The Arrowsmiths moved to New Zealand when Holly was four. At first they lived in Alexandra in Central Otago, then settled in Arrowtown. It was here, set against the backdrop of the beautiful Southern Alps, that Arrowsmith’s musical journey truly began. She first picked up the guitar at age 12, inspired by her best friend, who was taking guitar lessons at school. As a teen, she began experimenting with songwriting. “It was sort of accidental,” she told Australian-based website Sunburnt Country Music in 2024. “I think I heard a song, and I thought, ‘I wanna write a song like that,’ and my way of practising was basically to kind of copy this song and see how I could change it or what I would do with it, and it kind of evolved from there.”
From these tentative beginnings, it took remarkably little time for Arrowsmith to develop a strong, poetic and distinctive songwriting voice. Drawing inspiration from nature and her rural surroundings, Arrowsmith was also becoming well-versed in poetry. She has spoken in interviews about her love for poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rumi, Mary Oliver and others, and how they have impacted her lyrics.
At 19, new new to performing, she began busking around Arrowtown
At the age of 19, Arrowsmith was confident enough in her newfound abilities that she quit her job to pursue music. Completely new to the business and to performing, she began busking around Arrowtown. It was around this time that she met producers Steven Roberts and Tom Lynch, who were so impressed by the young Arrowsmith that they offered to record her debut EP, gratis. The result was The River, a stripped-back offering released in 2013. Arrowsmith gave a free EP launch concert in a church hall in Queenstown; it was her first ever live show.
“I didn’t really know how long a set was meant to be,” she says. “I think I played, like, six songs, so the show was over so fast, and people wanted more so I just played the first song again! But it’s still one of my favourite shows I’ve ever done.”
After the EP release, Arrowsmith continued to work with Roberts and Lynch, and received a $10,000 AMP “Do Your Thing” scholarship to partially fund the production of her debut album. The producer duo started a project studio in Queenstown and spent the next two years working with Arrowsmith on this new body of work. The result was For the Weary Traveller, unveiled in July 2015. Setting Arrowsmith’s ethereal yet resonant voice against a full-band backdrop for the first time, the album nonetheless retains her folk spirit with acoustic guitar always at the forefront. In the lyrics, Arrowsmith displays a poetic sophistication and wisdom beyond her years. Nature imagery is front and centre, with multiple references to rivers and mountains. This is a mainstay of her work.
“That’s such a huge part of folk music throughout the ages,” she told John Cowan on his Newstalk ZB show Real Life in 2024. “This connection to the natural world, and appreciation for the fact that we are connected to it and we’re not separate from it. And there’s a spirituality in that, and just think it’s one of life’s richest gifts that we get to partake in.”
2015 was a year of great change for Arrowsmith, and not only because of her album release. It was the year she got married to woodworker and musician Michael Gilling, and also the year she left her beloved Arrowtown behind for the big city. Spurred on by a desire to pursue her music career, she moved with Gilling to Auckland.
“Arrowtown was a good place for me to start, but there isn’t a live music scene down there,” she said to NZ Musician in 2015. “What is there is dedicated to covers, but I guess that’s what you get in a tourist town. So it was a great place to start ... I wasn’t short of opportunity, but it was getting to the point where it was going to come that way.”
The move to Auckland only lasted a year, but provided fertile ground for songwriting inspiration. Arrowsmith began to write about feeling out of place in the city, and missing home and nature. By 2016, Arrowsmith and Gilling had already packed up and moved to Christchurch; not much more rural than Auckland, but at least a little closer to home. “I’m just a South Island girl at heart,” she told Stuff in 2017.
‘For the Weary Traveller’ was awarded the 2016 Tui for Best Folk Album
It was after this move that For the Weary Traveller was awarded the 2016 Tui for Best Folk Album, a remarkable achievement for someone so early in her career. She travelled back to Auckland to receive the award at the Auckland Folk Festival, before embarking on an American tour in support of Zach Winters. It was her first time returning to the United States since she was four, and it was a life-changing experience for her. She considered moving to the US, but ended up returning to Christchurch.
Arrowsmith began to work with Lynch and Roberts on her second album, this time begun in a project studio in the small South Island town of Colac Bay. Finishing touches were done in the Sitting Room in Lyttelton, where Arrowsmith worked with award-winning engineer and producer Ben Edwards (Marlon Williams, Julia Jacklin, The Eastern).
The first taste of this new project came in December 2017 with ‘Love Together’, a light, playful love song in which Arrowsmith sings, “I’ve got no credentials, I’ve got no ID / I don’t have a home, and I sure don’t have no money/ they say If you’ve got love, then you’ve got everything.” The song didn’t get a full-release campaign; instead Arrowsmith released it “on a whim, against all good advice”.
Nonetheless, the song got some traction when global superstar Taylor Swift added it to her Spotify playlist “Songs Taylor Loves (Past and Present)”. This caused an inevitable explosion of listens, and the song now sits at over three-million streams, Arrowsmith’s most played track on Spotify.
‘Love Together’ was followed by ‘Farewell’ in April 2018. This time, there was a full PR campaign and an unusual music video directed by Theresa Fryer, featuring Arrowsmith silhouetted by the fire intercut with shots of nature. The slow-building, heart-wrenching track was reportedly the first song written on the new album, begun as Arrowsmith was leaving Arrowtown for Auckland. Longing and loss come through strongly in the lyrics, where she sings, “I’m going to a forest where the river’s black with sin, and iron trees don’t bend in the breeze.”
‘Farewell’ is meditative, containing some of Arrowsmith’s most reflective lyricism
Arrowsmith followed ‘Farewell’ with one more single before the album release. ‘Every Kingdom’, released in May 2018, was a meditative song containing some of Arrowsmith’s strongest and most reflective lyricism. “Though every kingdom must fall,” she sings, “and words cannot be undone/ But all things can be made new/ In every sorrow a song.”
She penned the song while in California. “I wanted to try a new approach to my usual style of writing, and let my mind skip from idea to idea, without them necessarily needing to correlate,” she told Muzic.net.nz. The music video, directed by Andrew Hewson, is atmospheric in a similar way to ‘Farewell’. It features three women in the wilderness, plenty of creative camerawork and a running motif of water.
The full album, A Dawn I Remember, was released in June 2018. The collection of nine songs was more delicately and intimately presented than her first, though it still featured band instrumentation to a lesser capacity. A maturing is present in the songwriting, which feels more personal than her previous work. Much of it was written while in Auckland, and a feeling of melancholy permeates the record. Nature imagery is still ever-present, but it takes on a more nostalgic feel, as if it’s just out of reach. One of the highlights is stripped-back closer ‘Slow Train Creek’, which was written in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. This ode to the peace found in nature won the Best Country Song award at the 2019 NZ Country Music Awards and was nominated for an APRA Silver Scroll award.
Following the release of A Dawn I Remember, Arrowsmith took a break from recording and from the public eye. The next few years involved upheaval, endings and beginnings. Arrowsmith lost her grandfather, had her first baby during the Covid-19 pandemic, and struggled with mental health. Songwriting helped Arrowsmith to process this challenging time, and a new body of work emerged.
When it came to recording, she opted to work with Tiny Ruins’ Tom Healy rather than her usual team. Healy has production credits for high-profile artists such as Bic Runga and Marlon Williams. The pair met while Arrowsmith was playing support for Tiny Ruins. “I saw him playing guitar,” she told Sunburnt Country Music. “He’s a phenomenal guitarist, and I thought, ‘Oh, wow. I wanna work with him.’ I knew he was a producer.” Production took place at Mt Eden’s The Lab Recording Studios, starting while Arrowsmith was pregnant and finishing when she was a new mother.
January 2023 saw our first taste of it with the single ‘Desert Dove’, a plaintive, expansive piece of Americana rock which signifies a shift into more band-driven material. Written in tribute to her paternal grandfather, the song perfectly captures the desolate numbness of grief and the quiet determination of recovering from loss. “Praise to early waking grievers, to those who face the dawn,” Arrowsmith sings amidst shimmering guitar strums in the chorus. The lyric’s double meaning as both literal and metaphorical adds a poignant resonance.
The ‘Desert Dove’ video has a nostalgic feel reminiscent of family photos
The music video, directed by Robyn Jordaan, has a nostalgic feel reminiscent of family photos. It features Arrowsmith standing with a guitar in a desert-inspired set, a homage to the New Mexico desert her grandfather called home. ‘Desert Dove’ earned Arrowsmith her second Best Country Song win at the 2024 NZ Country Music Awards. Arrowsmith told Sunburnt Country Music that this song being a tribute to her grandfather made the win even more special. “I wanted to pay homage to him when he passed away, and I was really happy when it won, because I felt like I’d done him justice.”
Arrowsmith didn’t release a follow-up single for over a year, returning confidently with ‘Neon Bright’ in May 2024. Describing it as “a danceable song about depression,” Arrowsmith told Sunburnt Country Music that before she took it to Healy, it was a very different type of song. “It feels very sad when you’re just playing it on a guitar, but he could hear something else going on, and he really brought out this completely different feel that I wasn’t anticipating at all.”
Listening to the punchy Americana rock of the finished recording, it’s hard to imagine the song presented in any other way. The almost ironically sweet and floaty guitar riff, driving backing and Arrowsmith’s emphatic repetition of the word “neon” make for a song that stays in the listener’s head for days after only one listen. Arrowsmith once again turned to Robyn Jordaan for music video direction. The starkly evocative visual features Arrowsmith singing and playing various instruments, but other hands are controlling her movements, which she said symbolises depersonalisation and a loss of vitality. At the end of the video, Arrowsmith has a Western-style standoff with a cowboy villain played by singer-songwriter Delaney Davidson.
In June, the third and final single was released; the gently meandering ‘Blue Dreams’, which was to be the album’s title track. In the lyrics, Arrowsmith candidly addresses the trials of motherhood, something she feels isn’t sung about enough. “I wanted to hear a song that I could take comfort in, because I didn’t know it was meant to be this hard,” she told John Cowan. “And I couldn’t find a song, and I think probably most mothers are too busy to write songs, so there’s not many songs about being a mother. So I found the time to write that song that I wanted to hear.”
‘Blue Dreams’ wistfully addresses the loss of individuality that often comes with parenting
Arrowsmith has done well in tackling this subject. She sings wistfully of the loss of individuality that often comes with parenting a child; the necessity for being less self-focused combined with society’s habit of not noticing mothers. “I’m just a background dancer while the world goes on without me, go on and pass me by.” Still, Arrowsmith ends the song with her signature tender hopefulness, softly but confidently addressing her child: “And I love you, and you know what that means? I think we’re gonna make it through these blue dreams.”
The suitably blue-tinged music video, directed by Naomi Haussman, features Arrowsmith with a new short haircut, standing in the middle of a field and holding a piece of blue cloth behind her. At the climax of the song, Arrowsmith immerses herself in a pond – a powerful image which seems to signify acceptance of this new challenge.
The full album was released in June 2024. Its enigmatic cover art featured a brooch of a horse bucking, allegedly belonging to Arrowsmith’s paternal grandmother. Blue Dreams may be Arrowsmith’s strongest work to date. It’s both her most cohesive and most varied, her deepest and most polished, her most confident and most vulnerable. The first half of the record features band-driven material, seeing Arrowsmith take a leap into Americana with a definite rock edge, while the second half is more stripped back, closer to her acoustic roots.
Scratching the surface of Blue Dreams will have the listener discovering numerous extraordinary deep cuts with themes of endings and beginnings, death and rebirth, hardship and hope. On ‘Something Small’, Arrowsmith creates an evocatively desolate landscape both musically and lyrically, the soaring refrain of “something small will save me” feeling like a heavenly respite. She sings to the struggles of the common singer-songwriter in ‘Red Lit Room’, a driving, bass-heavy number in which she quips “you’ve got to be a little bit deluded to keep singing your sad songs.”
The raw, stripped-back ‘Mountain Lion’ paints a tear-jerking portrait of a loved one on her deathbed in a rest home and compares her to a mountain lion in a cage. And on the extraordinary ‘Womb of Venus’, Arrowsmith lets her philosophical musings go deeper than ever before against an atmospheric backdrop. “All I want is to return to the womb of Venus,” she sings. “Where I didn’t have a name/ Nothing to deny or to defend/ No knowledge of the state that I’m in/ Just held within my mother.” A journey from start to finish, Arrowsmith goes out on an exuberantly joyful note with the love song ‘Swan Dive’, a perfectly placed light at the end of the tunnel.
Arrowsmith promoted Blue Dreams with a national tour in October 2024. The tour featured Arrowsmith performing with a full band for the first time. Beforehand, she told John Cowan that she was really excited about this new experience. “I’ve mostly played solo or with an accompanist, and it’s so nice having your friends onstage with you, and it really takes the pressure off of you kind of holding it all down yourself, so I’m looking forward to that.” Her backing included Healy on guitar, Anita Clark on strings, Joe McCallum on drums and Chris Wethey on bass.
Following the tour, Arrowsmith settled back in Christchurch with her family. Though she plans to keep writing and releasing music, for the moment she is more focused on being a mother. “I’ve been told by interviewers that I don’t seem very ambitious,” she says. “But I’m ambitious to create the life that I want, and most of that is outside of my work.”
