Hozier Discusses New Album ‘Unreal Unearth’ In Apple Music Interview
Apple Music host Zane Lowe said of ‘Unreal Unearth’, “It’s rare that you hear an album that can put you in this beautiful, uplifting, reflective space.”
Hozier joins Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 for a conversation around his recently released album, Unreal Unearth. During the interview, Lowe notes that, “It’s rare that you hear an album that can put you in this beautiful, uplifting, reflective space. It’s like no album I’ve heard in a long time.”
During the conversation – which you can check out in full below – the two discuss a variety of topics. They take a deep dive into Hozier’s inspiration for the album and his songwriting. Also of note, the Irish singer-songwriter touches on the impact of his first album including hit single, “Take Me To Church,” reflecting on the project 10 years later.
Reflecting on the themes he explored during the making of Unreal Unearth, Hozier said “I knew that there was a lot of light and shade on the record, for sure. And knew that it was going to be part of the idea of touching on these themes that are all kind of universal, like playing with this idea of circles.
“I knew that it was thematically going to be broad, but there’s also…Yeah, you can’t…To reckon with, it’s like any experience of falling in love, or parting ways, or reflecting upon that after the fact, or experiencing it in the moment, nothing is ever perfectly good. No moment is ever…Every experience is alive with a multitude of things.”
Elaborating more on channeling and crafting his songwriting, Hozier said “I think I turned to it first for me. I had no idea that it would be as inspiring as it would be. I’d always wanted to go to this poem. Some part of me, as a lyricist, I suppose, had all these poems that I wanted to approach, all these classic poems.
“Yeah, it is very human…The feeling was, there was always some part of me, and this is the macabre part of me, and there’s a kind of … Even since I was a child, I just wanted to hear this long, very descriptive, very visual telling of a man walking through hell, in a very visual way. And so inventive. So there’s that part of me.”
Later on in the interview, Hozier also touched on the impact of his breakthrough hit “Take Me To Church” on his career and reflecting on that 10 years later…
“I think it was too heavy,” he admits. “I was proud of that song, and there was some part of me deep down, if I could admit this, that felt that song needed to be written and it needed to be written for me. And I was an unsigned, unknown Irish musician. I’d never sold out of [small Dublin venue] Whelan’s, I’d never played at Whelan’s. You know what I mean? I was doing open mic cover songs and stuff. So to write that I imagined that it might be appreciated by a small group of people.
“I think in my field or in my song tradition, there’s not a huge amount of confrontational truth telling. We’re maybe at a low ebb for that at the moment, but that’s really only maybe in my field, in my same song tradition.”
