HOZIER

The singer talks life after “Take Me to Church” and working with the “unbelievable” Mavis Staples on his upcoming EP ‘Nina Cried Power’

In mid-2015, Andrew Hozier-Byrne was living out what seemed like any musician’s dream. The Irish singer-songwriter’s independently released breakout single “Take Me to Church” sparked a U.S. label bidding war, skyrocketed to Number Two on the Billboard Hot 100, and, much to his surprise, entrenched itself on pop radio for several months. As if that wasn’t enough, only two years removed from life as a college dropout who’d frequent open mics around Dublin, the husky-voiced singer was booked on Saturday Night Live and then duetted at the Grammys with Annie Lenox.

Behind the scenes, however, the musician, who performs as Hozier, was struggling to cope with his stratospheric rise. “My head was spinning,” he recalls. “It took a long time for me to even make sense of it all.”

Meeting with Rolling Stone in May, Hozier settles into a couch at the airy house he’s been renting in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood. He’s been living here for a few weeks, putting the finishing touches on some new material. “So I don’t want to dwell on the past too much,” he tells RS. “But yeah, there were some really rough moments at the beginning.” Not until more than a year into his headlining tour, he says, did he finally feel at ease onstage. Still, “there’s no moment where it all of a sudden clicks and you go, ‘I have it all figured out.’ That’s a total fallacy,” he offers. “I guess at a certain point you just stop fucking shitting your pants and feel comfortable.”

Something that never felt comfortable, though, was writing music while on tour. To that end, in early 2017, when the now-28-year old finally returned home for his first true break in several years, he began working on a new batch of songs almost immediately.

“I wanted to empty the pockets and get as many of songs down as possible,” Hozier says of the almost manic approach he took to writing and recording the four songs that comprise his forthcoming new EP, Nina Cried Power, out September 6th, as well as several more set to appear on his as-yet-untitled second full-length, due in early 2019. Sensing he’d be back on tour before long, “there was a bit of an urgency to get these songs written,” he explains of spending more than a year straight shuttling between studios in London and L.A. to record with producers including Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay) and Rob Kirwan (U2, Depeche Mode), who produced his 2014 eponymous debut. 

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“Everyone takes their own meanings from things, based on their life experiences and based on their human experiences. … Is it of any more value to you if I tell you what I felt about it when I wrote it? It really doesn’t matter, I suppose..”