Story-telling, personal and revealing, has long been a hallmark of Holly Arrowsmith’s work as a musician and songsmith, and it is as true as ever on new album Blue Dreams. The album is another considerably autobiographical work by the Arrowtown-raised singer-songwriter, but at the same time also a lesson in the strength of being open to influence and letting the wider world play its part.
Take opener Neon Bright, for example.
A sample lyric goes, "Sadness wants to talk? / Well put her on the line / Sadness at the door / So I let her inside".
Not at first glance a dancefloor jam, but the finished article is definitely a foot-tapper, and the ability for the song to make that transition was all about Arrowsmith giving up control over the narrative, her story, at least in part.
Neon Bright was indeed a sad, acoustic song as originally composed, sad and slow, an exercise in vulnerable truth-telling, she says.
But the album’s producer, Tom Healy, had other ideas.
"I brought it in and he said, ‘I just feel like this needs to be kind of poppy ... let’s go all in on this one’," Arrowsmith recalls.
"I was quite unsure because it’s not at all how I wrote it, but it really worked.
"Having that ear to be able to hear how to elevate the song or enhance the feeling of it through production is a real gift," she says.
Some of the richness in song and detail of the album is down to such combinations in the writing, recording and production of the album, but its long gestation period contributed too.
The now Christchurch-based musician says the songs were written over an extended period of years. So, it reaches back into the time of the pandemic and for Arrowsmith, most pertinently, covers the period during which she became a mother.
"I probably started writing some of the songs five years ago and I came to Tom with about eight songs, I think seven or eight, when I was pregnant, during Covid," she says.
"I thought, ‘I better get started on this because I think life is about to change’. "And I was right.
"Fortunately, we got quite a lot done. And then for the next couple of years, I slowly wrote a few more," she says.
"Like, Blue Dreams was inspired by early parenthood, and I couldn’t have written a lot of these songs without going through that experience. So, I think the album is richer for it."
Once a parent, the pace slowed a bit, visits to see Healy at Auckland recording studio The Lab became more fitful and shorter.
"But it’s kind of nice taking your time because I think you can refine things as you go and you change your mind on certain decisions. I think it actually serves the project sometimes to let it take its time."
Motherhood, inevitably, is very much in the foreground. On the title song, Blue Dreams, Arrowsmith is sleep deprived while rocking her newborn child in the small hours.
There’s a line in the song about being a background dancer, "swaying with no music".
The song is about the haze of early parenthood, the long lonely early-morning hours, the change of identity, the loss of identity, the isolation and the desire to dream again, she says.
And it’s about the swaying too.
"I find that I see people who are swaying when they don’t even have the baby, and I did it too," Arrowsmith says.
"You’re so used to just standing there rocking that you become this kind of walking metronome, who’s just automatically doing these things.
"I often thought it would be nice to be rocked to sleep by someone, someone put me in a pram and walk me around."
But the album is no one thing. Rather, it quite consciously employs a broader palate.
"I really love hearing a record where the songs don’t all sound the same," Arrowsmith says. "You know, I want to be taken on a journey and for unexpected things to happen.
"The songs really are all quite unique, I think, in their feel and some of them are quite rocky and some of them are very country, some of them are kind of folk — stripped back."
To pull that off, she needed a band that could play anything across the range of styles the album encompasses. It was certainly no fluke that Healy, who plays electric guitar and pedal steel on the album, produced the album. Arrowsmith had her eye on him for some time.
"Tom Healy is in the band Tiny Ruins as well as being an incredible producer, and I was opening for them years ago, maybe six years ago," she explains.
"And I’d never seen someone play the guitar like him, he’s so unusual and I just thought, ‘I want to work with him on my next record’. And then of course, he produced My Boy by Marlon Williams and a few other records that I just loved and that kind of solidified my choice."
In the end, Arrowsmith signed up the whole Tiny Ruins band, Cass Basil on the bass and Alex Freer on the drums.
Anita Clark joins them strings.
Recording with such a tight team turned out to be gold.
"There’s this chemistry there and they know each other so well. They know how each other plays. It’s very easy," she says.
"That’s a huge consideration and a huge advantage really, to have those relationships and those friendships between band members where they can just get together and just, you know, smash out a few takes and you just get it."
The playing is universally well judged, subtle flourishes and instrumentation choices supporting the song, layering interest, never overpowering.
One of the album’s tracks, Desert Dove has already picked up the Apra prize for the year’s best country song — an award voted upon by those in the industry.
Arrowsmith’s songbird stylings have long recalled any number of celebrated vocalists, but Blue Dreams has taken it up a notch again, the musician soaring high and low across her songs’ melodies.
"Yeah, I think my voice has matured a lot and it seems as you get older you get a lower register, even as a woman. And I really found that on this record that I could sing much lower than I knew that I could. I’d already discovered how high I could sing and now I’ve kind of discovered this lower register. So it was fun to kind of play between those two extremes, I guess."
It did mean she created some challenges for herself.
"Yeah, sometimes I curse myself for the way I’ve written a song when I get to the studio and I think, ‘Oh my God, can I actually sing this on a microphone?’."
Arrowsmith also sometimes wonders about the extent to which she lays her life open.
"More than I’d like it to be sometimes," she says.
But there are compensations.
Neon Bright, for example, captures an episode of not feeling great, she says.
But writing about it, singing about it, she has the opportunity to think about those moments again, as presented in the track.
"When I listen to these songs, it’s like my higher self has a perspective on whatever situation it is that I’m writing about and I can come back to it and actually be comforted by that.
"So, it’s definitely a valuable process for me to write songs about my life and even valuable to come back to them and to be reminded of insights I’ve had, which you so easily forget."
And there’s the opportunity too to serve it up to those who have it coming. Like, for example, the music industry.
The business receives a searching assessment of its dynamics in the rocking Red Lit Room.
"It is a song that’s got a lot of, almost, anger about this industry ... Artists aren’t the ones who benefit from the industry 90% of the time, and sometimes you leave a show and you’ve paid everybody except yourself," she says.
Besides the musicians enlisted to play and produce, Arrowsmith called on a vast cast of influences in one way or another for the new album, expending her growing vocabulary of life and experience on the music.
"I can see how I’ve got so much better at this as I get older and part of that must be that you have more of a well of experience to draw from.
"But also I’ve had more time to read other writers and to listen to lots of music and ... I kind of rely on these figures a lot in my life to get me through. It’s like reading poetry or listening to music of people who I look up to, people like Patti Smith and Sinead O’Connor, not only for their music, but for who they are and what they have to say about life.
"And even Georgia O’Keeffe, the painter, was an inspiration for this record because of her way of life and her thoughts."
Janet Frame is referenced in Swan Dive, the American writer and activist Wendell Berry on Could’ve been a River and the cover art nods to poet Mary Oliver.
In all these ways, this album is the most heavily influenced by others that she has made, Arrowsmith says.
"I think it’s much better for it."
Musical influences included using reference tracks in the studio. So, a Kurt Vile track provided clues for how to approach Neon Bright and they drew on Neil Young to shape Blue Dreams. Van Morrison was also on the listen list, together with The Weather Station, and Mazzy Star for the guitar sound.
"It’s very helpful to have a reference to say, ‘OK, let’s try to get a guitar that sounds like this, or let’s try to get a drum feel like this’.
"It’s really difficult, actually, to take a raw song and to produce it well," she says.
It often explains why that great band you heard live doesn’t sound as good on the album.
"That’s the art of production and what Tom’s so great at is finding the right sound for a particular song, finding the right feel."
