Holly Arrowsmith With Special Guests

After a sold out tour of New Zealand with her full band, multi-award-winning songwriter Holly Arrowsmith returns to Ōtautahi Christchurch for an intimate seated show in the historic Great Hall at Te Matatiki Toi Ora The Arts Centre. With accompaniment from renowned violinist Anita Clark and appearances from special guests.

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 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, Arrowsmith 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.”