Holly Arrowsmith

Multi-Award-winning Americana artist Holly Arrowsmith and her all-star band tour Aotearoa New Zealand in support of Holly’s new record, Blue Dreams. An alt-country opus, Blue Dreams features “Desert Dove”, which took home the award for 2024 APRA Country Song of the Year and has been reworked by Melbourne choir One More Chorus. Singles “Blue Dreams” and “Neon Bright” have won Holly radio play across Australia and the United States as well as New Zealand.

Holly tours with an incredible lineup of musicians: Joe McCallam on drums (Nadia Reid, Marlon Williams, Tami Neilson); award-winning engineer Tom Healy on guitar/pedal steel (Bic Runga, Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams); Anita Clark aka Motte, on violin/keyboard (Don McGlashan, The Eastern, Phoenix Foundation) and award-winning producer Chris Wethey on bass (Jack Page, Emily Browning)

With support from Jessie Shanks (The Eastern)
Having traversed the countryside for the last fifteen or so years in New Zealand’s hardest working band The Eastern, Jessie Shanks is a renowned guitar picking, banjo frailing, foot stomper with a sweet southern voice and a raft of songs built from years on the road. Shanks has cultivated her own unique approach to roots music, performing haunting contemporary folk tunes steeped in time and place and woven from her countless travels.

About Holly Arrowsmith:

Born on the high desert in Santa Fe New Mexico and raised in the mountains of Southern New Zealand, multi award-winning songwriter Holly Arrowsmith is both poet and storyteller. With the conviction that the deeply personal is also the 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 and alt-country movement, Arrowsmith’s sound pays homage to tradition without being too reverential. She embodies Americana through her mastery of vocal dynamics, and nuanced lyrics, creating a gorgeous sonic portrait of life’s ups and downs, real emotion and optimism, a baptism by sparks. Holly shape-shifts from powerful to intimate with ease.

Arrowsmith has won the hearts of music lovers close to home and abroad, touring throughout Aotearoa, Australia, and North America, and sharing stages with Sixto Rodriguez, CW Stoneking, Tami Neilson, Jessica Pratt, Nadia Reid, Marlon Williams and Tiny Ruins.

NPR described Arrowsmith’s music as ‘Utterly beautiful, anchored by a voice that pulls you close and cancels the noise outside.’ In 2020 she was awarded the APRA Country Song of the Year (\Slow Train Creek\), after receiving the prestigious Tui Award for Folk Album of the Year in 2017 for her opus For The Weary Traveller. In 2024 Holly was awarded the APRA Country Music Song of the Year for \Desert Dove\, the first single off her 2024 album Blue Dreams.

If a great song can act as a mirror for the listener’s own inner landscape, then this is songwriting at its finest.