Frost School faculty member Ian Hölljes’ path in music and life has been propelled by a sometimes-startling serendipity that seems to flow naturally from his trust in his own instincts. He started the band Delta Rae with his brother, sister, and three close friends in a house in the North Carolina woods, creating an indefinable style of music that made them wildly successful. Then they left their label and a conventional path with a Kickstarter campaign that broke records, enabling Delta Rae to control their destiny and forge deep connections with their audience.
As he married and started a family in Miami, Hölljes embraced a new role mentoring the next generation of musicians as an instructor in the Modern Artist Development and Entrepreneurship (M.A.D.E.) program, where he has taught full-time since last fall.
“I really like to be part of nurturing young artists,” said Hölljes, who this semester is teaching songwriting, contemporary lyrics, artist development and career strategy, and ensemble performance artistry. “I love what our students are doing.”
He is humble about his own and Delta Rae’s achievements. “My experience is just one experience full of luck and mistakes and ceilings I couldn’t get past. I want my students to leapfrog past our success and find out what their dreams are.”
Hölljes’s music and life have been closely intertwined. He and his siblings grew up in the South and Northern California, where they sang in an a capella group together. Ian and Eric Hölljes began making music while attending Duke University, then created Delta Rae with their sister Britanny and childhood friend Elizabeth Hopkins as lead vocalists. To do that, Hölljes spent a year as a live-in caretaker for Reynolds Price, an acclaimed author, Rhodes scholar, and Duke professor who had paraplegia. Hölljes saved $30,000 to buy a house in the woods nearby where the fledgling group could make music and figure out how to launch, which they did in 2009, adding close friends Mike McKee on drums and Grant Emerson on bass.
“We gave ourselves two years to start the band and either get signed or start making a living,” said Hölljes, the guitarist and co-songwriter.
Delta Rae were a compellingly original “Southern Gothic-soul-folk-Americana-pop-country-family band” (per Hölljes’ website), with natural charisma, heartfelt presence, and vivid, poetic songs that did much more than help them make a living. Delta Rae signed with two major labels, Sire Records and Big Machine, released multiple studio and live albums, performed at major festivals such as Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, and, on top, late-night TV shows Conan, Seth Meyers, and The Tonight Show, played for Farm Aid and Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, and garnered national press. They accumulated over 100 million Spotify streams, 34 million YouTube views, and sold 100,000 headline tickets.
But they kept their iconoclastic spirit. In 2019, the group left Big Machine and appealed to fans to fund an independent double album, “The Dark and The Light.” Their effort hit as superstar Taylor Swift also left Big Machine in a famous rift over royalties and artistic control, lifting Delta Rae’s fundraising into the stratosphere: they hit their goal of $30,000 in the first hour, eventually raising $450,000 to become the best-funded independent band in Kickstarter history. The response strengthened their belief in going their own way and forged a deeper connection with fans who supported them online during the pandemic and beyond.
Now Hölljes channels the lessons of those experiences: staying true to yourself, taking creative and practical inspiration from other artists, and being unafraid to take risks.
“When I teach the artist development course, I ask them to look at who they admire today who has broken in the past five years,” Hölljes said. “The same for songwriting. You have to figure out what you identify as magical, to close the gap between what you admire and what you can do yourself.”
“You can go back to the great poets and learn about great craft. Or, if you admire Olivia Rodrigo, Kendrick Lamar, or Jay Z, you can study them. You have to study folks that light up your imagination.”
He is conscious that the music industry has changed enormously since the 2010’s, aiming to guide his students, rather than push them into following his or any other specific path.
“Coming into this too top-down doesn’t feel honest for this industry,” he said. “Every class feels like an experiment, and I’m learning a lot too.”
He is forthright about the potential pitfalls of a music career and the strength needed to negotiate them.
“You have to have confidence in who you are, and that’s not easy,” Hölljes said. “It can be challenging to your identity, to your family life, and your financial standing. All those things are elements of being an artist that I want to be honest about, so that our students can make good artistic and entrepreneurial decisions for their lives.”
He has brought in guest speakers to show other examples of those decisions: Miami-based superstar producer El Guincho, a friend who has worked with the stars Rosalia and Charli XCX; brother Eric Hölljes, who has written for Mike Posner and Rascal Flatts; and Katerina Lomis, a University of Miami biochemistry graduate who recently found success returning to her early love of music.
“They had so much wisdom about staying true to yourself and maintaining your leverage as an artist and entrepreneur, so you’re not at mercy of the industry,” Hölljes said.
That same ethos also brought Hölljes to the Frost School. He and his Miami-raised wife Rebecca—whom he met at Duke University and who left work as a law clerk at the Florida Supreme Court to be a tour manager for Delta Rae, and whom Hölljes proposed to in front of a 10,000-person concert crowd—moved here in 2018 soon after the birth of their first son Leo. When the pandemic shut down Delta Rae’s tour plans, band members found themselves turning in a new direction.
“There were all these pent-up shoots of life that had been arrested by so many years of touring,” said Hölljes, who is 41, and whose family has expanded to include a second son, Hugh. Delta Rae members had three weddings and four kids between 2020 and 2023. "We scheduled one last tour, and by the time we got to the end, we all looked at each other and said “We can’t do this this way anymore.””
Fred Goldring, a friend and entertainment lawyer who graduated from the University of Miami School of Law, recommended Hölljes connect with the Frost School, where M.A.D.E. chair Raina Murnak welcomed him as an adjunct in 2023, leading to his full-time appointment in 2025.
Even as he nurtures his students’ dreams, Hölljes and Delta Rae are pursuing a new dream of their own: an immersive Broadway musical based on their songs, developed by P3 Productions, which has produced or co-produced such successful, culturally influential shows as “Kinky Boots,” “A Strange Loop” and “Art.” Titled “The Ninth Woman,” it asks the provocative question: what happens if witch hunters encounter a real and powerful witch?
Serendipity, instinct, and adventurous creativity have also propelled “The Ninth Woman.” The seed of the show can be found in one of Delta Rae’s first music videos, “Bottom of the River,” which they made for $2000, directed by a friend at Duke University and featuring the school’s dance and step teams. In the haunting video, a mob drags singer Britney Hölljes off to what looks like a lynching, which doesn’t end well for them.
Two of P3’s founders, Ben Holtzman and Sammy Lopez, were early Delta Rae fans who had contacted the group about the idea of basing a musical on their songs. The idea grew during a 2018 residency at a Nashville club, designed to look like a haunted chapel with actors interacting with Delta Rae. That accelerated after the Kickstarter campaign, which inspired the band to promise to create a musical—a form the Hölljes siblings loved as children.
“The Ninth Woman” has had successful showcases at the famed Williamstown Theater Festival and New York Stage & Film, which helped develop “Hamilton” and “American Idiot.” Hölljes said the plan is to launch “The Ninth Woman” in the fall of 2027, and bring it to Broadway or London’s West End soon afterward.
It is another example of how following creative instinct and real-world opportunities can be transformative. “I want to give that idea to students to go do something crazy good right now,” Hölljes said. “For me, so much of songwriting is teasing out a thread, a chorus, a melodic idea, and then teasing out what story that song is trying to tell. It’s the same with the musical. We had “Bottom of the River,” and then we went song by song, asking, “What story is this trying to tell?”
