“Social media is an advertisement for the superficial extroverted self.”
― Hozier
“By nature, I’m an awkward person; I’m a gangly introvert.”
― Hozier
“You grow up and recognize that in any educated secular society, there’s no excuse for ignorance. You have to recognize in yourself, and challenge yourself, that if you see racism or homophobia or misogyny in a secular society, as a member of that society, you should challenge it. You owe it to the betterment of society.”
― Hozier
“I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death: a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment – if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes – everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.”
― Hozier
“I try to be happy. I try to face things without regret or make sure that I’m happy with things and leave nothing unsaid if I can.”
― Hozier
“There are a lot of recurring themes that I resonated with when I read ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’”
― Hozier
“When I first started to sing, I just swung at it with an axe.”
― Hozier
“My musical education was grounded in blues and Chicago blues – John Lee Hooker and Otis Redding.”
― Hozier
“It’s a very, very interesting experience to be talking to people who are such icons in their own right. When Adele came to a show, I was just talking to her, and at the time, I thought, ‘I’m just having a chat with somebody.’ But then I heard myself say, ‘Oh, I was talking to Adele the other day,’ and it’s as strange as you’d imagine.”
― Hozier
“We have such a culture of discrimination and hatred, and one that has scapegoats and affects people so extremely. That’s something that very easily crosses borders.”
― Hozier
“I love making music, but if you make something that inspires somebody else to make something, without getting too airy-fairy, you’ve contributed to the zeitgeist in some way, and that’s just an amazing feeling.”
― Hozier
“I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties. I spent quite a bit of time in choirs growing up, and in the world-touring music group, Anuna. It’s a sound with very rich texture, voices singing together.”
― Hozier
“I like playing with light and shade. I like saying awful things in very pretty ways.”
― Hozier
“We all run the risk of thinking that people have common sense sometimes.”
― Hozier
“Growing up, I always saw the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. The history speaks for itself, and I grew incredibly frustrated and angry. I essentially just put that into my words.”
― Hozier
“I don’t like false happy endings, and I don’t think the real world is such a forgiving place.”
― Hozier
“I try to face things without regret, or make sure that I’m happy with things and leave nothing unsaid if I can.”
― Hozier
“There is no singer I can think of who can touch Ella Fitzgerald. And when Billie Holiday sings, she’s merciless about it. Her voice has just this immaculate sadness – even in happy songs, there was something that was so broken about it.”
― Hozier
“The public discourse online is not done through the polite language of debate.”
― Hozier
“I had just discovered jazz, and I started singing in a kind of blues cover band at the age of 15. We called ourselves – it was a terrible name – the Blue Zoots. We couldn’t actually get our hands on zoot suits, nor did we dress in blue. We did covers of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and kind of Blues Brothers repertoire stuff.”
― Hozier
“I love a lot of Irish folk music and Irish folk songs.”
― Hozier
“I’m still finding my feet in many ways as a performer. I’m not an extrovert, and certainly the attention isn’t what drew me to it, and I find that quite jarring at times. I used to stress a lot about shows and get palpitations before shows, but eventually you learn to love it, and it is a thrill.”
― Hozier
“I’m uncomfortable with selfies and status updates documenting mundane pieces of my life, which I don’t think should be of interest to anyone else.”
― Hozier
“I didn’t even have that many close LGBT friends or anything like that, but I suppose it was growing up and becoming aware of how you are in a cultural landscape that is blatantly homophobic… you turn around and say, ‘Why did I grow up in a homophobic place? Why did I grow up in a misogynistic place?’”
― Hozier
“You grow up and recognise that in an educated, secular society, there’s no excuse for ignorance. You have to recognise in yourself, and challenge yourself, that if you see racism or homophobia or misogyny in a secular society, as a member of that society, you should challenge it. You owe it to the betterment of society.”
― Hozier
“When you play to an audience, you come away energized. It’s the promo that really breaks an artist. Some lad sitting on a box trying to create a drum sound in a dry little studio. Everyone goes, ‘Great – okay, now on with my day.’ You go back to the bus, and you weep.”
― Hozier
“It’s so easy to look forward when you’re travelling; you spend your life looking forward, thinking, ‘What’s next? When do I get time to work on my music again? Or when do I get time to get my ‘normal’ life back?’”
― Hozier
“I used to almost not look forward to recording, because it was like, ‘Okay, what am I going to have to sacrifice?’”
― Hozier
“One of my first festivals was Oxygen 2006. It had this amazing lineup with the Arctic Monkeys on their first or second album, the Strokes, Kings of Leon, the Magic Numbers and then the Who and James Brown. I waited in the pit for a good eight hours to see James Brown.”
― Hozier
“My dad was a blues musician around Dublin when I was a baby, so the only music I would listen to growing up was John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It’s music that feels like home to me.”
― Hozier
“I just hate getting my hair cut.”
― Hozier
“I think marriage is a scary concept. It’s a scary concept for anybody. I’m not sure where I sit with that.”
― Hozier
“If I fall into a city, I fall into a scene, and I just don’t want to get distracted and enjoy myself too much. There’s too much work to be done.”
― Hozier
“I wish I had more time to read. I’m always traveling.”
― Hozier
“Someone had an eye on me as I was leaving high school. I had a chance to record demos, but they were kind of wanting to make a pop singer out of me, of the ‘X Factor’ variety. I didn’t feel comfortable with it. I wanted to be a songwriter.”
― Hozier
“No Facebook status is as worrying as a vote and no tweet is as noticeable as an angry cry from a crowd outside a government building.”
― Hozier
“It’s funny: Your relationship changes with a song over time. After a year or so, you’re a different person, so your songs, you don’t connect with them like you did.”
― Hozier
“It’s kind of strange to hear your songs sung back to you! You get a big insight into what people connect to, what’s moving to people or what songs people are really into.”
― Hozier
“There’s not a lot of room for thinking in popular culture; there’s not a lot of room for being conflicted.”
― Hozier
“I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.”
― Hozier
“Biggest musical influences would be people like Nina Simone and Tom Waits. A huge amount of writers like Leslie Feist and Paul Simon.”
― Hozier
“I tried to avoid anything that caused me frustration or grief or duress. I played FarmVille and procrastinated like all teenagers.”
― Hozier
“For me growing up, I had a Christian upbringing, and I just noticed this Catholic influence in school.”
― Hozier
“Being 16 is the worst time to be anybody, there is not enough tea in China to persuade me to be that young again. I wasn’t very happy with myself.”
― Hozier
“Some of the earlier stuff I did in studio with producers was very pop-directed, which I was uncomfortable with.”
― Hozier
“Being in a studio is quite a creative and energetic process.”
― Hozier
“I’m reading a lot of poetry because it’s a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you’ve got 10 minutes to yourself.”
― Hozier
“I’ve definitely received a lot of support in Nashville; it’s a huge music town. I like country music. Like any genre I’m largely unfamiliar with, there are elements I really enjoy and elements that go over my head.”
― Hozier
“I think it all started with Nina Simone. When I was maybe seven or eight, I used to listen to one of her albums every night before I went to sleep. For me, her voice was everything.”
― Hozier
“The best vocalists I can think of are female.”
― Hozier
“I always thought of myself as a very, very obscure artist.”
― Hozier
“I love Muddy Waters and Nina Simone. I also watched ‘The Blues Brothers’ movie over and over.”
― Hozier
“I never wrote music for the mainstream.”
― Hozier
“Blues is a very physical music.”
― Hozier
“There are a few Irish writers who have a very strong influence on me, especially on the ‘Take Me to Church’ EP.”
― Hozier
“I feel my duty is to make music.”
― Hozier
“Growing up in Ireland, there are a lot of aspects of God that hang in the air. And my music reflects that.”
― Hozier
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get married. I have no plans to not get married.”
― Hozier
“The myth of fame and the myth of success is cultivated because it is monetisable and it is profitable.”
― Hozier
“I’m always eager to make new music.”
― Hozier
“The way I did the first album… the way I wrote ‘Church’… was just to trust my instincts with the music and let it kind of do what it does.”
― Hozier
“Either somebody has equal rights, or they don’t. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There’s no mention of a man and a woman.”
― Hozier
“There was a moment, a few weeks after I signed, that it actually hit me. I was signed to a major label.”
― Hozier
“It was a rural upbringing by the seaside. A real quiet place surrounded by fields. I had to travel into town for school and stuff like that.”
― Hozier
“The main thing is, I can’t stay up late partying when I’m on tour. That’s not good for my voice or my health in general.”
― Hozier
“I’m quite tame as touring musicians go.”
― Hozier
“It’s a surreal experience filming promotion with Ryan Seacrest and meeting Top 40 pop artists.”
― Hozier
“Religion wasn’t imposed on me.”
― Hozier
“I dabbled with faith, and I explored religion quite thoroughly.”
― Hozier
“By the time I was in my teens, I was listening to Delta blues and jazz.”
― Hozier
“I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties.”
― Hozier
“I spent quite a bit of time in choirs, growing up, and in the world-touring music group Anuna.”
― Hozier
“Rarely do I finish a song lyrically before I have a musical idea there, but then again, rarely ever would I finish a song musically before starting the lyrical ideas. So a lot of the time, they come in tandem, or they just come at a glance.”
― Hozier
“I find lyrics can come at any time during the day, as can music.”
― Hozier
“Especially on the road, it’s very hard to find time to actually sit down and write.”
― Hozier
“If I don’t think something’s worth saying, I don’t think it’s quite there, I’d rather just not say it, to be honest. In that case, I’d rather wait ’till the thought is ready, ’till I feel like I’m happy with everything.”
― Hozier
“I would love to get in trouble with the Catholic Church. I’m not religious myself, but my issue is with the organization. It’s an organization of men – it’s not about faith.”
― Hozier
“I love a good party – but I’m not all that attracted to a celebrity lifestyle.”
― Hozier
“I hate nightclubs, and I get fed up very quickly in crowded rooms. I enjoy being around people I know.”
― Hozier
“I was always drawn to gospel music and the roots of African-American music. It’s the foundation of rock and roll.”
― Hozier
“It sounds like I’m joking when I say it, but when I wrote ‘Take Me To Church’ and a lot of these things, I didn’t think they would be hits. I thought I was writing for a potentially smaller audience.”
― Hozier
“I figured the songs wouldn’t make much of a splash. I didn’t think ‘Take Me To Church’ would play on the radio or get in the charts, and I didn’t think about dealing with a global audience.”
― Hozier
“The first time I heard Tom Waits, it was like everything just flipped. It was just this fascination with him. My cousin showed me ‘Small Change,’ and I just couldn’t get over that this was a white guy singing.”
― Hozier
“I’ve been a total Tom Waits dork for a long, long time.”
― Hozier
“I remember writing lyrics for ‘Take Me to Church’ for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It’s not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don’t actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.”
― Hozier
“I’m an awful control freak at times when it comes to production and stuff like that.”
― Hozier
“I will play around with an idea for a very long time until it’s found it’s feet and it’s good enough to become a song.”
― Hozier
“I’d love to do something with somebody like James Blake.”
― Hozier
“Things were never as exciting for me as the first gig in New York.”
― Hozier
“The more I come to L.A., the more it’s amazing.”
― Hozier
“I think my parents took me to see Sting when I was very, very young.”
― Hozier
“I remember one of the first albums I got was an album called ‘Thin Lizzy: Live and Dangerous.’”
― Hozier
“All songs, all pieces of art, reflect the world that they were made in and the values of those artists and the hopes and aspirations of the people who listen to that music and who made that music.”
― Hozier
“A lot of the ‘leave’ campaign was centered around a thinly veiled xenophobia, just ‘control our own borders.’ It’s not a good look. I don’t think it represents Britain; I don’t think it represents the U.K. all too well. It breaks my heart for my generation in Britain who are going to suffer.”
― Hozier
“Regardless of the sexual orientation behind a relationship, it is still a relationship and still love.”
― Hozier
“As I listened more and more to the music that moved me, I gained more fascination with America.”
― Hozier
“I was definitely drawn to the mythology of one man, one voice, and one guitar.”
― Hozier
“I didn’t know what to expect of real America. What shocked me was the diversity of it and how different every city is. But also just how polite and usually good-willed and optimistic most Americans are.”
― Hozier
“I’m not quite used to being seen through the eyes of fans yet. Being met with squeals and screams – I haven’t gotten used to that.”
― Hozier
“I think it is important to differentiate between lip service towards something and actually making change.”
― Hozier
“I’m not cross about the idea of baptism; I just think the idea that when a child is born it is inherently sinful and carries sin and needs to be cleaned in order for it to be all right and all good with its creator, I just think that’s an absurd notion.”
― Hozier
“It was amazing for me to even perform at the Grammys, but to do so alongside Annie Lennox was a truly incredible honor.”
― Hozier
“My hair grows into a fuzz ball – I just wanted it to grow downwards rather than outwards – but then I realized I couldn’t play guitar with it that way. I couldn’t do anything day-to-day without my hair getting in my mouth or my eyes or my food, so I just started tying it back, long before I knew what a man bun was.”
― Hozier
“One of my biggest influences of all time would be somebody like Tom Waits. David Bowie is another huge influence. I’m also a big fan of St. Vincent and Leslie Feist.”
― Hozier
“I have very strong feelings about a lot of things. I am sometimes reluctant to come straight to the forefront with it. You know, first and foremost, I’m a musician. I’m a songwriter.”
― Hozier
“I look at all good things with a bit of a dark lens, I suppose, especially with something like love.”
― Hozier
“Love isn’t any one good thing; it’s a very, very strange mishmash of emotions. Your love for somebody is, oftentimes, informed by the terrible things you might believe about yourself, and comparatively, the person you see them as is everything that you’re not.”
― Hozier
“If you can say something beautiful in a very terrible way – I was always drawn to that.”
― Hozier
“I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.”
― Hozier
“I am a politically motivated person, and that will come through in the music.”
― Hozier
“I’m not sure if every song will be ‘Take Me to Church,’ but I can only hope that people enjoy the body of work that I have ahead of me.”
― Hozier
“I was essentially raised on blues music. My dad was a blues musician around Dublin when I was a baby, so the only music I would listen to growing up was John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It’s music that feels like home to me.”
― Hozier
“When I write songs, I try to remove myself a little bit. Obviously, they’re very personal to me, but it feels easier if I feel like I’m writing characters.”
― Hozier
“I’m influenced a lot by Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, even Paul Weller – Billie Holiday as well: People who wrote and sang songs that were reflective of their times. I quite like that. I quite admire that.”
― Hozier
“To be honest, the biggest reason I write music and became a musician was to create the amount of joy that I felt about music to anyone else. To me, that’s a job well done.”
― Hozier
“I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.”
― Hozier
“The best vocalists I can think of are female. There is no singer I can think of who can touch Ella Fitzgerald. And when Billie Holiday sings, she’s merciless about it. Her voice has just this immaculate sadness – even in happy songs, there was something that was so broken about it.”
― Hozier
“I know I’m not the kind of music that’s going to have tons of screaming fans, and I’m not gonna be everyone’s cup of tea. I just want to do as good a job as I can.”
― Hozier
“I’m quite sure I don’t want legions of 15-year-old girls who call themselves, like, Broziers or something. My career isn’t going to be that kind of a thing.”
― Hozier
“If I could, I’d sing old French songs or American folk music, but I sure as hell can’t do it as well as Mississippi John Hurt – no way in hell am I getting near that!”
― Hozier
“One of my favorite books is ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ by George Orwell, and ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ obviously, is a big influence and is one of my favorites.”
― Hozier
“I think it’s very hard to write things about being joyful. I find that quite difficult. I think when you’re happy, you don’t want to write songs; you just want to enjoy being happy.”
― Hozier
“Religion wasn’t imposed on me. I dabbled with faith, and I explored religion quite thoroughly.”
― Hozier
“I think all that we would know of America back home is foreign policy, and maybe the snippets of the madness of political culture.”
― Hozier
“You just feel like you’re doing a job that you want to be doing, and then one day, somebody asks you a question like that: ‘What’s it like to be famous?’ It doesn’t really mean anything. The only difference is some people stop you and ask you for photographs.”
― Hozier
“Truth be told, I’m not all that comfortable with celebrity culture. That was always something that baffled me, the obsession over fame. I don’t think that’s a reason why anyone should get into making music.”
― Hozier
“The success of ‘Take Me To Church,’ I never imagined it. I never imagined that it would work on radio, that it would find its way onto the charts, even at home and certainly not in America.”
― Hozier
“Certainly in the case of having to answer questions about where a song comes from, it’s a hell of a lot easier when you say, ‘I’ve removed myself from it.’ But they start from quite a personal place. They always do.”
― Hozier
“I am a politically motivated person, and that will come through in the music. I’m not sure if every song will be ‘Take Me to Church,’ but I can only hope that people enjoy the body of work that I have ahead of me.”
― Hozier
“Anyone close to me will be familiar with my frustrations with certain aspects of social media: the behaviour it encourages and attitudes towards the self it can breed.”
― Hozier
“Much of social media can be seen as the ‘News of me.’ It’s not so much a platform for connecting and sharing as it is a platform for advertising the idea of yourself you want to portray to others: the image of yourself you want to project.”
― Hozier
“Governments do not care about your Facebook-assembled opinion. Incompetent politicians don’t read your tweets; there are reasons for them being out of touch. Change does not come about for ‘likes’ on a page, though the ideas for it may start there.”
― Hozier
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