Hozier has revealed his motivation for writing his serious and often politically motivated music.
The 31-year-old who hails from Bray admitted he has no interest in writing straightforward chart hits.
The singer said: “It’s that thing of the personal being political. Everything that is personally experienced has a political dimension to it. If you’re struggling to pay the rent, to pay for the clothes that you wear, the food that you eat – they all have a very important political dimension to them. You absolutely can put the essence of the bigger questions of the bigger issues into a song.
“Why write about one thing as opposed to writing pop bangers? I just find it more interesting, if nothing else. It’s a fascinating world out there. Not always a pretty world. In fact, a terrifyingly brutal world at times.”
The singer/songwriter made the remarks during an appearance in the new Netflix docuseries This is Pop which unpacks the history of pop music.
He appears in episode seven of the eight part series, which examines the impact of music as a form of protest. And he was conscious to reinforce the importance of music saying:
He added: “Writing songs and putting them out there into the world is a serious business. When you think about that song as a vehicle and what that vehicle can carry a song can be a very, very important medium for spreading the message. For example it can remind institutionalised power where true power lies and that is with the people.
“There is something about music that sticks to people. It sticks with their experience and follows them through generations what I’m fascinated by songs as a vehicle for storytelling, as a vehicle for the immortalising of the human experience. And the shared experiences of people in that community."
Speaking about the inspiration for his first hit Take Me To Church, which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards and became an anthem for the LGBTQI+ community, he revealed: “Take Me to Church was first a series of lyrical ideas where I was reflecting quite a bit on the legacy of the institutional lies of the Roman Catholic Church at home in Ireland. How it had treated people, the soft power that it had held over people’s lives for so long.
"Here was this institution that had managed to instil in society this matrix of thought and values, which was deeply hypocritical and incredibly damaging.”
He continued: “To use the church’s own words they view homosexuality as something that is intrinsically disordered. Something that is unnatural. When you have an organisation of that power that provides the sort of God given justification for alienating and torturing and persecuting people of that sexual orientation…
“At the time there were these horrendous attacks that were taking place against members of the LGBTQ community in Russia. There had been an increase in attacks carried out by essentially Neo Nazi gangs against LGBTQ youths. They posed as other LGBTQ youths in chatrooms and message boards to lure 14, 15, 16 year-olds to places where they thought that they would be safe and they attacked them and filmed those attacks and would torture them on camera and post those on social media.
“That was where Take Me To Church came from. It was discrimination against people in same sex relationships and that song managed to cross borders and it seemed to resonate with people across a wide space. If you’re writing songs and you are honest with it and you believe in what it is you are writing and you are willing to love and die by it surely your hope is that the more people that hear that the better.”
Hozier's episode is one of the more serious of the show with other episodes dealing with subjects such as The Boyz II Men Effect, Auto-Tune, Britpop and the appeal of festivals. The entire series is available on Netflix now.
