The New Cue #300 July 10: Hozier
"If you want to maintain chart success, there’s oftentimes a certain formula..."
Wahey, it’s Monday!
I wonder if those words have ever been said before? Unlikely really. Historically, Monday has never had anything going for it, it’s grim, it’s serious, it’s the Panorama of weekdays, it’s Monday. But then your trusty music Substack letter The New Cue comes along with our weekly free Monday editions and everything is all “wahey, it’s Monday!”. Feels good doesn’t it? And if it doesn’t feel good just pretend it feels good and somewhere along the line you’ll convince yourself it feels good.
Today, in our 300th edition (!!), we’ve got a chat with Irish singer-songwriter star Hozier and all you have to do to read it is scroll down. So easy! We’ll see you on Friday, when we’ll be Recommendering you into the weekend.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Hozier
Hozier emerged a decade ago with the soulful anthem Take Me To Church, a song that became such a gargantuan hit that I just had to Google what number its Spotify streams were as it contained too many digits for my tiny brain to comprehend (it’s well over two billion). But rather than trying to repeat the trick, since then the affable, gently-spoken Irishman with a belter of a singing voice has explored new sonic territory. His 2019 second record Wasteland, Baby! beefed up the stark blues of his debut, everything a little more bombastic and on-edge, like the excellent Nina Cried Power, which featured Mavis Staples on co-vocals:
With his forthcoming third album Unreal Unearth, Andrew Hozier-Byrne expands his sound further, the songs taking in sweeping rock, gospel-tinged indie-pop, jazzy ballads and bluesy contemplations, that stirring croon at the centre of everything. In a further sign that he’s a man apart from all the big-voiced singer-songwriters who emerged at the same time, the album uses Dante’s Inferno as its thematic core – I mean, you won’t be saying that about Rag’n’Bone Man, will you? A few weeks ago, Niall spoke to him on the phone about how the record came together, bee-keeping and more:
Hello Andrew, long time no speak.
Yeah, it’s been a moment. When was the last time we chatted?
I think it was just before the second record so a while ago, as now you’re getting ready to release another record. Are you all geared up to get back into it?
Yeah, it’s good. We’ve just done a kind of a club tour in the States and in Europe so I feel pretty good with the band. I’m just eager now to get the music out, excited to let people hear it. I feel good. It’ll be an onslaught when the release comes, it’ll be busy. I’m just happy with the work, I want to share it.
How did you feel when you finished it?
I think, like a lot of albums when you finish it, you haven’t quite decided or become at peace with the fact that it’s finished yet. There’s a part of you that’s always wondering, ‘do I need to do more? Should I do more?’. But I think once settled into that and I had a grasp of the record and revised over it once or twice, I’m really proud of it and I’m at peace with it.
Take me back to the beginning, how much of an idea did you have about what you wanted to do at the start?
I definitely wanted to lean into Dante’s Inferno thing in some way and that was part of a lot of the early songs. I had to make a choice at some point of how to do that, be it structural or if it was kind of textual. There’s a few songs that I started where it just got too close to it, where the references were too close that it was nearly like musical theatre, stuff that actually referenced it too closely that it’s so specific to the text. Once I loosened from that and let it be more of a thematic thing, or let the circles be themes and let the nods be subtle here and there, things just started flowing way, way better. I wanted it to be something that people could enjoy the album and the Dante’s Inferno thing is not a very important part of it, it’s structural but the songs can be enjoyed completely on their own regardless of any knowledge or any reference, or the listener having any knowledge whatsoever of the Dante thing.
Don’t you think you missed a trick by not calling it Take Me To The Nine Circles Of Hell?
I think I can give that one a miss! Tempting as it is...
Fair enough. What was it that prompted the Dante’s Inferno angle in the first place?
I think I was reading it during the pandemic, and there’s a few lines in the first few Cantos of Inferno where the visual elements of it rattled me a little bit and stuck with me. It was at the beginning of the pandemic, I had a lot of time on my hands so I started reading a few books that I had always wanted to read but never had the opportunity or never gave myself the opportunity to. It felt like we’d all entered into something of a new scenario, a new situation and in the beginning parts of it there was just a lot of loss, this huge fear of loss at the beginning of the pandemic. It became a useful device of writing about that journey of the last three years without actually making, quote-unquote, “a pandemic album or a lockdown album”, describing something of a journey. There’s this line in the translation I was reading that the big text that’s above the doorway of hell is “through me you enter the population of loss”, these lines about how Dante is just trying to get his head around how many people are in the world to die, and he’s trying to make sense of the numbers. I think the first few months of the pandemic, it was all trying to make sense of numbers, every day was just news reports of numbers and numbers and numbers and it felt surreal and it felt unreal. It’s in that stew that the album found its way and emerged.
There’s always quite a big gap between your records – five years between the first two and four to this one. Is that the natural pace at which you made music?
I think they’ve always been long tours and it’s hard to begin work on an album while you’re still in tour mode. Sometimes it’s been a year and a half or two years touring, which is a lot now looking back. And then you could finish an album and it’s not really gonna be out for another year. Plus, usually anyway and I hope this can keep up, but unless I really think something is worth saying, I just won’t release it, I try to make sure I’m happy and feel that the work has merit and it’s worthwhile before releasing it. I’d never just release music for its own sake. I think this album would have been out earlier, the pandemic definitely slowed it down. Moving forwards, maybe I might shorten those gaps.
Looking back to that initial blast of success you had on your debut and with Take Me To Church, did that affect your approach moving forward?
It didn’t really affect my approach. I tried to make sure that it didn’t, I still write songs in the same way that I wrote that. I was really proud that that did what it did and it had success that it that it had. I think the trickier part is making sure that having chart success doesn’t affect what you value in a song and what you value in what a song needs to be or can be. I tried to make sure that I wasn’t chasing that success for its own sake, or chart success. But I think if you want to maintain chart success, there’s oftentimes a certain formula that you might have to put into your work which I think is not what I’m interested in with with my own stuff.
Do you have any hobbies away from making music?
I do. Increasingly, I realise it’s good to have hobbies. I didn’t really have so many once upon a time. But I keep bees - there’s one hobby. At the moment, I think we have about five hives.
Wow, that’s amazing.
I enjoy it. Myself and my neighbour, we tend to a few hives, so when I was home last week I got to open them up and check them out.
What’s the hardest thing about having a five beehives?
It’s sometimes finding the queen. And you may not realise whether the queen is there or not. There’s always this awful period of a week if you don’t sense any activity out of the queen. You don’t see any new brood, you can’t find the queen and you can’t replace it, maybe you’ve tried and then the bees have rejected a new queen. We caught a wild swarm recently and it’s a healthy hive but we’ve got to mark the queen and we can’t find her, so there’s little things like that. And there is diseases and stuff but they’re very rare. But they’re actually very self-sufficient, they’re incredible creatures.
That’s a great answer. Where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever heard your music?
I couldn’t tell you the weirdest place, but I was sent a video once of a person who was on vacation somewhere near Papa New Guinea and they had taken a small boat to a tiny island and they sent me this video of them sitting on the island and it was playing on the local stereo or something like that. That was in the early days where it’s strange to hear where it finds its place. I remember one of the first times hearing it in public before anyone had seen what I looked like, I remember sitting on a train on the way home from college and somebody was sitting across from me listening to my music and they were facing me. That was a bizarre experience.
ND