Holly Arrowsmith will perform at the 2025 Auckland Folk Festival. Photo: Naomi Haussman
Fans of folk music often get stuck in nostalgia for artists of the 60s and 70s, says Holly Arrowsmith, but there is recent stuff that's also really good.
To celebrate contemporary folk music that's not what her dad would call 'shallow', the Christchurch singer-songwriter shares six of her favourite songs on The Mixtape.
Born in the New Mexico desert and raised in the Southern Alps, Arrowsmith says that as a kid she was shy but very curious and liked to listen and observe.
Ballet competitions gave her some performance experience and taught her musicality, then as a teen she faced her fears and started writing her own songs and performing live.
"I wanted to share this thing inside that I thought I had."
For Arrowsmith, the online self-marketing required by the music industry feels "quite contradictory" to her naturally private nature.
For her, music is a tool for building connections and community in person - not online.
"I want to move more into that and further and further away from the internet. If I wasn't a musician I would just cut all ties with social media happily. I'd be gone," she says.
Now parenting a child with her husband Michael Gilling, a woodworker, Arrowsmith has had to find a new way of balancing and honouring the two roles of musician and mother in recent years.
"All of a sudden I was just a lady with a pram and I had to kind of claw my way through to find out who I was again."
Depression and anxiety - which Arrowsmith lives with at times - show up on her latest album Blue Dreams.
She says when it came time to promote that album last year, her mental health wasn't great.
"It was kind of harrowing having to put myself out into the world when I wanted to be alone, and speak about these things and promote these songs - which felt like a little too close to home at the time."
While it can sometimes be emotional performing the songs from Blue Dreams, Arrowsmith says, it is also really cathartic.
"There's a moment where you know you're transferring or transforming something painful into something beautiful and then you get to see other people absorb that. It's like a full-circle moment."
In the future, she hopes to set up regular tours around the United States.
"I'd love to get on the festival circuit or something and escape the Christchurch winter every year and be somewhere else. That would be the total dream."
Holly Arrowsmith will perform at the Auckland Folk Festival, this weekend.
Holly Arrowsmith's Mixtape selections:
'God in Chicago' by Craig Finn
"I discovered Craig Finn a couple of years ago - he's an artist from Minnesota - and I was just totally captivated by his storytelling. I think one of the most skilful things a songwriter can do is to speak about mundane details and situations but make them beautiful.
"This is a song about him helping an ex-lover sell some drugs she finds in her brother's hockey bag after his death, and this road trip they go on to make the transaction.
"Most of the song he's just talking, and then as it builds subtly towards the end there's one chorus with singing and then he's almost talking in the correct key for the music at the end. It's really clever."
'Deep in Love' by Bonny Light Horseman
"I don't have a lot to say about this song other than it sounds so good and the production of these layered guitars and vocal harmonies are so lush and beautiful. I have listened to it a few hundred times and I'll probably listen to it a few hundred more."
'Wayward' by Vashti Bunyan
"This song is about her dreams for her life and how [she] wants to live in an alternative fashion and she doesn't want to be this woman who's at home, forgotten about.
"She is a fascinating person because she was kind of groomed by The Rolling Stones' manager in the 60s to become the next folk star. After her first album came out, it only sold a few hundred copies and then faded into obscurity.
"She speaks about being distrustful of the music industry and struggling with mental health problems. She ends up getting in her caravan drawn by clydesdale horses and travelling to the Hebrides. She had four children and gave up music for 30 years to raise her family.
"Thirty years later her record became this cult folk record that was rediscovered and her career had a second coming.
"I really respect that. It's a really hard thing to step away from something when it might seem like you have so much promise or you have so much ahead of you in some career. But I think she could see that it was kind of killing her. I think her music is just stunning."
'Free Treasure' by Adrianne Lenker
"It's just one of the most gorgeous love songs ever written, I think. It reminds me of my husband Michael. We've been together for 11 years and it makes me feel lucky when I hear this song - that this is the kind of love I have and it's the love I want to try to keep."
'Miracles' by Alex G
"This is from his God Save The Animals album, which I think is a really funny album name. My sister introduced me to this song and it's been one that I have listened to over and over.
"The religious imagery is quite interesting in this record and I don't fully understand it, but I love this song 'Miracles'.
"I grew up going to mass and Catholic mass and then the Pentecostal church as a teenager. Those themes of divinity and meaning and, I guess, existential things definitely come into my music and I am quite drawn to music that explores those themes."
'This Is a Photograph' by Kevin Morby
"Kevin Morby is one of my favourite contemporary songwriters. I've been following him for a long time now and he's got a real gift for these narrative records where he'll pick a theme and he'll just extrapolate on that theme and tie this whole thing together. I tried to do that in my last record, and he was my inspiration.
"The chorus is 'This is what I'll miss about being alive. This is what I'll miss when I die'. It's a great song to listen to, to remember to be grateful to be alive. Even when you're struggling or you feel like it's too hard, remember the things that you would miss if you weren't here."
