literally take my grief and make it good."
Larsen made a joke that evening at Highlands about his changing voice as he sang songs that transmuted immense loss into beauty. He asked us to grant him grace, for his voice was changing as part of a sort of second puberty; it was still in the process of dropping after he began testosterone treatment in March 2022. Talking to him now feels like we've come full circle, to a spot in time that evening in 2023 was anticipating. Where Good Grief put to practice the knowledge that creating art of pain makes it easier to navigate by externalizing it, Blurring Time reverses the trajectory of Larsen's art, folding time and distance and bringing us vividly into his particular lived experience, where time isn't totally linear or traditionally mapped.
"I wear a watch. I'm pretty punctual," Larsen says when I ask him about his relationship with time. "That's an important thing to be. It's within my value system to be very punctual." But this value for punctuality applies only when time is considered in a "zoomed-in, specific type of way," he says. "When we zoom out, I don't like time. I don't like thinking chronologically. I don't think that things ought to happen in a certain way, in a certain timeframe."
For Larsen, typical timelines become especially fraught when considered within the context of the queer experience. "I think that the timelines for an artist and for a queer person are often very similar," he says. "Obviously there are queer artists, and then it's kind of like a little cocktail of the two. But I think that queer people and artists alike have this very unique experience of looking at people around them achieving certain life milestones in a more cookie-cutter traditional way. And then having this sense of, like, 'Oh, am I doing this right? Am I catching up to my peers? Am I doing life well?'"
An artist committed to their art in a way that fulfills them but not the dictates of capitalist society may look at their peers in more traditional careers and feel out of step, disconcerted by a sense that the march of time is leaving them behind. "And it's the same thing I feel with queer time," Larsen says. "I have friends who are having children, who are getting married, who are doing these things in a much more traditional way, ontologically speaking."
Survival requires that we make peace with or celebrate the idiosyncratic — whether chugging along, hiccuping, elongated, or abrupt — beats of one's own drum. Larsen reflects, "I think that through being an artist and through being a queer person, I've tried to distance myself from time in that chronological way. I think that if I show up on time for my commitments on a quotidian level, then it's okay if I show up late or not on time on a zoomed-out global level."
Blurring Time makes a home within Larsen's unique swath of time. Lacking a sort of urgency asked for by healing, the album is a marvel for the ways in which each track not only folds the present over onto the past, but also for the way in which Larsen patiently works through what it means to exist over a lifetime, to love over the course of time and to be a man, in haltingly, confidently curious ways. It's deliciously languorous how tracks on the album exist within the question mark of uncertainty, pacing within questions themselves, or the feeling of love, or the stubborn heat of loneliness. "I am better off on my own, I am lonely / How can I hold both of those as true?" he asks on "The Way the Wind Blows," and we don't really get a literal answer. There is a desire to go back to the way that things once were, alongside a desire to flick through the possibilities the future contains, the friction between the two acknowledged but not massaged away; there will be time enough for that later.
The tender "Questions" is a steady stream of yearning questions directed to his past self, who feels distant: "Why does Nonna call me when she hears you on the radio?" he asks, and the question feels like a sob caught in the throat. "I'm doing so much better than I was this time last year, but tell me how you are," he sings, accompanied by his steady tinny guitar, and it's impossible to not feel all the hairs on your arms stand up. "Why don't you ever ask me any questions? / Do you feel that you still know me now that I've started anew?" We keep expecting a voice to come in in answer, but it never does. Though the track's core sentiment is like a butterfly lilting in a faltering ascendance out of our grasp, there's no sense of panic here at the building pile of questions. The hand doesn't desperately grasp after the butterfly, because, it seems, the act of folding time, the mood of introspection and openness to one's past self, is enough. Larsen is patient, affording his various selves grace and the space to fallibly exist and discover the future at their own pace.
It's not altogether unreasonable to expect a voice ringing in an answer on a track like "Questions," for a few of the tracks on Blurring Time, though all written between March 2021 and January 2022, are duets between Larsen's "high" voice from the songwriting period, and his present "low" voice.
"The idea for the project came to me gradually," he says. "It felt appropriate to name it Blurring Time, because the process through which I've become myself and the process through which this album came to be, it's the same process, but it's been so non-chronological and so fragmented and so all over the place, and I feel like a queer becoming is one that by nature is blurred and is non-chronological."
The creation of Good Grief meant that Larsen spent a lot of time thinking about his loss, his grief, and other emotions that rose up within him. He also began thinking about gender. And so, after Good Grief, "I was feeling ready to switch the focus and look more inward rather than outward," he says. "I do feel like it was right after I finished recording Good Grief that I felt ready to explore the self, not so much looking for what I've lost, but, in a very woo-woo way, trying to find myself."
In the time it took to write Blurring Time, Larsen, through the project of introspection shepherded by his songwriting, did gain a better grasp of himself. "In that timeframe, I leaned a lot more into my transition," he says. "My transition has kind of always been a little bit of a question mark with regards to how much I'm going to transition, how I'm going to transition, am I going to transition socially, medically, all that sort of thing. So I think that the songwriting for this project was a way for me to tackle that question mark and ask myself, 'Who am I?' That's the thesis of the first song ['Blurring Time']."
The album's second track, "514-415," wonders what it means to be in a relationship "with someone that you met pre-transition," he says, whether the same love remains during the transitioning process. (Spoiler: it definitely does!)
"Would you still look at me the same," Larsen sings, a duet between his high and low voice. The final track on the album, "Might," asks what it means to be a singer "if you're maybe going to pursue hormone replacement therapy and then your voice is going to get deep," Larsen tells me.
"My voice might get deep, and I might bruise my knees," his high voice, sweet as summer, sings on the track. "Maybe it's time that moves through me inviting change," comes a thought eventually, and it's less as a finite answer and more as an easy companion.
"I was just asking all of these questions through song, and through doing so, figured out that I needed to make some changes in my life." He was also reading The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron at the time, and cites the text as his bible. "It's so fucking good," he says. "It has been so pivotal in my experience as a person. It's amazing. So [I was] reading this book while writing these songs, and it was the pandemic time, I was on CERB, so I had a second to chill." He had all the time in the world to embark on an intentional exploration of the self, he says, for the first time ever.
At the core of the creative journey Cameron maps out is an exercise asking the reader to journal three pages in the stream-of-consciousness mode everyday. "The thought behind that practice is that if you write enough about something that is bogging you down in your life, it's going to be really hard to keep writing about it every single morning and not change it," Larson says.
What was bogging Larsen down was who he was: "I was just very aware of the fact that the person that I was living as was not my most authentic self. And so, through songwriting, through this book, I realized that I wanted to make some changes, namely physical changes. And then I thought about the way I wanted to do that, and I had all of these songs, most of which were very topical and about gender and about loving and being loved as a trans person. And I knew through having other trans friends, such as T. Thomason, what vocal transition looks like and the fact that it takes time, the fact that it can be kind of clunky sometimes, and kind of awkward. T.'s voice is so beautiful, but he's been very vocal about the fact that it's slow and you're going through, like, puberty, so it can be awkward."
At this point in the creation of Blurring Time, Larsen found himself with two options: "I can record these songs as they are right now, and they will come out with my higher voice, or I can wait. I know for myself I need to start testosterone. So it's kind of one or the other."
Swiftly, however, a third option revealed itself. "I feel like a lot of trans stories are depicted in a one-or-the-other, before-and-after type of way. I can't really think of many examples where there's been a synthesis or a marriage or a combining of the past and the present. So I put my concept glasses back on and then thought to myself, 'I think I'm going to do both. I think I'm going to record essentially a fully finished record before I start testosterone,' which is what I did in January of 2022. And then I'm going to start T in March of 2022. And while I'm waiting for my voice to drop, I'm going to promote the first project [Good Grief], and then later I will come back to it and then I will sing with myself."
In recording in his high voice, he needed to make space for his future self through a projection of how low his voice could potentially go. "I got it wrong," he says. "I don't sing these songs in the same key anymore. And thank god for the people who I play music with in a live setting. They're so kind and quick and talented, and they bear with me when I ask for the changing of keys and stuff like that. But my voice has really been an accordion. My range has been bigger, it's been smaller. I feel like it's more or less settled. But yeah, there's some songs on the record where when I was finally singing with myself, I was like, damn. I was being very generous with how low I thought I would go. I was recording with Georgia [Harmer], and I really had to stretch for it. But I just kind of see it as part of the terms and conditions of the project that there's just creative unknowns."
Harmer, a dear friend of Larsen's since they both went to Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, helped him write the vocal arrangements for Blurring Time and to harmonize with his high voice. In 2024, Harmer would take up the same stage at Highlands that Larsen stood on a year earlier.
The uncertainty around what his low voice would sound like, captured on "Might," and ultimately what the finished version of Blurring Time might sound like, didn't daunt Larsen. "I'm not someone who deals super well with uncertainty, but it felt like a good challenge," he says, steadily. After all, he had a plan — worst case scenario, if his low voice didn't work out, he would still have a beautiful record in his high voice. Luckily, though, matters sorted themselves out perfectly, and Blurring Time stands as a fluid synchronicity between past and present.
And there absolutely are answers to certain uncertainties that can be found if one knows where to look for them: within the album's soul, within its understanding of time not as something that makes meaning out of us, but as something that we pull meaning from. Ultimately, Blurring Time privileges not time, but the self as a flowing and ever-changing river; Larsen has us see that what is important is not keeping up with time, but surveying it, taking up space within it, and inspecting it, for in so doing, we discover and confront ourselves, and are all the more able to discern and pursue goodness and authenticity. Time merely keeps track while we make meaning.
"When I was figuring out which songs would be duets, which ones would be high voice songs, and which ones would be low voice songs, it felt really important to choose which one was going to be which based on the context of the song, even based on the context of a verse," he says. "So I feel like the answers to some of these questions that I'm asking are answered through who is singing."
For example, the sixth track on the album is called "My Brother & Me." The first half of this song is about Larsen's brother, considering him and the version of masculinity he projected at 17 years old. The second half is about himself and wondering about the kind of man he will be as he goes through his second puberty, especially with reference to a brother who, at the time, was into Jordan Peterson. The track asks what kind of man Larsen will be if he has as his reference a man whose masculinity is against everything Larsen stands for as a person. "Will he change or stay the same?" Larsen asks, before going to ask the same of himself. "Will I be an asshole or a gentleman?"
"It felt important to have that second verse be just my high voice," Larsen explains. "Because these are questions that are very earnest and very sincere, that I don't really feel like I need to speak to as 25-year-old — or, at the time when I was recording it, 23-year-old — Bells. So we kept it to just the 2022 high voice, but then I come back in at the end, because the refrain is at first, 'Will he change or stay the same?' And then the refrain at the end is, 'Will I change? Will I stay the same?' It felt really important to have my low voice come back in for that, because the answer is, well, yes." He has changed, and he has also remained the same: a good person.
Larsen isn't sure yet what or how a man ought to be, the contours non-toxic masculinity takes. "I think that's become an even more complicated question in the years since I've written the record and since the world has become more politically divisive, and since we've seen very clear examples of very harmful masculinity enact that in different ways," he says.
Those political divisions have affected Larsen's career directly; a few weeks after our interview, Larsen shared a statement cancelling all his US tour dates, writing, "I am no longer able to apply for a visa because US Immigration now only recognizes identification that corresponds with one's assigned sex at birth. To put it super plainly, because I'm trans (and have an M on my passport), I can't tour in the States.
Still working masculinity out for himself — he's marching to the beat of his own drum and has grown a little moustache — it's easier at the moment for him to understand masculinity in the negative, to definitively say what masculinity does not look like.
In terms of authenticity and being a person, though, Larsen has a clearer definition, grounded in indefiniteness.
"I think we're all in flux, and I think that we are all in transition," he says. "There have been various points in the last three years where I've been really freaked out by my own changes that I've been going through personally and physically. It's very jarring to watch yourself change so intensely, so rapidly. But then I also find a sense of relief in remembering that we are all in transition all the time. And my hope for this project is that, of course, it finds its way to the people who ought to hear it, namely queer and trans kids. But I also hope that it can be a reminder that we're all in flux and that we are all going through big life moves and breakups and deaths and marriages. And that is not an experience that is specific to me, the change of it all. So I think that we are all whole in these fragments."