“Music has always been like God for me,” indie-pop singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Holly Blair says on what looks like another sunny day in LA from my gloomier side of the Zoom call. “It was the one thing where I found refuge and connection to self and connection to others. I had a lot of anxiety and depression in my teen years, like a lot of artists do, and I remember listening to an illegal bootleg download of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ by Radiohead, which was one of the first Radiohead songs I really heard. And something just clicked.”
Equipped with her love of Radiohead and a desire to experiment with sound like Thom Yorke and David Byrne, the tough ‘but also extremely sensitive’ Holly spent a lot of her time singing and playing guitar quietly for herself, and herself alone, at home. And while this sounds like the start of a straightforward music industry tale of inspiration, determination and pursuit, that isn’t Holly’s story.
Her past is marked by a medical episode that most singers would find unimaginable: losing her voice at 23. “I couldn’t speak or sing for almost a year. I didn’t know if I would ever speak or sing again. And I remember just being so distraught that I couldn’t do this thing that had always come so easily and had been taken for granted for so much of my life. So that was when I was like ‘okay if I ever get my voice back, I’m not going to let fear be the thing that determines the way I live my life.’
Getting her voice back around nine months later and staying truer than ever to her word, Holly started writing music that she hoped to one day share with others for the first time in her life. Screw fear, screw avoiding self-expression, and screw brushing past her dreams, anxiety would not dictate Holly’s life anymore.
“Fear is a huge part of the work I do on a daily basis,” Holly said when discussing her life and music. “I think I have a hyperactive nervous system. It’s just a big part of what I’m trying to push through. I think for so long, I worked around fear, and I just was avoidant with it.
“I think with my songwriting that comes up a lot. Like with my song ‘Slow’, there’s a verse that’s like “Caught up in things that get caught up in my throat / I’m singing my favourite song but can’t find all the notes.” That is super tied to my voice and my ability to express. I get really caught up here and can’t say the things that I want to say. So, songwriting is a way for me to get into that and kind of speak freely without judgement, and so I find a lot of relief in writing music. And just in writing in general because expressing verbally has always been really hard for me.”
Exploring feelings of guilt and shame in queer relationships, Holly’s latest single ‘baby girl, he’s so boring’ might just be the perfect example of what music does for her. Inspired by a situationship she had with a girl whose ex-boyfriend was shaming her for being with a woman, the playful lyrics and melancholic melody see Holly process some pretty tough emotions regarding self-love, but perhaps in the healthiest of ways.
“I was distraught, and I needed an outlet” Holly said. “And I think I wrote it for me in that moment, and I wrote it for her too. I wrote it never with the intention of her hearing it, but I did write it for the idea of this thing. And I think that definitely can resonate with a larger audience and I think people do feel a lot of guilt to their prior partners when they do come out. I know that was real for me.
“I remember there was a year period where I just felt so bad because I really loved my ex-boyfriend, and I came out right after. And it didn’t make that love not real, it’s just different. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t love these people before we realised. To kind of just release that pressure that we put on ourselves would be really helpful for a lot of people when they come out.”
‘baby girl, he’s so boring’ is the third single to be released from Holly’s upcoming EP ‘Then Comes the Lightning’, which is named after a line from previous single ‘Used to Dying.’ The EP features similar themes of letting go of fear and self-sabotaging patterns, as well as an exploration of the full spectrum of messy human emotion amongst a cinematic, oceanic and deep soundscape.
Talking about the EP, Holly said: “I was really tired of all of the same patterns that I had continued to repeat for a lot of my twenties and my early twenties were super turbulent emotionally for me. And so, it was written in this period of feeling like I was coming to the end of a chapter, and I couldn’t find the page to the next one.
“These songs are kind of written from a place of self-awareness that was new for me. There’s this quote “everything screams before it dies” and I think that is really true. Not to say that I’m fixed now but I’m so much better. And so, this collection of work is really this moment in time of self-reflection. It was right before I got sober, right before all these really big life changes that have really helped me just be kinder to myself in general. So, it’s cool to look back at this body of work and be like wow I’ve come so far since then.
“For me writing is so therapeutic, so I’m pretty excited to let it go and let go of that grief and move on from those songs, from those feelings. Although they’re always with you, your songs and your feelings.”
Holly Blair’s ‘Then Comes the Lightning’ is set for release this Thursday. Make sure to listen and check out her music, below.
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