Born on the high desert of Santa Fe New Mexico and raised in the mountains of Southern New Zealand, multi award-winning songwriter Holly Arrowsmith was forged in an unlikely matrimony of place. But from her home in Aotearoa, she is carving out a path all her own. 

With the conviction that the deeply personal is also universal, Arrowsmith's lyrics orbit around what it means to be human, and offer up prayer-like responses to our most intimate struggles.

A leader in New Zealand’s contemporary Folk, Alt-Country and Americana movement, Rolling Stone praised her 2024 album Blue Dreams as “A stunning and heartbreaking Americana record that shows why Arrowsmith is one of the country’s top Singer-Songwriters right now” 

Arrowsmith has toured throughout New Zealand, Australia, and North America and shared stages with Sixto Rodriguez, CW Stoneking, Tami Neilson, Jessica Pratt, Nadia Reid, Marlon Williams, Tiny Ruins and Angus & Julia Stone.

NPR described her 2018 record ‘A Dawn I Remember’ as ‘Utterly beautiful, anchored by a voice that pulls you close and cancels the noise outside.’ In 2024 Holly was awarded the APRA Best Country Song for the second time for "Desert Dove" a single from her critically acclaimed new record ‘Blue Dreams.’ 

Recorded and produced by Thomas Healy (Marlon Williams, Julia Jacklin) over a three-year period, ‘Blue Dreams’ was born in the midst of a momentous time for the musician, with recording beginning when she was seven months pregnant. It’s no surprise that Blue Dreams is suffused with weighty themes: “It rotates around opposing forces like hope and doubt, birth and death, divinity and humanity. Also, birds somehow became a central theme – river birds, swans, desert doves. I think life felt really constricting at times when I was writing these songs and birds were like a symbol of freedom.”

Going through a pregnancy, both a deeply personal and innately universal experience, Arrowsmith courageously offered all of herself in her album’s ten tracks, capturing her transition into motherhood both vividly and calmly. Despite the upheaval of that time in her life, Arrowsmith often sings with a confronting serenity on Blue Dreams, as if these songs were recorded in the soothing glow of hindsight. 

Blue Dreams is perhaps most notable for “Desert Dove,” a standout track that earned Arrowsmith her second APRA Country Music Song of the Year win. “Desert Dove” is typical of Arrowsmith, a mixture of dreamy flourishes and somber realism. The heartfelt ballad was inspired by the loss of her grandfather, a “true cowboy” who ran a trading post in New Mexico frequented by Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Patti Smith.

Great care can be felt throughout ‘Blue Dreams’ construction. With an all-star band (Cass Basil, Alex Freer, Tom Healy and Anita Clark) these songs herald in an exciting new direction for Arrowsmith. As an album of two halves, one basking in driven energetic Americana, the other adhering to more traditional country and folk compositions; there is the iconic cover artwork, a cyanotype of her Grandmother’s bucking horse brooch designed by her husband; “I love how it subtly pays homage to ‘that’ Joni Mitchell record, and to Blue Horses by Mary Oliver, a poet I cite in my song ‘Could’ve Been a River.’ Other writers and artists were my muses for this work, especially because of the social isolation of the pandemic and early motherhood. I lived through books and music.”  And there is care, of course, in the songwriting, which is vulnerable, brave- often darkly humorous, and always exquisite.