Twenty-three years after pressing pause on his musical ambitions, Caloundra songwriter and bandleader Sam Holden has restarted the clock with “Waiting,” the first single of his audacious 3 Year Project, released June 28, 2025. The track lands like a postcard from two timelines at once: the wide-eyed rush of a love that’s moving at different speeds, and the present-tense resolve of an artist who finally chose “Day One” over “One Day.”
“Waiting” wears its Britpop DNA proudly—glimmering chords and open-throated choruses that nod to Oasis, Blur, and Stereophonics—yet it never slips into replica. Instead, Holden channels that ’90s largeness into something personal and unguarded. Written two decades ago while he and his then-future wife were crisscrossing the United States, the song’s single artwork and music-video footage are lifted straight from that trip: sun-scorched highways, unfussy snapshots, two people moving through a world that felt boundless. The decision to keep the visuals “unedited and unfiltered” is more than aesthetic; it’s an ethos. “Waiting” is a reminder that the first draft of a feeling can be the truest one.
Recorded at Easy Tape Studio on the Sunshine Coast and produced by Nyssa Ray, the single also marks a first for Holden: capturing his songs with a full band. You can hear the difference immediately. Guitars crest and recede like a second wind, drums lean forward without bullying the melody, and the vocal sits right where the lyric lives—plainspoken, earnest, quietly pleading. That arrangement intelligence is part of the track’s power. It dramatizes the song’s central tension—one person already headlong, the other not quite ready—without ever tipping into melodrama. The chorus doesn’t grandstand; it releases.
“Waiting” also arrives freighted with a larger story. Holden, an engineer by trade and father of three, had let music drift to the back of the cupboard while work and family took precedence. A sudden flare of arthritis in his index finger served as an alarm he couldn’t ignore; an impromptu open-mic performance on a work trip to New Zealand—borrowing a guitar, sharing a few old songs with strangers—reignited the spark. The phrase he spotted on the drive home, “One Day or Day One,” became a mantra and a framework. The 3 Year Project was born: one new single every month, 100 shows total, and a stretch goal that’s both romantic and ruthless—culminating on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage in 2027.
Ambitious, yes, but never merely self-serving. From its first step, the project braided purpose into process. The “Waiting” launch was counted down like New Year’s Eve among friends and family, with profits donated to Headspace, the local children’s mental-health charity. That philanthropic thread will run through each of the capped 100 shows, every one of them documented, each with its own limited-run merch, each sending something back into the community. For Holden—who grew up in North Manchester and saw a sibling navigate serious mental-health challenges—this isn’t branding; it’s ballast.
Lyrically, “Waiting” lands with the hush of a late-night kitchen confession. It’s about the ache of falling fast while someone you love treads carefully; about asking without demanding, about wanting reassurance without writing ultimatums. The language is simple because the experience is; anyone who’s ever tried to match rhythms with another human being knows the helplessness in the gap. Musically, the song quietly votes for patience. It surges where you expect it to, but the biggest lift is emotional—a melody that feels like choosing to keep hope alive.
Producer Nyssa Ray’s fingerprint is all over that balance. The track favors lift over gloss and space over clutter, letting the full-band energy carry weight without crowding Holden’s delivery. It’s the sound of a songwriter who knows exactly what he wants a song to do, and a collaborator who knows how to make it do that—no more, no less.
The video completes the circle. Those grainy road clips from the early 2000s—the “young couple with no cares in the world”—aren’t nostalgia props; they’re the living archive of the song’s origin story, proof that the feeling “Waiting” captures has been walking alongside Holden for years. Bringing that footage into the present reframes the narrative: this isn’t a comeback so much as a continuation finally allowed to become audible.
Zoom out, and the 3 Year Project starts to look like a dare and an invitation rolled into one. The dare: prove that a disciplined, monthly release schedule and a finite run of shows can build a body of work with momentum and meaning. The invitation: bring people along—audiences, collaborators, family, strangers—so the story belongs to more than one person. It’s not lost on Holden that the Britpop he loves was built on anthems made to be shouted back. “Waiting” doesn’t beg for that treatment, but it will earn it the honest way, by showing up song after song.
There’s romance in the north-star goal of Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage. There’s even more in the day-to-day choices that make a long shot plausible: writing when time is scarce, practicing when energy is thinner than it should be, playing shows that matter because they’re limited, giving away a cut when it would be easier to keep it. In that sense, “Waiting” is a mission statement disguised as a love song. It says the quiet part out loud: I’m still here. I still mean it. Meet me where I am; I’ll keep moving.
As a first chapter, it’s disarmingly complete—an origin myth, a personal vow, a public promise. As a signal of what’s ahead, it’s even better. If the plan holds, we’ll get eleven more singles between now and next June, each another dot on the map outlining Holden’s reemergence. If they’re all as grounded and generous as “Waiting,” the 3 Year Project won’t just hit its marks; it’ll make its case for why long arcs—of love, of work, of art—are worth following in the first place.
