Top 75 Hozier Quotes

There are a few Irish writers who have a very strong influence on me, especially on the ‘Take Me to Church’ EP.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m quite tame as touring musicians go.

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!

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.

There’s not a lot of room for thinking in popular culture; there’s not a lot of room for being conflicted.

I like playing with light and shade. I like saying awful things in very pretty ways.

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.

I used to almost not look forward to recording, because it was like, ‘Okay, what am I going to have to sacrifice?’

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.

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.

I remember one of the first albums I got was an album called ‘Thin Lizzy: Live and Dangerous.’

For me growing up, I had a Christian upbringing, and I just noticed this Catholic influence in school.

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.

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.

Blues is a very physical music.

Some of the earlier stuff I did in studio with producers was very pop-directed, which I was uncomfortable with.

I think all that we would know of America back home is foreign policy, and maybe the snippets of the madness of political culture.

I always thought of myself as a very, very obscure artist.

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.

Biggest musical influences would be people like Nina Simone and Tom Waits. A huge amount of writers like Leslie Feist and Paul Simon.

I never wrote music for the mainstream.

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.

The public discourse online is not done through the polite language of debate.

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.

I’ve been a total Tom Waits dork for a long, long time.

I think my parents took me to see Sting when I was very, very young.

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.

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.

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?’

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.

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.

I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties.

We all run the risk of thinking that people have common sense sometimes.

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.

I’m always eager to make new music.

I tried to avoid anything that caused me frustration or grief or duress. I played FarmVille and procrastinated like all teenagers.

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.

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.

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.

Growing up in Ireland, there are a lot of aspects of God that hang in the air. And my music reflects that.

I find lyrics can come at any time during the day, as can music.

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.

The best vocalists I can think of are female.

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.

When I first started to sing, I just swung at it with an axe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think marriage is a scary concept. It’s a scary concept for anybody. I’m not sure where I sit with that.

By the time I was in my teens, I was listening to Delta blues and jazz.

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.

Regardless of the sexual orientation behind a relationship, it is still a relationship and still love.

I look at all good things with a bit of a dark lens, I suppose, especially with something like love.

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.

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.