TONY CLAYTON-LEA reports on the rise and rise of Hozier
IT’S A question that has been asked for some time, but especially in the past six months: how exactly did an introverted songwriter from County Wicklow become in the past three years one of the most commercially successful musical exports from Ireland?
Back in 2013, Andrew Hozier-Byrne released Take Me to Church, which within months had attained the status of an instant classic, a song that became so quickly embedded in radio playlists that it not only generated the requisite hot buzz in Ireland but around the world. ‘A star has very much been born’, ran the headlines, yet as is the way it took some years for Hozier’s popularity to make its presence felt outside of Ireland. This was easy enough to understand once you’re aware of the years it took to get Take Me to Church from the songwriter’s head into the hands of the radio playlisters and programmers.
The son of a blues-loving father, Hozier was (as his song Jackie and Wilson has it) raised on rhythm and blues, and so from the off, a course was charted. Come his teenage years, a drift from academia towards music seemed the only choice, but there was no rush to his progress: Hozier took the slow but sure path of the former. Hozier was fully aware of rock’n’roll sprinters that had sparked early and burned out quickly. Such caution, dovetailed with perfectionism, ensured that whatever he did would take time but would be as good as he could get it. Cue (in his late teens and early 20s) a series of songwriting and recording sessions that, as the saying goes, went either his way or the highway.
“Some of the earlier stuff I did in the studio with producers was very pop-directed, which I was uncomfortable with,” he informed the Irish Times in 2013. At the end of 2012, he said, “I realised I had never been happy with stuff fully produced by other people and probably was never going to be.” Part of that, he said, was ego, and part of it was not being able to relinquish control. And so he removed his songs from the ears of people he deemed (rightly or wrongly) not to have similar creative approaches. He took his songs home and recorded most of them in a tiny room with basic sound recording equipment — one of the songs, Cherry Wine, was recorded in a nearby derelict hotel, and was left virtually untouched by studio production wizardry.
He left his house with a batch of songs that went on his 2014 self-titled debut album, which proved that Take Me to Church was no fluke: music critics and audiences praised it, five of the album’s singles reached the Irish Top 50, and the album was noticed by two bastions of the American music industry – Billboard Music Awards and Grammy Awards. It appeared to be a hare-and-tortoise race.
But some onlookers wondered whether Hozier was taking the cautionary approach just a little too seriously. It took five years for his second album, Wasteland, Baby!, to be released, yet it was clear from the strength and issues outlined in the songs that he wasn’t someone to needlessly issue material if he didn’t feel it was warranted.
Commerce could wait a while, seemed to be the presiding thought. Besides, by this time Hozier’s fans knew he wasn’t the feckless sort. With the album expressing concerns about the perilous state of the world, fans and new admirers alike realised that solemn topics could be expressed within the formats of rock, blues, folk and pop without taking away from the simple pleasures of a song.
Despair and fatigue had seeped into the songs, admitted Hozier to San Francisco’s Riff magazine in 2019. “A lot of people, certainly like a lot of Irish people, have a very close, healthy relationship with despair, which is not always a bad thing. I think there are wonderful things to explore in that - we’re living in very interesting times and in many ways unprecedented times. I’ve always held that finding something to hang onto, something that provides you with an amount of hope, gives you some sense of faith in the kindness that people are capable of. That’s what a lot of the songs on the record were trying to reach for.”
Serious and overly earnest stuff, some might say, but the differences between being informed about such topics and being hammered over the head with them have proven to be Hozier’s special talent. Not only is there a lightness of touch in his songs that makes the topics feasible for commercial consumption, but there is also the man himself, who has managed over the past few years (particularly since the end of Covid restrictions) to unleash a charm offensive that isn’t at all disingenuous. Not that it’s a strategy, but Hozier’s innate sensitivities have come across decisively in media interviews - notably in the US, where the blend of a tall, handsome male rock/pop singer and self-aware intelligence is viewed with equal parts admiration and ardour.
Meanwhile, his latest album, Unreal Unearth (inspired by topics that include British colonialism and Dante’s concept of the nine circles of Hell), has proven to be the one that has made his music a fixture on US commercial radio stations. Not only did the album reach the number one position on Billboard’s Top Alternative and Rock categories, but the single track, Too Sweet, topped the US charts. When this happened in March of this year, the bean counters informed us that Hozier was the first Irish music act to top the Billboard Hot 100 in almost 35 years (since Nothing Compares 2 U, by Sinead O’Connor in 1990), but the same statisticians missed out on a different and far more intuitive fact: Hozier is the first Irish music act since U2 (in their 1980s pre- and post-Joshua Tree phase) to tour the US so often and doggedly. In fact, notwithstanding visits to other territories, he has spent much of the time since the release of Unreal Unearth traversing the US playing large open-air venues and major theatres.
Next year is next year, of course, but whatever takes place will be because sometimes non-strategy works, sometimes having a quiet demeanour trumps the loud noises, sometimes sincerity bests chicanery, and sometimes the hare beats the tortoise. Hozier, says one of his Dublin-based management team, Niall Muckian (founder of Rubyworks Records, the singer’s label in Ireland), is not interested in what might work for radio. “He stays away from industry tricks, and he puts his fans first.”
