INTERVIEW: “I’ve always been this, I’ve always been me” – Bells Larsen Turns Tragedy & Change Into Art On Latest Album ‘Good Grief’

When people ask me what music I like most, my first instinct isn’t so much a genre, as it is a feeling. I enjoy music that strikes a chord (pun intended) and brings out some hidden, visceral reaction that begins deep in the soul and comes out through a full body reaction. Sometimes it’s fast, loud, and aggressive (where are my metalcore fans at), and other times, it’s through passionate, tranquil, and patient performances.

Self-described “Canadian” singer-songwriter Bells Larsen falls into the latter category, and their new album Good Grief is stirring, personal, and sonically compelling; 12 songs, packaged into a journal-like series coloured by tragedy and change.

Bells, who bounces between Montreal and Toronto in almost equal measure, was in town for POP Montreal, the indie art festival that has become well-known for putting a spotlight on emerging Canadian talent (and then some).

With the festival in full swing at the end of September, we met at Ursa, a small underground venue in the Mile End, and the venue for their performance later that night (spoiler alert: it went well).

A few hours ahead of opening, we found a small corner against aconcrete wall with hanging lights and a small microphone between us. Despite my poor judgement choosing to record with a band sound-checking in the back room, our conversation stayed focused as we discussed Bells’ new record and its life-changing backstory.

Stream the record here while you read our conversation below.

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Kane Wilkinson: I’m Kane from Dusty Organ, and I’m here with singer-songwriter Bells Larsen. How are you today?

Bells Larsen: I’m great, Kane. How are you?

KW: Good, good. We’re kind of cuddling up here in Montreal during POP Montreal and, tonight you’re performing at the Next Door Records showcase. We’re in the beautiful venue of Ursa in…this the mile end?

BL: This is the mile end. Yeah. We are right at Park & St. Viateur which is kind of like the Times Square of the Mile End.

Kane Wilkinson: That’s cool.

BL: Yeah!

KW: Cause you’re kind of from Montreal, but also not; you’ve kind of wandered everywhere.

BL: A little bit. I’ve been a bit nomadic over these past couple years. I’m from Toronto, but did a lot of back and forth from Toronto to Montreal when I was a kid. Cause I have family friends here and I’ve always loved it. I’ve been living here officially for three and a bit years.

KW: Oh, sweet. Cause you don’t really have, you know, a home base. And I know some people like to categorize artists from where they’re from; you’re like a Canadian singer-songwriter.

BL: Yes. My partner is Quebecois and we talk a lot about the difference in feeling and culture between being Quebecois and being Canadian. They always refers to me as their Canadian boyfriend.

KW: That’s sweet.

BL: But I don’t really feel Canadian. I feel very Torontonian, if that makes sense. Toronto feels like, I don’t know if you feel this way to being in Toronto, but sometimes Toronto feels like its own thing, you know what I mean?

KW: Yeah, especially compared to Ottawa or Halifax, or Montreal.

BL: Totally.

KW: It gets a bad rap for reasons, but also it’s like a really great city. Actually, speaking of Toronto, you just had your album release party.

BL: I did.

KW: In Toronto and Montreal.

BL: Yes.

KW: And do you have a favourite of the two?

BL: Toronto.

KW: I knew that answer already. I was pandering for that one.

BL: Yeah. I love the Toronto one. The more I play, the more I get used to the fact that there will be people in the audience who were not there with me, experiencing the things that I’m writing and singing about as they happened.

And when you’re at the early stage in your career, there’s this comfort that the people in the audience will connect with what you’re singing about because they were there.

KW: Yeah.

BL: And in Montreal, lots of friends there, but none of them were like…they’re all new, right? In Toronto there were a lot of like old friends and family and who I go way back with, but then also a bunch of new people too. And I love that mix.

Also the band was great, the sound was great; it was just a great day.

KW: It’s a good energy; the Drake is a really nice venue.

But that’s the thing, ’cause this album that you just put out Good Grief is a tremendous record. And also it’s a very heavy record despite the intimacy of it, which I think is really a nice juxtaposition.

BL: Thank you.

KW: And the title itself too, Good Grief.

Bells Larsen: Mm-hmm.

KW: Why don’t you explain kind of like the backstory of it, ’cause I know it is, it’s a bit of a pun too, I feel. But it also really has like a heavy story behind it. How did you kinda start writing Good Grief?

BL: I did an interview not so long ago where the interviewer asked me like three times if I was referring to Charlie Brown, and I was like, no *chuckles*.

But I started writing Good Grief when I was 19, and I was fresh out of high school, about to go to university and then just when I started university, my first love from when I was 15, 16 died by suicide. It really hit me and coloured the next couple years; arguably still colours parts of my life.

Most of the album, if not about like breakups or other sort of universal life experience events, it’s about the loss of this person. So the record is a lot about grief, but the act of writing it, recording it, and releasing it for me was a way to very literally take my grief and make it good.

It was super cathartic to do at that release party. A bunch of my high school friends who knew her were there, and that again is just a way to take my grief and make it good. But then also, love this sort of old expression, like, ah, good grief.

KW: Which, you know, the Charlie Brown ties in a little bit.

BL: Yeah, for sure. It was between good grief, and I was maybe going to title it after one of the tunes…didn’t do that, or ‘Good Mourning’, but that was too farfetched.

KW: I think I’ve also, I think the Good Mourning thing, I’ve seen it a few times I think with like emo bands and stuff like that.

BL: Oh, really? Okay. True.

KW: It’s a very common pun in the emo world, so I think you kind of dodged a bullet there, I think. Not that it’s a bad idea, but good grief was a bit better too because the mix of you know, grieving and finding the good parts coming out of it is really interesting.

And that theme is put into the record on the track’s “Wasp” and it’s “Reprise”, which I think is really interesting. What inspired that song? Because I know it comes from another track.

BL: Yeah, so “Wasps” and then “Wasps (Reprise)” are not technically my songs, but they’re ironically my favourite songs on the record.

When my producer friend Graham and I were recording, we had 10 songs – they were like ready to record and stuff. And I knew that I wanted to have some kind of like interlude-y type thing, whether that was like a voice memo or an instrumental kind of a-là like “DVD Menu” by Phoebe Bridgers, which starts Punisher, just a thing to sort of ease you into the record.

Because it doesn’t really feel to me like a record that you just like put on and it starts, I wanted to vibe. So when I was recording, I was looking through a bunch of old voice memos and videos to see if I could find anything. And I found this old, really janky camcorder video from the 10th grade where me and all of my friends are singing around this campfire. And we’re singing the Sufjan Steven song, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Out to Get Us” – classic Sufjan with his like really long title.

And the weirdest thing is that we’re singing that song in the exact same key in the 10th grade as the first song on Good Grief, which is “Tongue Tied”.

And the last song on the record, which is “People Who Mean So Much To Me”, the voice that you can hear most prominently in this old found footage thing, is the voice of my first love who died. And the lyrics that she’s saying, they’re about loss and so it just felt really serendipitous, I really needed to use it.

Her mom gave me her blessing. And then the song itself, “The Predatory Wasp…”, it’s a song about young love, queer love lost love which are all very much in Good Grief.

Then for the first one, “Wasps”, it kind of turns into this like synth-y thing and gets really grandiose. Then it goes right into “Tongue Tied”, which is the first Bells song. And then for the reprise, me and Graham got grown up me to sing along and then the voice memo kind of fades into just me singing. It’s hard to describe, but it makes sense if you hear it.

KW: And the idea of like the wasps and everything too, plays back to that. Because the lyric “loss is like a wasp sting” is very accurate in a weird way. For your experience, would you describe it as such?

BL: Yeah. Big time.

Like before I even knew I was gonna write Good Grief, there’s a lyric in the Sufjan song: “I see a wasp on the length of my arm”, and my very first tattoo when I was 19 – a wasp right here. I just love wasp iconography, I guess. After Cara died, this song and also just wasps in general, took on this whole other meaning.

And I’m Jewish, but I’m not really – like I’m not super religious, but, you know, I see signs in stuff just as much as the next guy. And so whenever I see a wasp, it like hurts so good, you know?

KW: Yeah, when I see a wasp I just wanna run the other direction.

BL: Very fair.

KW: The concept of “Teenage Love” that is on the record, you put a new music video for that too, which was a really, a beautiful music video. This is coming from a cold-hearted Aries. That actually hit me in the feels.

BL: Nice.

KW: So, emotional people out there, good luck.

But so for people who don’t know, you interviewed random people in Montreal and asked them what love is to them. Were there any answers that really surprised you?

BL: For sure. There was this one moment and it was like one of my favourite music video making memories I have in the last year. Me and the director, who’s my friend Dom, talked to a bunch of young people because it was like half strangers and then half young people who we know.

We were definitely missing some older folks and I feel like there’s just like so much potential for a rich story there. So we went to a neighbourhood in Montreal called NDG where there are a lot of old people and we went to a park like early on a Sunday morning, you know, old people…

KW: Going for their walks.

BL: Exactly. A lot of people said “no thanks, I don’t wanna talk to you” and that’s fair. But this one dude who did make it in the video, he says something about like, “love to me is love for the mother, the father and the neighbour”.

We didn’t show this in the video, but he actually didn’t speak English or French. He spoke Ukrainian-Russian. So the way we got to communicate with him was literally just through Google Translate, where we were both kinda like speaking into Google Translate in our phones and then like showing it to the other person.

KW: Wow. That’s actually really cool. I remember that part of his, he had one of the more unique answers too, because a lot of people were talking about very romantic love.

BL: Yeah, for sure.

KW: That’s great. And in terms of the stranger aspect too, like one of my favourite tracks on the record is “People Who Mean So Much To Me”. I’m glad it’s been doing well too. I looked on Spotify has the most streams.

BL: Thanks!

KW: But I guess, branching off of your philosophy background, the idea that we’re going to continually meet strangers and some of them will unravel into this deeper connection is so compelling. And I love the direct imagery you kind of create with that song.

BL: Thanks.

KW: I was wondering, has anything like that happened more recently? Cause I know some of the stories are a bit older, but has there been somebody in your life that was a stranger and now they’re much more?

BL: I mean, in little ways, yeah.

I don’t know why I’m this kind of person, but whenever I take an Uber, I’m always making friends with the Uber driver. I wrote that song in the first wave vibes, you know, like when we weren’t really meeting anyone, which is why I wrote that ’cause I was just missing organic connections.

But thankfully in the last year there’s been like a lot more opportunity to do that. I’m not huge on the TikTok thing. I have very mixed feelings about TikTok as a platform, but I met a friend recently on TikTok who makes a bunch of like funny music content. He makes funny jokes about being someone who likes Big Thief and Adrienne Lenker and like being soft and kind of oat milk like that, you know?

KW: Oat milk, that’s a good term.

BL: Like just kind of crunchy, you know? And he made a TikTok about moving from Halifax to Montreal, so something that I did. So I just messaged him and was like, do you wanna hang out? Do you wanna be friends?

KW: It’s that easy.

BL: Yeah. I made him some sourdough we like on our first friend date and he’s coming to the show tonight.

KW: Oh, sick.

BL: Yeah.

KW: Do you make bread often?

BL: I do, I’m pretty good. I like making sourdough. I started right before the pandemic.

KW: Oh, so you were ahead of the trend?

BL: Ever so slightly. I was part of a gay choir in Montreal and one of the other altos had this starter that they brought for me at the rehearsal.

But I’ve been taking to like focaccia and bagels, challah, that kind of stuff. Because it doesn’t take as long – sourdough takes like fucking forever.

KW: Wow, that’s interesting. I should have asked you to bring some bread for me.

BL: I’m sorry.

KW: Now I feel like an idiot.

BL: I’m making focaccia tomorrow.

KW: If I do get some focaccia, I’ll let [the readers] know how it goes.

Yesterday we had a brief conversation about your future releases and stuff too. And the one thing that I found really interesting was your transition has been a very critical part of your music recently which is an interesting thing because we were talking about how there aren’t that many prominent names in the trans community that are making music and just kind of sharing that story.

BL: Yeah.

KW: And you’re almost going to be doing it very actively because you have all these older tracks and you want to blend them with your new…I’m not gonna put words in your mouth. How would you kind of explain that?

BL: I won’t say too, too much, but what I will say is that I have a whole other project in the can. I didn’t know if…I hate the word journey cause it’s so corny, but I didn’t know if part of my “journey” as a trans person was gonna be testosterone until probably around a year ago.

As of today actually I’m six months on T and I realized it was something that I wanted to do that would enhance my quality of life but the thing I kept hearing over and over again, whether it was people in the industry or from my dad, was, “what about your voice”?

And there are musicians I know, trans musicians I know who are not on testosterone and share their music that way and that works great for them. And then trans musicians I know who like very much are adamantly like, this is me post voice drop. I’ve never seen any kind of like marriage of the two, or much music that actually talks about what it means to be trans or just about gender identity in general.

So what I will say is that there is another project in the can that’s very much about gender that I intend to have marry the past and the present in the future, whatever that kind of means.

KW: Yeah, I wanted to bring it up ’cause I think it’s such a creative and unique situation to be in.

BL: Thank you.

KW: It’s cool you’re taking advantage of it. In the weird colossal way of the universe.

BL: Thank you. The songs on Good Grief are…it’s funny and you might have noticed this at the Toronto show – you’ll notice the songs that I sing are, pretty much like every month on T, my songs go down a capo. It’s cool; I hope like no one feels cheated out, that the songs that they’re hearing are like a little bit different, but yeah, it’s cool.

KW: In terms of becoming into this new identity – you know, six months with T and everything – I’m curious about how you feel about that while incorporating that into your social media presence as well.

I was going through your Instagram; have you had insecurities or worries about shifting on your image and everything like that? Or has that been pretty smooth for you?

BL: It’s been pretty smooth.

I’ve been pretty much every letter in the LGBT alphabet, so I’m used to coming out. I’ve been out as queer for like 10 years, pretty much. I’ve been out as non-binary for three, four years, but the way I think about it: I’ve always been this, I’ve always been me.

It’s just that I haven’t had the language or the tools or the know-how to express that or to articulate that, to express it through music even. So whether or not I have long hair – there’s tons of pictures on my Instagram still of me with long hair – or whether or not I post a bunch of pictures of me shirtless ’cause I love my body, and I have a flat chest.

I think those things can exist in the same universe and that doesn’t make me like anymore or less me. I haven’t posted like a ton about the testosterone thing just because in some ways that feels more vulnerable than getting top surgery.

At first the surgery thing like that was just for me, but then with testosterone, there’s a lot more tangible and noticeable changes that people will hear and see, and in their own time and that kind of thing. I think this new project is probably gonna be where, and like how I express that and showcase that.

For now, I’m taking monthly updates on this really chunky video camera that’s from 1998. Just kind of to give my little update videos that home video type feel, as though they’re happening in real time.

KW: Yeah. To recap it.

BL: Exactly. Yeah.

KW: That’s really interesting. It’s such, like I said, it’s such a unique perspective, especially in the Canadian music industry.

So if you haven’t already, go listen to Good Grief. It’s a wonderful record. And have a good time at your show tonight and I’ll be seeing you around more!

I’m expecting bread.

BL: Yeah, yeah – you gotta let me know what you want. Oh, there’s a Portuguese bread. You’re Portuguese?

KW: Yeah.

BL: Oh boy. It’s called ‘papo secos’. I’ve made those with a friend before. They’ve got little nipples.

KW: That’s impressive. That’s, it’s, I’m sure it’s pretty easy but…

BL: There’s like a technique to give in the bread, the nips.

KW: It’s very easy to eat for sure. That’s my only experience with papo secos.

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(This interview was originally recorded on September 30th, 2022)