Burs Find Their Center on Significance, Otherness
Burs. Photo credit: Paige Paton.
On release day, Toronto band Burs answered my video call like family waking up together with a cup of coffee. Three of them – Lauren Dillen, Ray Goudy, and Aidan McConnell – appeared from the same room in Toronto, crowded around a laptop with ease. Devon Savas, joining separately from Hamilton, popped in moments later with a cheerful, “Good morning, sweetie pies.” Within minutes they were pulling LPs off shelves to show me their inspirations and graciously reminiscing about the times they’ve all made music together and within their communities. It set the tone: Burs isn’t just a band, they’re a little ecosystem.
That closeness pulses through Significance, Otherness, their second full-length record and the first made with a label partner (Birthday Cake Records). It arrives after a two-year cycle of writing, refining, and perhaps more crucially, playing live. For a band that has always blurred folk tenderness with soothing, head-tilting experimentation, the stage became the workshop. “Almost all our songs start as acoustic folk songs,” Goudy explains. “Then they become whatever they want to become once they’re filtered through the four of us.”
On earlier releases, Burs built songs in a studio-first, mosaic-like way layering parts and textures. This time, the songs had more time to grow. Decisions about tempo, layering, and even the emotional choices of the tracks were informed by nights spent in rooms with audiences. “This record is more honest to the folk ethos. We had performance to lean on before committing anything to tape,” Savas says.
Choosing singles was also partly shaped by this connection. “Soil” and “Black Flies” weren’t just strong reintroductions, but songs most requested and representative of the the two poles the record lives between: earthy, rooted folk with an alternative shine.
The title Significance, Otherness emerged from a long period of reflection and from the artwork. Toronto multidisciplinary artist Paige Paton, a longtime close collaborator (and as the band jokes, a “fifth Beatle of Burs”) created a collaged, bisected image of a rose, one clear and another overexposed. It became a poetic metaphor and reaction from the band after seeing Paton’s work. “The title is like a two-word poem and a bit of a pun,” Goudy shares. “It’s in reaction to the art, while also trying to hold onto the themes of the album — duality, relationships, distance, and closeness.” McConnell adds, “I guess what ties together three different lyricists on this record is just more of a closeness, the immediate few that you need to survive and to move with them through the world and the otherness deals a bit more with the space in between that can be with individual subjects.”
They noticed, only after sequencing the record, that the tracklist itself seemed to fall into two distinct sides that mirror the title’s two halves. It’s serendipity that seems to follow Burs, with small things revealing themselves over time. Paton’s influence also goes deeper than visuals. She designed the entire layout (the band’s first physical release), shot the press photos, and even sang on the album’s closing voice memo-style track called “Change is All Around Us." “I was talking about [Paton] with a friend last night and how it kind of feels like we’ve been growing together,” Dillen says of Paton. “We’ve known her for six years and in that time, our music got better, her art became thematically developed. We just couldn't really imagine anybody else undertaking the art for this project.”
Burs aren’t shy about the difficult relationship artists have with streaming platforms. Instead of pulling their music from Spotify in a symbolic move that can hurt emerging artists more than platforms, they created a playlist that protests Spotify directly on their own profile. Pinned at the top of their artist page, it urges listeners to take their money elsewhere. “It felt more effective than disappearing. It puts the choice in listeners’ hands, and it’s communal. Anyone can add themselves to the playlist,” Dillen explains.
Goudy calls Spotify’s public display of monthly listeners “one of the biggest acts of bullying against artists. That can turn people off from checking an artist out and you never find that on any other platform. And then adding to that — war profiteering, AI, etc., obviously we don't want any part to do with that.” and the band openly hopes for a future where streaming looks radically different. Yet they also talk about the joy that powers them through like the person at a show who’s never heard them before, the live versions that evolve, the sense that connection, not metrics, is the real measure of meaning.
The band is gearing up for release shows and they’re thrilled to bring the songs into new shapes. “‘Free Being’ and ‘Hourglass’ have totally different live arrangements now,” McConnell shares. “It’s refreshing for us and the audiences.”
“Sorrows,” Savas’ towering, slow-burning composition, is a personal favourite to play with an alternative-leaning epic that markes one of the band’s boldest departures. And as they being dreaming about Western Canadian dates next spring, they’re excited by the possibility of playing not just the songs from Significance, Otherness, but new fragments that will eventually become LP3.
When asked for local shoutouts, they didn’t hesitate – instead reaching for records behind them, holding them up to their webcams in true music fan fashion. They spoke with love about Sister Ray’s Believer, a record Dillen sings on, which connected them directly with producer Eli Browning who worked on Significance, Otherness. Georgia Harmer’s new album, on which Savas contributes and Rachel Bobbitt, whose Swimming Towards the Sand is considered an essential Canadian release. Last but not least is A Horse Named Friday, whose community-first ethos inspires them. These aren’t just influences, but circles of friendship, mentorship, shared stages, and swapped ideas. Similarly to how they lean into collaboration with other musicians, even more so do the members of Burs lean on each other, sharing responsibilities across arrangements and vocal duties so that every song feels like a true blend of all four members. It’s a chemistry that ignites Significance, Otherness, into a record that feels lived-in and fully realized.
