Hozier’s Uniquely Irish Perspective on “The Condition of Living”
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The post Hozier’s Uniquely Irish Perspective on “The Condition of Living” appeared first on Consequence.
“I love my homeland. There’s no other way of saying it,” muses Hozier, who introduces himself as Andrew in the midst of his tour rehearsals in Nashville. “You spend time in a place, and the place spends its time in you.”
It’s a blazing late summer day in Tennessee when our conversation is taking place. The members of Hozier’s touring band are rolling in to the East Nashville rehearsal space one by one, and a drummer down the hall working through charts provides a backbeat throughout our time speaking. Many of the folks in the band are based in Music City, and Hozier shouts out the “incredible players and incredible instruments” the town has to offer.
We’re thousands of miles from Ireland, that homeland he loves so dearly, and it’s not the last time throughout our interview that a line from “Butchered Tongue,” off his latest LP, comes to mind: “So far from home to have a stranger call you darlin’/ And have your guarded heart be lifted like a child.”
Unreal Unearth, Hozier’s 2023 album, is a poetic spiral into Hell. During the pandemic, between a bit of Samuel Beckett and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he landed on Dante’s Inferno as the cornerstone of his third full-length project. “Between Wasteland, Baby! and Unreal Unearth, there is some small continuity; there’s an impending end, and then there’s what comes after,” he explains. “That’s what I was anxious about when writing Wasteland, Baby! — an information dark age, or dark age of empathy. And Unreal Unearth starts with what happens after the end.”
In this case, what happens after the end is a collection of 16 tracks that covers everything from heartache to memory, wistful longing to redemption. Soft-spoken and incredibly thoughtful in conversation, Hozier says that he toyed with even holding the Inferno inspiration close to his chest, but ultimately decided against it. It wouldn’t have matter: Unreal Unearth is lyrical not just in the musical definition of the word, but in that it’s immediately clear upon listening that it was inspired by poetry; you’d hear it even if Hozier hadn’t explicitly told you so.
After spending so much time immersed in such a story, he’s hesitant to agree to the word cathartic, which he feels sometimes has too much finality for his liking.
“The thing about playing with this idea of the Hell realms is that every one of us is going to descend into our own place and come out of it on the other side, hopefully having learned something about ourselves and the condition of living,” Hozier explains. “Something I’d hoped for was a sense of accepting the difficulty and challenge, and the sorrow and pain, of being alive, but also recognizing what’s beautiful about it — what can be cherished.”
In “To Someone from a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuarithe),” for example, he sings: “The feel of coolness only water brings/ There are some things that no one teaches you, love/ That God in his awful wisdom first programs in.” It’s one of many lines that feels timeless, but Hozier says that to him, the stories in his songs definitively take place in the present day, and he credits his own voice for any interpretations to the contrary.
“I think perhaps it’s that the Irish vernacular describes things in ways that are sometimes a little backwards — in Anglo-Irish, that is, it’s a bit Hibernian — so the syntax is sometimes mixed up, and there’s so many sayings that feel a little antiquated,” he posits. “But I never considered it. Sometimes, there’s only one way to say the things you need to say; and if they sound unusual in this time, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, either.”
On Unreal Unearth, he says things in a way he never has before: in that native Irish language. With the upcoming tour in support of the record (secure tickets here), he’s hopeful that he’ll hear fans around the world singing “organic Irish words,” noting how special of a thing it would be for him to witness, given that it’s a language that was once illegal.
He is aware of the fact that he’s become a bit of an ambassador for the country of Ireland as one of its most successful figures these days: “It would be silly of me not to consider it,” he says. “As any artist, I can represent my experience of growing up in a place and time, but I can’t represent everyone’s experience.”
He begins to reference some of the more “fun, playful” ways the Internet likes to represent him before trailing off. But you can find what he’s hinting at with minimal searching: “Hozier’s music teleports me to a past life in the 17th century where I was a humble woman married to a sheepherder living in a quaint cottage in a woodland area,” reads one tweet. “Hozier is never beating these bog man cryptid faerie allegations,” reads another.
It prompts me to ask if he does, in fact, feel like a woodland creature who emerged from the glen one day to gift us with his poetry. “So, no,” he laughs kindly, shaking his head. In this modern age, he’s perceived by so many people through his work that he’s come to terms with the fact that he can only control so much, adding, “I think there’s a lot of Irish people that are resistant to that representation; Irishness is complicated… So I see [fan posts], and it’s fun, but I’m careful about how I engage with it.”
Whether he engages with all the reactions the Internet has to offer or not, the album has connected with listeners. Unreal Unearth saw him return to the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Folk, Rock, and Alternative Rock album charts, but brought him to the top of the UK charts for the first time ever. This Irishman’s journey through Hell is resonating with international fans in ways even his considerable acclaim hadn’t yet reached, so he’s understandably excited to present it to live audiences.
As he prepares for the upcoming tour — which he confirms will include cuts from across all three of his full-length albums — he illustrates some of the ways the scale has been increased for this trek. There will be more visual elements that he describes as “tactile” pieces of the show. “The songs are a little more sonically complex,” he says. “We have synth lines and string lines, and having a cello and violin player at the same time creates a miniature string section.”
Until then, he doesn’t mind rehearsing in the American South, describing it as a place of “kindness and grace” with “a difficult history that can hold, in the same hands, the stunning hospitality and reality of the present.” He notes the “fantastic optimism” in this part of the world, and it’s all together such a thoughtful and poetic description of this part of the country that any of the great Southern gothic writers would have surely approved of the phrasing.
Even as the outsider, Hozier’s thoughtfulness is consistently present in that Irish brogue of his. He, if anyone, understands why being called darling when you’re so far from home is that much more special, and he reflects that back as a visitor. Perhaps it’s something learned from walking through an inferno: Who you are and where you are may not always align, but if you open yourself to looking for it, there’s bound to be something worth cherishing.
Get tickets to the “Unreal Unearth” tour, which kicks off its US leg on September 9th, here.
Hozier’s Uniquely Irish Perspective on “The Condition of Living”
Mary Siroky
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