She comes to depict this universal longing through commonplace imagery: a video store, windows and a big red barn. “I’ve seen pictures of when it was first painted and it’s bright, bright red. Now it’s burgundy and it’s chipped, so it’s kind of like how things change over time,” she says. The album’s cover art depicts this duality, featuring the image of the red barn plucked from her grandmother’s box of slides of the retreat. 

“If you don’t take time to acknowledge and appreciate and really get into the things that are happening around you and that have happened around you, you might still carry them in a way that you don’t want to, in a way that’s too heavy for you,” Paesler explains. “That picture, the idea of the photographer looking at the people on the porch and the people on the porch looking at the photographer, there being this moment and, in that moment, you don’t know what any of them are thinking, you don’t know what’s going on there, but it’s never going to happen again.”

 A registered social worker, empathy runs deep through Paesler’s life, both personally and professionally. Working in harm reduction while at university on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area disproportionately affected by drug related issues and social problems, she maintains it is “something that’s very near and dear to my heart, both as a job but also just in general as something that I care about for my friends and my family.” Her own experience with depression in high school inspired her poetry, some of which now acts as lyrics for the EP. She finds the pull to music as “an internal feeling and less of an external circumstantial thing.”

Emerging as a self-identified “sad girl” musician, Paesler’s artistry reaches beyond melancholy – “as selfish and self-indulgent as the act of writing, recording and releasing music is, I do love that somewhere, hopefully somebody listens to it and it resonates with them,” she says. This desire parallels Paesler’s own respite in Bon Iver’s earlier albums, works she asserts are “pivotal for the whole indie genre and indie folk music.” “For me personally, it just taught me so much about what music could be like and how it didn’t have to be perfect,” she continues.

This new EP in its entirety feels like the soundtrack to a family photo album perused exclusively on rainy days. It’s personal but it’s universal, raw yet refined. It could be a younger sister to Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, encapsulating deep emotion and layering them in a perfectly imagined setting. In this case, that setting is Paesler’s retreat.

Despite a burgeoning music career, Paesler remains wary of social media’s demands. “I feel like if I wanted to make videos online, I would’ve made videos online,” she admits. “I understand that it’s a good way to reach people and it’s a way to see if people resonate with the music you’re making, and that’s important and I appreciate that fact. But I just don’t like doing it.” Yet, even in her disdain for digital branding, she finds joy in the bizarre treasures of Facebook Marketplace. Her favourite find? A toilet-shaped ashtray featuring a tiny, hatted man preparing to be “flushed,” with a whimsical inscription: “Goodbye cruel world.”

Paeslar is unequivocally herself. Her charm is actualized in person and whether she agrees or not, her scattered Instagram posts of wacky Facebook Marketplace finds simply add to it. Her music is a refuge for listeners, a place where raw emotion becomes a shared experience. Whatever the industry has in store for her next steps, her career was born out of care and seems to be in the right hands for nurturing.