Photo: Naomi Haussman
In May this year, Holly Arrowsmith won Best Country Music Song at the Country Music Honours in Gore, for her song ‘Desert Dove’. It was written in tribute to her late grandfather, who would feed birds each morning at his home in Arizona.
Arrowsmith said a certain dove would wake her while visiting him, and when she heard the same dove in NZ, the feeling of loss and distance inspired the song.
It features on her third album, Blue Dreams, an immediately impressive collection made with evident care.
The definition of country music has stretched in recent years, a development that’s perhaps overdue. Arrowsmith is often labelled alt-country, but to me these songs are a hair’s breadth away from folk.
The title track ‘Blue Dreams’ has signifiers like steel string guitar, close harmonies, and a certain lope to its rhythm.
But on entries like ‘Neon Bright’, the margins get a bit more blurry.
With lyrics about needing some “real natural light”, and neon bright making the “darkness look nice”, Arrowsmith communicates the central metaphor clearly, and has since confirmed ‘Neon Bright’ is about depression.
She was pregnant with her first child when recording began, and maybe this is a reach, but on ‘Something Small’, when she sings “something small will save me”, wispy vocals over hopeful chords, I wondered if she was referring to her child.
Motherhood comes up again on ‘Womb of Venus’ in which, according to liner notes, she contemplates what it feels like to be in utero. The song is buoyed near its end by subtle string arrangements by Anita Clarke, also known as Motte.
Blue Dreams was produced by Tom Healy, whose loaded CV includes doing the same for The Chills and Marlon Williams, as well as Tiny Ruins, the band he plays in. Cass Basil and Alex Freer from the same outfit also appear, and through the album the three join Arrowsmith with arrangements that cushion but seldom intrude.
I’m struck by how calm she always sounds, and how that suits her wandering, philosophical songs.
Arrowsmith was born in New Mexico, but raised in NZ’s South Island. When she leans into her kiwi consonants, the result, intentional or not, evokes a Southern American drawl.
A late album highlight is ‘Night Flight’. When she sings “The river birds are dipping and diving into the inky black”, joined by a subtle vocal harmony, and a hint of Clarke’s violin, it’s one of many moments here where the delivery feels inseparable from the words, a testament to her fully-formed and finely honed songcraft.
