Hollyn has been doing this long enough to know how easy it is for an artist to lose the plot.
The Christian singer-songwriter signed a record deal as a teenager and entered the Christian music industry before she had fully figured out who she was, much less what kind of artist she wanted to become. Nearly a decade later, she can look back and see how much of those early years were spent trying to prove something.
She wanted people to understand her taste. She wanted the people around her to believe in her instincts. She kept looking outside herself for whatever might make her seem more legitimate.
“In the past, I felt a massive weight to maybe overexplain or convince people that my taste or my style was good,” she says. “I was really trying to find, what do I need to access from the outside to make me more cool or have impact or whatever?”
Hollyn is quick to give her younger self some grace. She was 18 or 19 years old, after all, trying to develop an identity inside an industry built around other people constantly evaluating it. But she’s also spent the years since confronting what happens when approval becomes a compass.
These days, her life looks considerably different. She’s been married for nearly eight years, has a 4-year-old daughter and is expecting another child. She goes to counseling, is rooted in a local church and has built a community of people she trusts to speak into her life. Her career is still important, but it no longer gets to define everything around it.
“I feel like I’ve created a pace for my life that feels sustainable and it feels whole,” she says. “It doesn’t really feel like I’m trying to prove anything or turn in music just to turn in music or work on something just to work on something. Everything has intention, and it feels like an overflow of what I’m already living in.”
Her latest project, Theology of Beauty, grew directly out of that shift.
Three years ago, Hollyn traveled to the Philadelphia area for a weekend of writing. She was a new mom and had spent years continuing to make music without being entirely sure what the next chapter was supposed to look like. She had also been writing poems and collecting thoughts that hadn’t yet found a home.
Over the course of one weekend, she and her collaborators came away with somewhere between 15 and 20 ideas. Eventually, those songs became a project built around the four seasons, tracing the cycle of loss, surrender and new life that Hollyn was experiencing in real time.
She didn’t always understand what she was writing while she was writing it. Looking back at the songs from Fall, she realized she had been processing grief before she had fully named it. Winter became about being stripped down and allowing God to meet her there. By Spring, the questions had shifted toward what happens when new life finally arrives and the past still feels easier to return to.
For Hollyn, the songs became less about presenting a polished spiritual conclusion and more about paying attention.
“I don’t think any of us ever have the full picture,” she says. “If something’s really agitating to me, or if something is like, ‘Wow, I feel like I’m trudging through the mud in this,’ or if something could make me cry easily, I’m sitting alone with my thoughts and going, ‘Why is that?’”
Learning to ask those questions has required Hollyn to become more comfortable with who she is when nobody is applauding. It has also forced her to reconsider the version of success she absorbed as a young artist.
The industry has changed dramatically since she first signed a record deal. Artists are now expected to be musicians, content machines and personal brands at the same time. A million views can mean almost nothing. Huge streaming numbers don’t necessarily translate into people buying tickets. Someone with a smaller online following can quietly build a far more committed audience than someone who appears ubiquitous on a screen.
Hollyn has spent enough time thinking about those contradictions to know she doesn’t have a perfect answer. She does know what happens when she thinks about them too much.
“If it’s good, I think people will eventually find it,” she says. “You have to ultimately start making things that you really love and care about and that you think represent you well and just kind of see how it goes. That’s my own philosophy. I’ve tried to do more than that and it just leads to burnout for me.”
Her resistance to the numbers game isn’t a rejection of ambition. Hollyn still cares deeply about making great music and pursuing the work she believes she’s called to do. But ambition, in her view, becomes dangerous when it starts asking for things she no longer wants to sacrifice.
Motherhood has made those trade-offs harder to ignore. Raising a daughter has simplified some of the questions that once felt enormous. Hollyn still wants to make music, tour and continue growing as an artist, but she also wants a life where her family actually knows her and where she isn’t perpetually overwhelmed because she’s trying to prove she can do everything.
“The older I get, the more I’m like, why are we so concerned about what anybody thinks?” she says.
For Hollyn, the question isn’t whether a career is successful by someone else’s standards. It’s whether the life surrounding it is becoming healthy and sustainable.
“I think you have to define what success looks like to you in this season,” she says. “Sure, you’re gifted and talented. Awesome. Go for it. Yes, chase your dreams. But who are you as a person? Are you becoming all that God has for you to be, or are you choosing to sacrifice that just to be seen?”
Hollyn knows something about the cost of being seen without feeling known.
When she was 18 or 19, she found herself on tour with TobyMac and deeply questioning whether the career she had wanted was actually sustainable. She felt isolated and spiritually dry, carrying a vision for the kind of artist she wanted to become without knowing how to articulate it.
A member of TobyMac’s band gave her Steffany Gretzinger’s The Undoing. The record, and particularly “Cecie’s Lullaby,” showed her another way of making music about faith. It wasn’t trying to convince her of anything. It simply gave language to something she was already carrying.
Years later, Hollyn still remembers the relief of feeling understood.
“I really think a lot of us just want someone to go, ‘You too? You feel that way? I do too,’” she says. “I remember listening to music growing up and even now hearing something and just thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so comforting that I’m not crazy. Thank God someone wrote that. I just needed somebody to vocalize that longing in me.’”
It’s the kind of artist she wants to be now: less interested in proving herself and more interested in making something honest enough to keep someone else company.
Hollyn admits she’s still working through parts of her own story. She sometimes feels frustrated that people continue to see her as the teenager they first encountered nearly a decade ago. She describes herself as “actively renarrating” those years, learning to see the younger version of herself with more maturity instead of embarrassment or disappointment.
Growing up in public means old versions of you never entirely disappear. The songs remain. The photos remain. Other people’s ideas about who you are can remain long after you’ve moved on.
Hollyn can’t control any of that. What she can control is what she builds now.
“I would just like to be a friend, musically,” she says. “I would pray that I would be a friend in suffering and in the death, the burial, the resurrection, all those things that we as Christians walk through. I just want to be a friend in those things.”
It’s a quieter ambition than the ones the music industry usually rewards, but Hollyn seems increasingly comfortable with that. She’s no longer trying to access something outside herself that will finally make her cool enough, successful enough or worthy of being taken seriously.
The goal now is simpler: to make music she believes in and become the kind of person she wants to be when the music stops.
“Regardless of anything else, I just genuinely was obedient to the Lord and I followed Him with my whole life,” she says. “Take the music away. I think it’s just going to overflow into anything that you do, anything you touch, everything you say. I just want my personhood to be that.”
