Laura Barton 

Hozier: The best vocalists I can think of are female

Hozier's breakout hit Take Me to Church was inspired by his first breakup and a lifetime love of Nina Simone, finds Laura Barton
  
  

Andrew Hozier-Byrne
Andrew Hozier-Byrne: 'I wouldn’t ever chase a pretty melody' Photograph: Public Relations

"When I first started to sing I just swung at it with an axe," Andrew Hozier-Byrne says, and smiles. He is recalling his early days fronting an eight-piece blues band: 15 years old, with a three-piece brass section and suits too big, playing Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Howlin' Wolf, and Tom Waits covers at local community centres to audiences of baffled teenage goths. "We always stuck out like a sore thumb," he concludes mildly.

Still, as a lesson in chutzpah it may now be serving him well. Hozier-Byrne is now better known simply as Hozier, a 24-year-old Irish singer who with the force of a single song has been flung on to an international stage – YouTube hits in the millions, sold-out US tours, performances on Letterman and The Ellen DeGeneres Show with more primetime exposure on the way.

Take Me to Church is indeed a remarkable song – a vibrant, lusty composition that showcases not only the hue of Hozier's voice but also the heft of his songwriting. With repeated listening what at first glance appears to be a song of simple love and devotion becomes something more muddled – a tangle of desire and religious scrutiny. Its video, following the pursuit of a young gay couple by an angry mob, and referencing the persecution of the LGBT community in Russia, went viral soon after release.

Hozier himself describes it as "a bit of a losing your religion song". Written in the wake of a breakup with his first girlfriend, it is a love song, certainly, but also a contemplation of the idea of sin, drawing influence from Christopher Hitchens and a Fulke Greville poem, Chorus Sacerdotum, that speaks of mankind being "created sick, commanded to be sound".

He has been startled by the lack of controversy the song has stirred, particularly at home. "That it got on Irish radio, the fact of that was amazing," he says. "But there is very little loyalty left for the organisation of the church at home. The damage done is obscene. And the lack of action to make reparations, and the lack of political will to make changes. It's very, very frustrating."

The core of Take Me to Church is "about how organisations like the Catholic Church undermine what it is to be human and loving somebody else", and the "offensive, backward, barbaric" notion that every newborn child is born into sin and must be forgiven by God. He has, he says, "a lot of strong opinions about the church". His parents were raised Catholic – his father educated at a Christian Brothers school, and his mother at a school run by nuns. "And I think they made a very conscious decision not to raise their kids the same way. And I don't blame them."

Hozier grew up in County Wicklow, in a community so rural that there was a bus "maybe every two hours" and a rather pitiable internet connection, which meant finding music was something of a challenge. Not surprisingly, he fell back heavily on his parents' record collection – they had amassed a hearty selection of blues, jazz and soul, and from an early age he found himself intrigued by John Lee Hooker, Bukka White and particularly Tom Waits. "I would hear snippets of his darker stuff, Blood Money and the Black Rider, and just be fascinated," he remembers. "I was trying to get my head around what he was writing. I dove right into the black, icy water of his weirder stuff."

Hozier is a very particular presence – he describes himself as "awkward", but rather there seems something undiluted about him – he is tall and slight, and speaks with intellect and intensity. At one point he explains how, for him, songwriting is slow, methodical work "because I'm very meticulous about making sure every word is right. I can defend any idea by the time someone hears it, because I've put it through a strainer seven times," and there is a similar quality to his conversation – each word selected with care, as if feeling its ripeness.


Hozier - Take Me To Church on MUZU.TV.

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His musical trajectory to date seems to have been fuelled by the courage of his convictions: playing Robert Johnson covers in the school canteen; dropping out of his music degree at Trinity College, Dublin, to pursue his own songwriting; being spotted at a talent contest singing a Nina Simone cover.

"I think it all started with Nina Simone," he says. "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." It's strangely rare to hear a male artist heap such praise upon female artists, but Hozier talks glowingly of St Vincent, Feist, Lisa Hannigan. "The best vocalists I can think of are female," he says. "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."

It's perhaps this musical furrow – the merciless, the dark, the broken – that Hozier hopes to explore further. He talks of wanting to move away from some of the "prettier, cleaner" sounding tracks on his debut record. "I think there's two or three shades in the album," he says. "There's where Take Me to Church is, and then there's darker stuff there – To Be Alone, and Angel of Small Death, that are all minor keys and darker. Songs like Someone New and Jackie and Wilson are in a much brighter space, and they to me are much harder to produce, to find what it is I like in them. I wouldn't ever chase a pretty melody, I wouldn't be in too much of a rush to finish it."

He speaks with similar distance about the "almost shamelessly romantic" songs on the album. "Again I probably hope to move away from that a little bit in the future," he says. "And I think a lot of my songs have been about relationships, which has to do with being a young man and coming away from my first experience of having a relationship. I'd never experienced being in love and being loved before."

He looks back on the songs he wrote before that relationship as "juvenilia, angsty, lonely songwriting that teenagers do", and still seems awed by the transformative power of being in love. "Being close to somebody, having that experience of closeness and physicality and the tactile nature of being with somebody, that was new to the music and to the lyrics," he explains.

When the relationship ended, Hozier was living back at home with his parents. "And I suppose it was just me in an attic," he smiles, "so there was time for me to write and just digest what it had meant – who you are before a relationship, what it does to you, who you were at the time, and then who are you afterwards. There was a lot of reflection on that.

"I think a lot of it's to do with listening to blues music," he says. "Son House once said I think that the only blues is the blues between a man and a woman. And there's no substitute for experience, to know what it is to be in love and to be able to write songs about it."

Take Me to Church is released on Rubyworks/Island on 15 September. The album Hozier follows on 22 September.

 

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