Most people leave Arrowtown for Queenstown. Ciaran McMeeken left it for Dunedin, then a Catlins farmhouse, then Auckland, then the world. Along the way he turned a set of drumsticks into a loop-pedal setup that could fill a room, made an EP in a kitchen that caught a Welsh producer’s ear, and wrote a song on Princess Street that he played on Princess Street. This is how that happened.
The Arrowtown Kid Who Ended Up on Rattray Street
Small Town, Big Noise
Arrowtown is the kind of place where everyone knows your parents and the loudest thing on a Tuesday night is the Shotover River. Ciaran McMeeken grew up there before his family moved to Dunedin and he ended up at Otago Boys’ High School – a shift from Central Otago gold-rush quiet to a city that at least had a music shop and a couple of venues worth playing.
He picked up drumsticks at eleven, which is how it starts for a lot of musicians in small-town New Zealand. You join the school band or you bash around in a mate’s garage because there’s genuinely nothing else to do after four o’clock. The guitar came later, and the singing after that, but the impulse was the same one that drives half the songwriters who come out of the provinces: silence is only interesting for so long before you want to make some noise in it.
Cricket, Then Not Cricket
Here’s the thing nobody mentions in the bio: before Ciaran was a musician, he was a cricketer. An opening batsman, and a decent one – good enough to earn a scholarship through the Willows Cricket Club in Christchurch and spend a year playing club cricket in England. That’s not a hobby-level commitment. That’s early mornings, nets, match days that swallow entire weekends.
The way he tells it, that’s exactly what ended it. “That’s the entire weekend gone.” Two-day matches, Saturday and Sunday, and by the time you’ve factored in travel and the post-match wind-down, there’s no room for anything else. Music was already pulling at him, and cricket was asking for everything. Something had to give. It’s a more common story in New Zealand than you’d think – the country produces sportspeople and musicians in roughly equal numbers, and quite a few start as one before becoming the other.
The Farm That Started It
After cricket, after school, Ciaran ended up on a farm in the Owaka Valley – deep Catlins country, an hour and a half south of Dunedin, where the nearest thing to a music scene is the birds at dawn. He was there to work, to save money, and probably to put off the question of what came next.
The farmer, a bloke named John, answered that question for him. The advice was blunt and perfect: stop sitting on your savings and go buy some gear. So Ciaran drove up to Dunedin, walked into Twang Town, and came back to the farmhouse with his first proper setup. He spent the next stretch of time writing and recording what became The Valley – his debut EP, named for the place that produced it. There’s something fitting about the first songs coming out of a farmhouse in the Catlins rather than a studio in Auckland. The isolation was the point. No distractions, no audience, no industry – just a kid with new gear and enough quiet to figure out what he wanted to say.
What the Music Sounds Like from Here
Loop Pedals and a Room Full of People
If you caught Ciaran live in Dunedin before he left, you would have seen something that didn’t quite make sense at first glance: one person on stage, two microphones, and a sound that kept getting bigger. The setup was deliberate – one mic ran dry through the PA for his lead vocal, the other fed through a chain of loop and effects pedals. He’d lay down a rhythm, loop it, stack a harmony on top, add another layer, and within a couple of minutes a solo performer sounded like a small band.
It’s the kind of thing that works best in a room the size of 50 Gorillas on lower Stuart Street, where you’re close enough to watch the mechanics of it. There’s a moment in every loop performance where the audience clicks into what’s happening – they realise they’re hearing one person do the work of four, and the intimacy of that is genuinely compelling. It’s not a gimmick. It’s a way of performing that demands you build the song in front of people, which means every show is slightly different and the audience is watching the construction, not just the result.
From Acoustic to Something Bigger
The Valley was spare – acoustic guitar, voice, the kind of stripped-back recording you get when your studio is a farmhouse and your budget is whatever a season of farm work pays. It was good enough to catch the ear of producer Greg Haver, who’d worked with the Manic Street Preachers and Catatonia, and that connection pulled Ciaran north to Auckland and into Roundhead Studios to record the Screaming Man EP.
The jump in production quality was significant. Screaming Man had polish and structure – partly funded through NZ On Air’s music programme and a PledgeMe campaign – and the single “City” landed on New Zealand radio, racking up close to 220,000 Spotify plays and hitting number 51 on the NZ singles airplay chart. It was the proof-of-concept moment – evidence that the songs held up outside a Dunedin venue.
By the time the self-titled debut album arrived, there was a full band behind him: Chris Ruscoe on drums, Jesse Reeves on bass, Aaron Prictor on guitar, M Andre on keyboards. The sound had shifted toward country-rock textures without losing the guitar-driven core that started in the Catlins. About seventy percent of the album was co-written, which is a different way of working – more collaborative, more structured, and a long way from a lone microphone in a farmhouse kitchen.
The Influences You Can Hear
Ciaran lists John Mayer, Bon Iver, and Ben Harper as his primary influences, and once you know that, you can hear all three. There’s the Mayer precision in the guitar work – clean, deliberate, technically sharp without showing off. There’s Bon Iver’s atmospheric layering, the sense that the production itself is an instrument. And there’s Ben Harper’s rootsy warmth, the feeling that this is music made by someone who’s spent time outdoors and doesn’t mind if you can tell.
One Australian reviewer described him as “Adam Levine’s earthy, indie cousin,” which isn’t entirely wrong but misses the geography. Ciaran doesn’t sound like he came from Los Angeles. He sounds like he came from somewhere colder and quieter, which he did. Dunedin has produced enough musicians over the decades that you can’t avoid the lineage question – is this the Dunedin Sound? No. He’s not the Chills, he’s not the Verlaines, and he’d probably be the first to say so. But there’s something about growing up in a city where music matters more than the population suggests it should. The infrastructure of small venues, student audiences, and a DIY ethic that says “just make the thing” – that’s Dunedin’s contribution to whatever Ciaran became next.
The Dunedin Chapter
Tim Greenslade and the Dunedin Connection
The crucial meeting happened in Dunedin, the way crucial meetings tend to happen here – not through an industry connection or a showcase, but because the city is compact enough that people doing interesting things eventually find each other. Tim Greenslade was a producer, Ciaran was a songwriter with a handful of ideas and no clear sense of how to shape them, and they started working together.
Tim gave Ciaran something he didn’t know he needed: structure. They spent a couple of years putting demos together, testing arrangements, releasing early tracks on SoundCloud to see what stuck. It was the kind of slow, low-pressure development that Dunedin is unusually good at providing. There’s no rush here because there’s no industry machine applying it. You can spend two years getting your sound right without anyone telling you you’re behind schedule. That’s not a limitation – it’s a luxury most musicians in bigger cities don’t get.
Princess Street Songs and Parents in the Crowd
Ciaran’s parents own The Brothers, a boutique hotel on Rattray Street near St Joseph’s Cathedral. It’s the kind of detail that anchors someone to a city in a way that “grew up in Dunedin” doesn’t quite manage. His family didn’t just pass through. They built something here, in the middle of the city, and it’s still there.
At one of his later Dunedin shows – the kind of homecoming gig a musician plays when they’ve been away long enough for it to mean something – Ciaran performed a song he’d written “just down the road in Princess Street.” His parents were in the audience. The reviewer who was there called it a beautiful moment, and it’s easy to see why. There’s a particular quality to playing a song in the place that produced it, for the people who watched you grow up. You can’t walk down Rattray Street without passing someone’s story, and this is one of them.
Where He Went, and What Stayed
Sydney, Auckland, Europe, Austin
Dunedin was the starting point, but it wasn’t the finish. Ciaran tried Sydney first – a brief stint that he found overwhelming, which is fair enough if your frame of reference is Arrowtown and the Octagon. He came back to New Zealand, regrouped on the farm, and then made the move to Auckland in early 2015. That’s where things fell into place: the band came together, the gigs became regular, and the industry connections that don’t really exist in Dunedin started to open up.
Then the world got bigger. In April 2016, Ciaran went on a European writing tour through Sony and Imagem Publishing – the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ireland – writing with over twenty songwriters in a matter of weeks. That list included MoZella, who’s written for Miley Cyrus and Charlie Puth, and Sacha Skarbeck, who’s worked with Adele. It’s a long way from a SoundCloud demo recorded in a Dunedin bedroom. By 2019, he was playing what was billed as his last New Zealand show before moving to Austin, Texas – a city with its own live music capital reputation that presumably felt like a better fit than Auckland’s.
Still a Dunedin Story
He left. They usually do. Dunedin has always been better at producing creative people than keeping them, and that’s not a complaint – it’s the nature of a city this size. The point isn’t that Ciaran McMeeken stayed. The point is where he started.
The first songs were written here. The first collaborator was found here. The first real gigs – one microphone, two microphones, a room of people watching the loops build – happened here. His family’s hotel is still on Rattray Street. The song he wrote on Princess Street was played on Princess Street. Whatever comes next in Austin or wherever the work takes him, the origin story belongs to Dunedin in the same way the Catlins farmhouse belongs to The Valley. We like keeping track of the ones who started here. Not because we need the credit, but because it tells us something about the city we already suspected – that this place has a way of giving people the space to become what they were going to become.
There are probably a dozen Ciaran McMeekens in Dunedin right now – working out their sound in bedrooms and borrowed studios, playing to forty people on a Wednesday night, waiting for their own John-on-a-farm moment. We won’t know their names until they leave. But we’ll know where they started.