Lauren Dillen’s songs are arborescent, ever-growing outward with tender determination. This suits the Toronto singer-songwriter, whose love of plants extends from the metaphors in her songs to the plant cyanotypes she crafts as album artwork to her work as a tattoo artist specializing in vintage botanical designs. With a mindful approach, Dillen’s folk songs uncover the understory by keenly observing what’s on the surface. As she sings, ‘we watch the leaves shoot up as the roots shoot down.’

While Dillen’s soothing voice and deft musicianship can be heard through her work with folk-rock quartet Burs, her solo project is all about self-work and following her instincts. In recent years, she has brought this work to stages across Canada, opening for artists such as Charlotte Cornfield, Bahamas, and Great Lake Swimmers, as well as performing at festivals and touring extensively across the country, steadily building a reputation for intimate but expansive live performances.

Blue Star, her debut EP, sees Dillen emerging from a “very passionate and difficult” time in her life. “My early twenties were all about working hard and striving for perfection despite what my body wanted, acting on obligation rather than joy,” Dillen explains. “I’m learning that it’s my job to advocate for my body as if it were my small child.” The result of this growth can be heard throughout Blue Star, with Dillen feeling more confident than ever to articulate just what she means: “My channels are clear, and I can be honest.”

The record is anchored in questions of identity and how it becomes attached to people and things. The focus track, “Chains/Rings”, unfolds as a coming-of-age lesson in detaching self-worth from romantic validation and breaking cycles of external approval. “Deepest Part of Love” and “Candles” both turn toward long-term relationships and commitment, examining what it takes to build and sustain healthy love.

“One More Time for the Road”, the first release from the project, moves through the disorientation of relapse and return, circling familiar emotional patterns and the pull toward once-familiar forms of validation.

The performance on the EP’s title track, “Blue Star”, draws directly from Dillen’s work in Toronto’s ambient music scene, using a freeze pedal vocal effect to create a suspended, reflective space within the record. Functioning as a pause in the narrative, it gently compels the listener into a moment of reflection.

Dillen began the EP with a day of recording at the National Music Centre in Calgary. In the studio that houses one of Neil Young’s microphones and Elton John’s original songwriting piano, Dillen brought these songs to life with gentle production support from engineer Graham Lessard (The Barr Brothers, Timber Timbre). Inspired in part by ambient organist Molly Raben, Dillen found herself drawn to the studio’s pipe organ (as she puts it, “that’s an insane instrument, I must use it!”), creating a reedy atmosphere that runs through much of the record.

The throughline of Dillen’s music over the years has always been truth-seeking. With refreshing, intentional arrangements, she shares songs with the intimacy of sharing a garment. “These songs aren’t necessarily the truth,” Dillen explains, “but I write them out to explore the truth, to explore what something actually looks like.” Dillen unveils the feelings that linger behind relationships, where the most precious details surface only in soft light.

The closer, “Wildflowers of North America”, draws its name from an inherited botanical textbook marked by a sticky note from her grandmother on a page featuring the blue star flower, reframing the EP’s central question into something perhaps more delicate: not only who we are in relation to others, but what remains in the fleeting texture of shared moments.

With a fresh excitement for performing her music and a newfound connection to her own truth, Lauren Dillen is basking in all that arises. “I don’t have to push towards the things that I want,” Dillen reflects, “I can just allow them to unfold.”