In the decade since first coming to national attention as the 2014 solo/duo winner of Smokefreerockquest, Georgia Lines has risen to a main stage position in the NZ music scene. Her debut album ‘The Rose of Jericho’ was hugely successful, debuting at number one on the Aotearoa Album charts, finalist for the Silver Scroll Award and Taite Music Prize, and making her a multi-category finalist in the 2025 Aotearoa Music Awards (having won the Tūī for Best Pop Artist in 2024). A year following that release, Lines returns with a new EP titled ‘The Guest House’.

Just 14 months on from her hugely successful debut album ‘The Rose of Jericho’, Georgia Lines is clearly excited to be releasing a new collection again. Although the music on ‘The Guest House’ continues in the same dreamily introspective adult contemporary vein as her prior work, this EP comes from a different personal perspective.

Asked about the album’s success, the very grounded Mount Maunganui pop artist answers with typical candour.
“It’s always funny when you win awards for something that you create based on your life! It was a very true and vulnerable representation of what was happening in my life at the time. I don’t create music hoping to get an award for it, I make music because I feel it’s what I’m supposed to do with my life.

“It’s like this offering that I can give to the world, that hopefully articulates things for other people in a way that maybe they haven’t been able to articulate for themselves. I think it just affirms, for me, the importance of continuing to create from a place of authenticity and vulnerability. It’s lovely to be recognised with awards and nominations, and bits and pieces, but seeing how the work means something to people is what’s really meaningful to me.”

Less a next step in artistic evolution, ‘The Guest House’ is about documenting personal challenges and growth in the period since her album was written.

“The last few years have been pretty tough,” she confesses. “Naturally, when you go through hard seasons of life… I think it’s like gold being refined in a fire, or you can use the same analogy with clay and pottery. It has to go through this refining process in order for the end product be what it is. The last little while has been hard, but it has created within me the resilience and the strength, and the courage and the willingness to be honest and vulnerable, and share.”

Lines wrote and recorded her EP with English musician / producer Matt Hales, a Grammy winner in 2020 for his production work with For King & Country (Best Contemporary Christian Music Album). She met Hales at the March 2024 APRA Songhubs event in Tāmaki Makaurau, and enjoyed working with him so much she has since twice travelled to the northern hemisphere to complete the project.  

“He came over as one of the guest producers and we wrote one of the songs on my record, called Till The Music Stops. I really wanted to work with him again, but he lives in the UK. London felt like such a long way for me to go, so we actually met halfway, in LA, and we wrote the rest of the project there. Once we’d written it, I really felt like I wanted to finish those songs with him, rather than bringing someone else in. So I flew to the UK over New Year’s, and we recorded the EP in his home studio.”

The five songs resulting from their collaboration are warm-toned and soulful, the lyrics taking her familiar confessional approach. ‘The Guest House’ title originates from a poem recommended to Lines by Chris Martin of Coldplay, at the after-party of the modern legends’ 2024 performance at Eden Park in Auckland. She was part of an artist meet-and-greet earlier in the day, and invited to the after-party.

“I had a conversation with Chris Martin, and he shared that one of his favourite poems is called The Guest House, by Rumi. That poem was talking about being human as a guest house, and every morning there’s a new arrival and you have to embrace the arrival every day, almost with laughter, because you have no idea what it might be teaching you. I felt like within my own life I’d arrived in this metaphorical guest house, and everything was very new and unfamiliar.”

Working with Hales she ended up composing a song based around this metaphor, the delicate slow-building closer and title track, the last song written for the EP.

“We wrote that while we were in London, and it was once I decided the project was called ‘The Guest House.’ I felt like we captured the essence of the poem in the record, but I really wanted to write a song about that specific kind of feeling that that poem created for me.

“I sat down at the piano and this melody rolled out, and we were kind of playing around with that. And then once we’d had the basic foundation of the music in terms of the chords and the melody that I wanted to sing, then we sat down and were like, ‘Okay, what do we want to say?’”

Her lyrics are themselves poetic, evoking a surreal, dream-like imagery.

“The song tells the story, within my own life, of the longing to be in the next season. We have all these ideals, the grass is always greener, and we think, ‘If I get to that point, then I’ll be okay’, or ‘… then I will feel happy or joyful’, or I will be at peace with myself, or whatever. But I think there’s so much to say about doing those things and being in the here and now, and realising there’s so much joy and peace and all of the things that we long for. There’s so much of that to be found in this current season of our lives, whatever that is, regardless of how hard or how tricky it may be.”

The bridge provides the EP’s cathartic climax. Lines starts in low tones before jumping up the octave into a powerful belt as she sings, ‘Take, take me away / over the ocean, kaleidoscope dream / how long will it take.’

“I think naturally, there was this push and pull within the feeling of the music. I think the 6/8 kind of feel naturally brings that feel, and the melody really leant into that as well. We kind of played around with the bridge. Obviously it’s got that big octave jump, it just happened to sit in the perfect kind of place vocally for me to be able to do that, in terms of the key.

“The lyric is the thing that’s really leading the story, because there’s actually not much musically in there. It’s a pretty sparse song, it’s not like this big poppy thing. The bed of music is very sparse, just the Rhodes and the synthy kind of sounds, and some brushes and maybe a little bit of bass or acoustic guitar. It’s the BVs and the swelling of the vocals and the octave jump that leads you from this very reflective asking of the question, to this pleading of, ‘When am I going to get out of this season’, into this resolve of, ‘Well, somehow, somewhere, at some point.’”

Lines recalls the irresistibly catchy EP opener and lead single, Wonderful Life, as being an unusually easy song to write.

“That just kind of rolled out of us! I had picked up this guitar in the studio and was playing around with the chords, and Matt was on the piano and playing around with that little melodic piano line that you can hear, and I just started singing this melody, and we looked at each other, and thinking, ‘This is kind of cool, what is happening?’

“It didn’t have any of the lyrics, but I basically was sitting there playing the chords, and I just sang the whole entire verse melody. And I was like, ‘This never happens to me, this is crazy!’”

Though it has an upbeat title and obvious pop sensibility, there’s a real bittersweetness to Wonderful Life, the lyrics about trying to stay positive through challenging times. ‘Baby it’s a wonderful life, even when you’re saying goodbye’, she sings in the chorus.

“I was kind of leaving these post-it notes around my house and writing this little mantra that I had adopted, that would just say, ‘It’s a wonderful life’. And I would often put things on my fridge and on the mirror, so when I was walking past, I would see this little collection of things that would remind me I’m going to be okay. I really wanted to write about that mantra and write about how that had woven its way into my story.

“And I really love that song. I think it has this beautiful sad storytelling to it. There’s still goodness to be found even when it doesn’t feel all that good or happy. Even in the small things like good food and people, and friends and flowers and the simple things, the ocean, the water…”

Her singing in the finished recording is actually the demo vocal, recorded the day the song was written. It was, she says, the vocal that felt like it held the song.

“We definitely tossed up, should we be re-recording this? And it was like, ‘No, I think it’s exactly what it needs to be. We would just be trying to re-record it for the sake of re-recording it and probably go back to that original vocal anyway!”

Alongside her own music, Georgia Lines has been delivering messages of support within other projects. In her own web-series, titled Intros, she interviews up-and-coming female and non-binary artists. Produced in collaboration with Rolling Stone Aus/NZ the series has been confirmed for a fifth season in 2026.

“That’s been really cool, because I am very passionate about equipping and helping and encouraging the next generation of artists. I think it’s really hard when you’re in this industry, trying to work out a lot of things on your own. A big part for us with Intros was trying to create conversation and content and help give artists tools to help them with some of the questions that they’ve been navigating or struggling with.”

Having released an EP that records and has likely helped overcome some significant struggles of her own, Lines is taking the opportunity to experiment with living and working outside of Aotearoa, announcing that she is heading off to try her luck as a singer-songwriter in Nashville. Her many Kiwi fans will be wishing her a wonderful life while there.