Lauren Dillen is a Toronto-based tattoo artist and musician. As a member of the band Burs, Dillen is one of four musicians cultivating an ecosystem of expansive psych-folk and rock. When it comes to her solo music, Dillen’s approach is simpler. She distills the weighty chaos of being alive into quiet moments using the soft vibrations of an acoustic guitar and her warmly affecting voice. This is the sound of a sunset after a storm.

 

Dillen has had a lifelong passion for music and recalls first picking up the guitar and writing songs at summer camp in her early teens. While enrolled at Humber College’s jazz program, she met some of her future Burs bandmates when they played together in a Joni Mitchell ensemble. Since 2019, Dillen has released a handful of songs under her own name and in collaboration with other Toronto-based musicians.

“every-woman sore,” her latest solo release, is a breathtaking meditation on kinship and people who sustain her. “I give you my heart every time cause I see that your heart looks like mine,” she sings. Recorded in her home studio with Burs bandmate Ray Goudy, a series of plucked guitar notes are returned to again and again on “every-woman sore,” as if mimicking daily affirmations offered by those you are closest to. In Dillen’s own words, “‘every-woman sore’ is my reflection on how I’ve treated the women in my life in the past, how they have treated me, and the responsibilities that we carry.”

Dillen began writing “every-woman sore” in early 2024 when she, alongside numerous other artists, was taking a virtual songwriting workshop led by Adrianne Lenker (of Big Thief) through the School of Song. The guitar’s open tuning and Dillen’s tumbling melody is reminiscent of Lenker’s own solo work in addition to the modern folk sound of artists like Laura Marling and Hayley Heynderickx.

The release coincides with 2 dates performing with Bahamas on August 16/17 and her first offering on Toronto’s Victory Pool music label.