Hollie Smith – Artworks Theatre, Waiheke Island: June 6, 2025
This year NZ Music Month is leaking into June. At least on Waiheke where Hollie Smith has brought The Bones Tour to the island’s theatre. Sold out and not surprising. Despite only 40 minutes away by ferry, we rarely get the bigger names in Kiwi music here.
It’s a sparse stage: black backdrop and a lone keyboard, cane stool and glass of water. Stripped back to the bones, in keeping with the tour title.
No support act. No fanfare. Hollie walks out in long black skirt and a Straight Outta Compton t-shirt, hair in top-knot under a scarf wrapped as a turban. As she gets seated, I’m recalling her and Teeks’ version of Whakaaria mai at the Christchurch Remembrance Service.
Tonight’s something very different. New songs getting aired in stripped back rawness (Basically, I’m in your living room, she tells us). And she’s onside with everyone from the get-go. A rapport oiled with self-deprecating humour and endearingly TMI comments. There will be mistakes but they’ll be absorbed into the songs, we are told. This is a show still airing new songs.
First up is Fine Lines. A break-up song. The first of a few. About when a relationship goes really wrong and that 5% of a person’s traits you used to put up with but which suddenly become unbearable.
Hollie’s head rolls back with the swell of emotion and her face contorts offering vocal emphasis. It’s like she’s singing from the side of her mouth at times. There is a fascination and beauty in being up close watching her sing. That she does so while playing complex compositions adds to the awe. There is nowhere to look but at her face and hands.
I’ve got lots of friends on this island and most of them are here, she tells us. I feel like a friend but have never met her. She’s telling me of the trauma of the BIG break-up. I am being offered confidences. But so are the hundred-plus others. This is non-tactile intimacy.
Grass is Greener explores the self-pity of scrolling on Instagram while cool friends are off doing cool things. But – and here Hollie is philosopher – the goal posts of happiness move, she tells us. Happiness so often seems just beyond where we are and what we are doing. Her lyric I check my phone to see if you’ve responded sounds all too familiar. Her quivering voice expresses insecurity and longing.
Another break-up song (Wait a Minute). A nicer one, she says. Opens with the conversation-starter Well that was mighty weird. The vocal is sort of early Joni Mitchell meets Blossom Dearie.
I’ve seldom been so intrigued watching a face so engaged with the feelings in the songs. Captivating.
Her new songs, she tells us, are about three themes: break-ups, mid-life crisis, or political despair. Nothing Spoken lies a little outside these categories: it charts a friend’s last days with cancer and the black humour in everyone thinking the other had a copy of her will. Plodding deeper keys add an ominous note.
Sharks are Circling savages the media for hounding those in the public eye who slip up. She mentions Kiritapu Allan. A ponderous tone of righteous anger suggestive of Simone. When Days Were Better laments the loss of friends to addiction.
The new songs keep coming (I can’t figure out which will make the record). And then a perfunctory encore (I hate that silliness of leaving the stage) offers up the inevitable: a fully soulful rendition of Don McGlashan’s masterpiece from the No 2 movie soundtrack: Bathe in the River. It’s the audience’s moment to offer added vocals.
It’s all over by a refreshingly early 8.38pm. Hollie heads to the merch desk and us locals speak in reverence of what we’ve witnessed: new songs (some yet to be titled); exquisite vocals and piano; and a warm delivery that filled Artworks on a chilly night. A songwriter’s craft stripped back to the bones, previewed in our living room. Roll on the album.
Robin Kearns
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