Becoming Cassie Henderson
The first concert at One New Zealand Stadium, aptly named ‘Once in a Lifetime’, will be just that for Christchurch born singer-songwriter and 2025 Aotearoa Music Awards’ Best Pop Artist Cassie Henderson. The velvety vocalist and The Voice Australia finalist sat down with Metropol editor Nina Tucker after a whirlwind 12 months and counting.
“I’ve been fighting to get on that stage for a long time,” Cassie says, sitting across from me in a quiet upstairs nook at The Arts Centre, a fitting home for a conversation of creative success. She spent the morning there – writing lyrics and sending emails with caffeine in between. A silver star-and-lightning-bolt charm drapes around her neck and catches the light. It’s her logo and it represents who she is – a powerful, electrifying force taking New Zealand’s music scene storm.
That symbolism might take a figurative meaning come 16 May when the 27-year-old with half a million social media followers plays to a crowd of 37,000 alongside Aotearoa music industry heavyweights like Six60. “I’m hoping to make this the most inventive show I’ve ever done,” she says, telling me how she’s brainstorming a way to weave pyrotechnics into her set. “It’s consuming every thought of mine. For an artist, you think a lot about how you can make a small show feel like a stadium. This is my dream.” (It’s her sports-obsessed dad’s too, even if she’s playing music instead of rugby).
“There was no need to ask,” when Cassie got the call from Once in a Lifetime promoter Brent Eccles of Eccles Entertainment. He’d been in the background of her career, watching intently since Cassie’s 14-year-old beginnings on The X Factor New Zealand’s first season. “I kept plaguing him, ‘I’m ready, I’m ready to do a big show’, but he told me to keep working, keep getting better.” Playing the first show in her hometown’s new stadium is as full circle for Cassie as it is for Brent.
INVISIBLE STRING
Before there were whispers of sell-out stadiums, Cassie was that annoying cousin playing concerts and songs at family events as a child and uploading music videos to YouTube at 10-years-old. “I was blessed with some form of natural skill, but it’s the drive to perform all the time that edged that skill into a craft.” She auditioned for The X Factor in 2013 and landed on stage, placing fifth in the competition and becoming one to watch in New Zealand’s music industry.
Graduating from Rangi Ruru Girls’ School, and University of Otago after that, Cassie relocated to Auckland – Christchurch didn’t have the foundations for a budding career in music at the time. But she found some space outside of the spotlight, that was, until heartbreak sparked her songwriting spirit. “Music has always been a form of expression. It’s like something that beats under your skin,” Cassie says. So she returned to the stage and spotlight.
“I messed up a high-stakes live performance big time,” she remembers. “I walked away with this crazy level of performance anxiety, the type where you would get to the high note and just crash and burn. I thought, well, what better way to get around this than throwing myself back in the deep end.” The next audition – for The Voice Australia – wasn’t something she could afford to fail. “I didn’t take a second of it for granted. I worked that entire month leading up to it. I’d practise every moment and practised what I was gonna say and sang it 100 times.” We laugh about New Zealand’s laid-back tendency – the classic ‘she’ll be right’ attitude. “This was a moment I was not leaving up to whoever ‘she’ is. I am taking fate into my own hands and I’ll make sure I do well and to the best of my capabilities.”
“The pressure was good for me. You don’t get any second chances,” Cassie says of the experience she’s dubbed a life highlight. Each on-stage moment was another reminder she didn’t want to spend her life any other way. “I learned there was genuinely nothing else that gave me as much joy as being on stage does.”
It was a learning experience in its entirety when she saw her audience’s diversity and understood how much music and storytelling transcends age. “It’s always been about making people feel a little bit less alone. I think that is something that can be just as relevant to a 23-year-old as it is to a 70-year-old as it is to a 10-year-old.” Emotional musical telepathy, perhaps.
A SINGING SWISS ARMY KNIFE
In some ways, music is Cassie’s isolation antidote too. “The nature of music careers these days is that you have to be a Swiss army knife. You could have one song doing well on radio, but if you can’t perform that live, or create the content to market it and build a brand or business, or if you can’t write with someone else, you cut yourself off at the knees. You have to diversify. That is something I’ve naturally done over the years because I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do it for me. Music isn’t just songwriting and singing, it’s business and marketing and social media,” Cassie says.
“Getting the Aotearoa Music Awards Best Pop Artist win was massive because it was recognition from my peers as doing something right. The Voice was recognition from an international audience as doing something right,” she says. “Unless you have the world’s best form of resilience, you need people to give you a pat on the back sometimes.”
Even with two number one songs, most of New Zealand’s New Year’s Eve festivals ticked off, and too many commercial wins to name, Cassie barely gets by with music alone. Industry awards and television shows convert to opportunities, not direct income. “You can’t expect that one song will do well and that you’ll be fine. You have to grind out all of the hard work and hope that one day it will pay off. It’s not an easy path to take.”
How does that pressure not consume every ounce of excitement? It does. But Cassie leans into what makes it matter. She asked herself ‘What if it wasn’t about how well we do, what if it was about how we make people feel, or the way you feel on stage?’
“The most reassuring moments for me have always been the personal ones. Meeting people after shows and hearing how the music has affected them is incredibly grounding. Streams and awards matter, of course, but that human connection is what reminds me why I do this in the first place.”
POWERFUL AND POIGNANT
Whether it’s turning down a music label because they wanted back-to-back hits and she wanted carefully crafted albums or diving into her memories for songwriting material, every choice Cassie makes in her music career is personal.
She’s finishing the last of a three-EP project – The Chronicles of a Heart Broken. Raw and emotional, The Pink Chapter offers up Cassie classics like Ghost. The Yellow Chapter followed, a story of volatility (“You’re fine but you’re not fine”) with number one hit Seconds to Midnight, and my personal favourite, Lemonade. Next was The Blue Chapter – but she found her storytelling steer off into grey. “I’ve been working so much that my life is actually kind of dull. My love life material is drying up,” she says. “Out came footnotes, an EP about what those in-between, reflective moments really feel like. I wrote, recorded, produced and mixed it all from my bedroom within a week and released it at Christmas. It was like, ‘Merry Christmas, have the worst week of your life.’”
“I like that it wasn’t polished. It’s a project about imperfection, made imperfectly, in real time. There’s a funny honesty in that.” Though I’m sure her parents couldn’t fault a thing in their daughter’s work. She tells me how her parents feel that their belief in Cassie for 16 years is finally something the world can see. “They’re relieved the word has amounted to something,” Cassie says. “They’re seeing the 10-year-old posting videos actually playing on stage. That’s what I wanted to do the most, make them proud.”
QUICK FIRE QUESTIONS
Your idol and biggest inspiration?
Taylor Swift is my idol but my biggest inspiration right now is [David] Bowie. I wish for that freedom of creativity and expression and want to pull more of that into my life.
Your favourite ‘struggle’ meal?
Cereal. Not a bowl but a full box.
The best song you’ve written and best song you’ve played?
Admit to that (on The Yellow Chapter) and it was an honour to cover Somewhere Only We Know. I’ve said for a long time if I could write a song like that I would die happy. But the most satifsying thing ever is seeing people sing ‘3 2 1 go’ in Seconds to Midnight.
The dream artist to tour with?
It changes every year! Right now I would love to tour with Sam Fender.
Your hack to coping with pressure and performance anxiety?
The podcast You Can Overcome Stagefright and Performance Anxiety by Learn-To-Learn. It has some visualisation in it, which I usually hate, but it really worked for me.
What do you miss most about Christchurch?
The theatre. I’m my most peaceful self when I’m watching a cool narrative unfold.
How does your on-stage style come together?
I spend a lot of time on Pinterest. I think of the moments and the big swooping note and ask myself how I want to feel when I’m delivering that.
What’s the worst fashion trend you’ve ever leaned into?
Oh my god so many. How far back can I go without being mean to myself? I really enjoyed peplum, and there was a period of time when I loved those cargo green jackets. It was bad.
Your go-to wellness hack or ‘me-time’ moment?
I do a lot of stretching videos. The reason I do the stretching is because at the end, they have this four minute segment where they just play atmospheric music and that’s probably the deepest slumber I get.
The advice you’d give your 14-year-old self?
I’d tell myself to not regret anything. And be nicer to your mum.
