Welcome to the first of what I hope will be several pieces that I’m calling The Spins. This is an idea that came to me as I was driving back from a Hozier concert in Atlanta, listening to his new album and dropping little factoids about the songs to Samantha in the passenger seat. I’d point out lyrics I like and my interpretation of them, and I’m sure it got annoying fast. I find myself doing the same thing on social media, sometimes sharing a song and ranting about what’s special about it. I’ve realized that it’s because I enjoy music more the more I know about it. I like to read books about musicians and hear their thought process for different songs, or how their background affects their sound and writing. I feel like knowing the history behind the music helps me get more attached to it and brings an enjoyment of and appreciation for the tracks that I may not otherwise have. My burning need to tell other people about it just comes from me wanting to share that with others. So I decided to realign my outlets and use this column to do just that.

The idea is that I’ll periodically take an album from my personal record collection and share a bit about it. Sometimes it might be an interpretation of the song lyrics, others it might be about my relationship to the songs or artist and what the music means in my life. Still other times it might just be interesting facts that I know about the record that I feel like sharing. What it won’t be, however, is a review. The primary reason for this is that these albums are coming from my collection, so by nature they are going to be ones I like. I don’t buy many (any, really) albums that I don’t enjoy listening to. Besides, I’m no good at writing reviews for things other than fast food desserts. Initially, I thought the concept might be that I would do all of the writing in the time it took to listen to the album. However, I’m a slow writer. When I tried doing it that way I ended up still writing about the first song when the time came to flip to the next side. There may times that I still am able to execute that concept, but this first time (at least) it didn’t pan out that way. I didlisten to it while doing the writing, I just had to keep stopping the album to let my writing catch up.

Since I was listening to a Hozier album when the inspiration for this first struck me, I knew I would start there. At first, I thought that I’d write about his new album, Wasteland, Baby!, which came out last month. The more I thought about it, though, I realized that I had more to say about his self-titled debut. I’ve been listening to that album for 5 years now and am deeply familiar with every song. I have a connection with the first album that I haven’t had time to form with the newer one just yet (but given time, I will.) It became the obvious choice to start at the beginning. I have enough knowledge of this album on my own that it would have already been a long piece and Hozier is also a very open artist who has shared a lot of background on his songs, much of which is easily accessible. All in all, there’s a lot of information out there and I’m able to dig in pretty deep here. Future editions of The Spinsmay not be quite this long and in-depth.

Enough about what this column will hopefully be and why I chose this particular album. Let’s talk about the album itself. Hozier’s debut was released in 2014 and was very well received. He’d already achieved radio popularity with Take Me to Church, which you’ve likely heard whether or not you’re familiar with any more of his work. His music plays to many different tastes – catchy enough hooks for pop radio, riffs tasty enough for fans of the blues, quiet acoustic ballads on the album taking aim at fans of folk and Americana. To me, however, the thing that stands out the most throughout these 13 tracks is his songwriting. Hozier reminds me of Leonard Cohen (whom he credits as an influence) in that his songs read like poetry. The lyrics are profoundly well-written and often overlooked in favor of the catchy melodies. If you were to remove the lyrics from the music and read them quietly, you might think that you were reading the poetry of Seamus Heaney. With that in mind, I’m going to focus heavily on those lyrics and my interpretation of them. Without further ado, let’s drop the needle.

The album opens with Take Me to Church– the song that sparked Hozier’s meteoric rise to worldwide notoriety. That might have been the last thing a young Andrew Hozier-Byrne expected when recording a demo of this song in his parents’ attic in County Wicklow in Ireland at 2 in the morning. The demo fell into the hands of someone at Rubyworks Records, an independent record label based in Dublin, and upon hearing Hozier’s massive vocals they extended an offer to him to record with them. He was paired with producer Rob Kirwan, who’d previously worked extensively with U2, as well as with artists like the Cranberries and Willie Nelson. Kirwan helped Hozier introduce overdubbing of instrumentation to the track, but encouraged leaving in the vocals from the original demo tape. Presumably, those vocals recorded in the wee hours of a County Wicklow morning are the same that you hear on the award-winning track today.

The original meaning of this song is often misunderstood. I believe that music should be left open to interpretation and therefore it’s not up to me nor Hozier to tell you what this song means. It means whatever it means to you, and that applies to all of my interpretations of the songs that follow as well. What I can tell you is that it wasn’t written about a woman, and the title lyrics were not intended to serve as a euphemism for falling in love or (as is often believed) oral sex. Though it is framed by a Romeo and Juliet reminiscent love story, this song was written as a scathing criticism of organizations who place a sense of power and authority in individuals to govern over the rights and privileges of other human beings and their own natural humanity. Churches are used as a focal point, but are far from the only example – as made evident by the music video, which tells the story of gay men fleeing persecution and was inspired by the current treatment of homosexuals in Russia. Hozier was, however, raised as a Protestant Quaker and now rejects organized religion. Through this lens, it’s not difficult to assume that the Church is one of the culprits he holds most liable in this, lending some weight to lines like this one:

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies

I’ll tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife.﻿



This line does more than lift the chorus to its massive swells – it also takes aim at the idea of blind obedience to a church that only pretends to bear in the mind the best interests of its followers, who were promised absolution for the confession of their sins but are instead faced with those sins being turned against them as sharp knives for persecution. That’s not a happy story about worshipping the body of a lover, and when you listen to this song deeply that becomes more and more obvious. The poppy nature of this song opens it to wide appeal, but it’s the fact that it stands for something that gives it the ground to take root in people’s lives. It’s those roots that became a firm foundation upon which Hozier’s career could grow.

After that monumentally epic introduction, the albums comes down a little bit, moving into Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene. In this song, Hozier compares the drug high of Codeine to a hard-to-get woman. The small death in this case is la petite mort – or ‘small death,’ which is a French euphemism for an orgasm. I suppose Angel of Orgasms and the Codeine Scene was too on-the-nose. In this song, Hozier is comparing the feeling of being led on by this tease of a woman to chasing a drug fix, and when he finally gets that fix it just leaves him wanting more. When he’s cut off and forced to come down he’s left feeling like a leash-less dog wandering the neighborhood, wondering if it’s better off for having escaped while also missing its master. He sees that there was an emptiness to this chase, but he still can’t help himself from wanting to go back for more.

In leash-less confusion, I’ll wander the concrete

Wonder if better now having survived

The jarring of judgement and reason’s defeat the sweet

Heat of her breath in my mouth; I’m alive



Hozier cites James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as inspiration for this song, and in the context of being placed after Take Me to Church, it’s given the air of being somewhat about the journey after distancing oneself from oppressive doctrines and pursuing previously forbidden sensual pleasures. It only takes these songs for us to realize that Hozier is a master of the metaphoric arts. He crafts parallels in ways that few artists can. Without beating you over the head with it, he packages it all up in a nice approachable box that allows his music to be easy and comfortable as opposed to labyrinthine and mysterious.

Having proven himself on the battleground of metaphor, Hozier relaxes a bit on track three, Jackie and Wilson. It’s here that we meet his pop star side as this is one of the most upbeat and danceable songs on the album, played on a baritone guitar that gives it a little extra bite. For those unfamiliar with a baritone guitar, it’s a guitar built on a slightly larger scale than normal, the barely longer neck allowing it to reach a deeper scale, similar to how a bass guitar functions. A normal guitar scale is E to E, but a baritone is tuned B to B, meaning it sits about half an octave lower – roughly halfway between a bass and standard. The deeper guitar voicing gives this song a signature crunch, which works really well with Hozier’s vocal range.

Jackie and Wilson tells the story of a man who is “Soul deep in the swill with the most familiar of swine.”In other words – happy as a pig in shit. He loves his life for all the good and bad in it, and there’s no better version of himself he thinks he’s capable of being. Then all of a sudden a girl blows in out of nowhere and shakes him right to the core. He quickly forms an idealized picture of their potential future together, complete with children named after R&B legend Jackie Wilson (Hozier grew up on his parents’ deep collection of Blues and R&B records – more on that in a bit). He ‘buries every other version of himself in the yard’ and is forms an entire façade around a life with her. However, nothing really comes to fruition with her and it’s all a fleeting thing. The narrator is forced to go back and find himself and the happiness he felt without her. Time to dig up the yard and find what’s left of the parts he buried – then it’s on to the next one. You only thoughtyou were getting a break from the poetic undertones. In fact, this song is some of my favorite writing on the whole album. It’s really hard to beat lines like “Me and my Isis growing black irises in the sunshine.”And of course one of my favorite sing-along verses on the album:

Cut clean from the dream that night, let my mind reset

Looking up from a cigarette, and she’s already left

Start digging up the yard for what’s left of me in our little vignette

For whatever poor soul is coming next.



Damn, this man can write. Thankfully, he gives us a small break from the headiness of his lyrics on the next track, Someone New. It’s perhaps the shallowest of his songs, which is appropriate considering it’s a song about the shallowness of many ‘romantic’ interactions. Essentially, this is a song about one night stands. It’s awkward but entirely fitting that Hozier wrote this song with an ex-girlfriend, which perhaps explains the lighter and less poetic tone as none of his other songs have a co-writer. I’m by no means saying that this song is any less stellar than the rest, just that it’s more of a “let your hair down, snap your fingers, and let’s just groove for a minute” than a “here’s a thinkpiece I turned into a radio hit that you’ll discover something new in every time you listen.” That’s totally ok, and I think that songs in that vein are necessary to keep the album from feeling like a weight on your chest. Never one for one-night-stands, however, it’s a song I have trouble emotionally connecting to. I must say, though, that when I saw him live he played this song at roughly 3/4 speed and turned it into more of a crawling blues jam, and I gained a new appreciation for it.

Speaking of blues jams, we get our first real taste of Hozier’s blues origins on the next track – To Be Alone. As I mentioned, Hozier grew up on blues music. When he was young, his father was a drummer in a blues band. The family record collection was deep and had a wide variety of blues artists in order to help the band learn new sounds and songs in an age where home internet connections were just beginning to be established and were often spotty if not entirely non-existent, particularly in rural Ireland. As such, the music on hand helped form Hozier’s early taste and craft his sound as a musician. He was inspired to pick up a guitar by Irish blues legend Rory Gallagher and taught himself to play by emulating guys like Muddy Waters, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker. Name a blues artist, and Hozier is likely deeply familiar. This song bears the mark of that influence without cratering Hozier’s own signature style. It’s a blues song, but the Hozier way.

It’s got the guitar licks, the grit, the overdrive – if you were to listen to just the Junior Kimbrough-inspired guitar portion you’d swear you were in a Texas blues bar listening to a seasoned ‘blues guy’. He even plays this song live on a guitar made of an old oil can, which is about as blues as you can get. The lyrics, as usual, are where you see that Hozier has taken this familiar genre and adapted it to suit his own style. Blues lyrics are typically pretty straight-forward. A simple message, lots of repetition, and lines that are short and to the point. While thematically similar to many blues songs in its frustrated brooding, Hozier’s lyrics also carry his trademark complexity.

Never feel too good in crowds

With folks around, when they’re playing

The anthems of rape culture loud

Crude and proud, creatures baying﻿



He compares people to dirty animals braying as they lose control of their common sense. At times later in the album, he identifies with them. Here, though he just wants to get away from them. He wants to be alone with his lover – the pull of that concept as intoxicating and addictive as a drug. No, more than that, ‘It’s the god that Heroin prays to.’ Holy shit. That’s blues as only Hozier could do it.

The first half of the album draws to a close with From Eden –a tongue-in-cheek song narrated by a devil trying to seduce a woman reminiscent of Eve. This devil views the woman’s innocence as a missing part or something lacking from her. There’s an wholesomeness to her that he finds truly tragic. If she would just get a little closer to him, he could help remedy that on the quick. Without voicing them, you get the sense that some lines are in response to possible objections and reluctance from her. She might object because it’s a sin and that’s wrong. He implies that she shouldn’t worry her pretty little head about that. Come along now, off to a delightful picnic he’s got planned. But if this is Eve, she already has a man. No worries, he’s bringing along ‘a rope in hand for your other man to hang from a tree.’What a snake. The staccato hook of the chorus might cause you to overlook some highlight lyrics that personify positive values as heroes long dead or gone:

Idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on his sword.

Innocence died screaming; honey, ask me, I should know.

I slithered here from Eden just to sit outside your door.



The album’s only duet, In a Week, leads off the second half. The female voice is that of Karen Crowley, part of Irish band Wyvern Lingo. Before releasing their debut album, Crowley and Wyvern Lingo toured with Hozier and served as his backing band and vocalists. The tone of her voice pairs nicely with his as they quietly settle in over an acoustic guitar. It’s the first time we hear a stripped-back folk sound on the album. This song was inspired by the Irish countryside in which Hozier now resides alone in a secluded house, self-described as the middle of nowhere. The remoteness of the Wicklow hills make the area more than just beautiful – it’s also a great place to hide a body – the area is home to plenty of shallow graves. This song plays on that idea as Hozier and Crowley play the roles of two lovers hiding out in the woods, imagining what it would be like to die there and only be found long after the insects, foxes, and birds have eaten all the good parts and the heat has turned the rest rancid. A grim scene to be sure, but with a sort of peace to it in the quiet stillness of becoming one with nature again. The mellow sound pairs with the lyrics framing the experience as peaceful and pleasant. These characters want to reassure each other, and you, and take the fear away from the situation. Their vivid imagery of rotting corpses leaves just enough of an edge to keep each other, and again you, on their toes. By this point in the album, you should expect nothing less.

Having eased into a more dark and subdued second half of the album, Hozier picks the tempo up again just a bit with Sedated.Let me preface this by saying that there are no songs on this album that I even somewhat dislike, but this is probably my least favorite track. It’s all still there – the upbeat guitar lines, the prolific writing (though there are fewer lines that jump out to me here), Hozier’s epic vocals. Nothing is missing, but for some reason it doesn’t pack the emotional punch that most of the other tracks do for me. Hozier has said that the song’s essence is about escapism. I can see that, though the metaphors in this one are a bit harder to interpret. I think one reason this song doesn’t sit quite as well with me is that it feels slightly misplaced on the album, as the back half is a bit quieter overall than the first, focusing more on telling stories than on encouraging you to stomp and shuffle your feet along to the beat, while this song falls more into the latter category.

There’s no better example of storytelling on this album than Work Song, which evokes the feeling of an old negro spiritual with elements of blues and modern folk. It takes the point of view of a worker in a field on a hot day, recounting tales of his lover to his fellow workers. The story is easy to follow and the imagery is immaculate. The only background for his vocals is a monotonous hum with two droning guitar chords that blend in and sound like additional voices, as well as a sparse handclap rhythm. It puts you right in the field with the narrator as the hum stands in for that of nearby workers and the claps evoke a the sound of a well-swung tool striking its target. This song is doing its damndest to tell you a story, and it does a great job of it. It’s one of his most popular songs, mostly because it sounds cool as hell, but I think you can also attribute some of its popularity to how easy it is to connect with and understand. It’s very approachable, and a great entry point for strangers to his work. Also on display here is the influence of Tom Waits, whose catalog was the next stop for Hozier after the blues and played a massive part in shaping his sensibilities as an artist. Hozier credits Waits’ Cold Cold Groundas having changed his life, and Work Songsounds almost an homage at times, particularly in the chorus:

Lay me gently in the cold dark earth…

No grave can hold my body down, I’ll crawl home to her



Work Song’s protagonist being laid in the cold dark earth is the perfect transition into the next track, Like Real People Do.Here the artist is at his macabre yet optimistic peak as he uses well preserved “bog bodies” pulled from Irish peat moss bogs as an extended metaphor. Often with skin and internal organs fully intact, bog bodies are so well preserved by the unique chemistry of peat bogs that it almost seems as if they could get up and start living again. Here, Hozier has one do just that, falling in love with the person who pulled it out. This one is a thinker, the verses begging the question of what someone was doing out there in the bog in the first place – looking for somewhere to bury some other love? The reanimated body begins to put together that people don’t just go digging around in bogs for fun and that this person’s intentions might not have been any more innocent than that of whoever first buried it in the bog.

I had a thought, dear, however scary

About that night, the bugs and the dirt

Why were you digging? What did you bury

Before those hands pulled me from the earth?

I know that look, dear: eyes always seeking

Was there in someone that dug long ago

So I will not ask you why you were creeping

In some sad way, I already know.



Having come to the conclusion that this person might have had a slightly unsettling past, the bog body decides that it’s content to just not bring it up and to let the past be the past. We all have one, but how much does it really matter? They are happy together, so why not just let the past stay in the past? The chorus lays this sentiment out for us beautifully with a message that is equal parts “everyone is broken” and “love is love.”

I will not ask you where you came from

I will not ask and neither should you

Honey just put your sweet lips on my lips

We should just kiss like real people do



The next track, It Will Come Back, is a pretty easy one to follow. It once again evokes animal imagery (by now a familiar theme on the album) and pairs it with a blues dirge (complete with slide guitar!) as a lovesick narrator begs for mercy. Hozier has said that this one is “quite a sad song… about asking somebody to do the right- the merciful thing and to cut all the ropes, cut all the ties.” His love takes on the role of a stray dog or wild animal – if you feed it, it will just come back night after night for more. If you aren’t prepared to take care of it you just shouldn’t go down that road. In other words, if you don’t want this to be something more then don’t keep leading him on. It just makes it worse. It does just fine on its own so just ‘Leave it to the land, this is what it knows.’ Eventually the metaphor shrinks away and the language shifts from “it” to “me,” giving the sense (at least in my opinion) that all of this has made him become like an animal in some respects, giving into base instincts and desires. This leads beautifully into the full-on blues outro:

You’ll hear me howling outside your door

Don’t you hear me howling, babe?

Don’t you hear me howling, babe?

Don’t you hear me howling, babe?

Don’t you hear me howling?

Don’t you hear me howling?

Don’t you hear me howling, babe?



The penultimate song of the album is Foreigner’s God, which is about feeling distant and isolated from the cultural norms and beliefs that may have been instilled on you as early as birth. This forms the central idea of the song, as reiterated by the simple chorus:

Screaming the name

Of a foreigner’s God

The purest expression of grief



There’s a huge feeling of isolation in this that I think everyone has felt to an extent. At its simplest, it’s the feeling of not feeling you quite fit in. It’s hard to just come out and say that sometimes, as it can feel like an open rebellion and upheaval of social rules that’s very intimidating. You try to just ignore it, go with the flow, pretend nothing is wrong, try to blend in – until you reach the point where you feel like you’re not even yourself anymore. You’re saying and doing things that you don’t even believe in because that’s what you’ve always done to fit in. Everything you do is copying the ‘normal’ people, and it’s all practically a foreign language to you compared to how you really feel. That’s the sort of alienation that this song laments, and it’s tragic but utterly relatable.

Wondering who I copy

Mustering some tender charm…

I’ve no language left to say it…

All that I’ve been taught

And every word I’ve got

Is foreign to me﻿



Finally we come to Cherry Wine (Live), which is only a ‘live’ track in that it was recorded outside of a studio. It was recorded on the roof of an abandoned hotel in Greystones at five in the morning, the wildlife and a cameraman as the only audience. You can hear the birds singing in the background as dawn breaks, the world’s sweetest backup singers. It’s a very charming ambiance, and the perfect setting for what is perhaps the quietest and softest song on the album – a simple fingerpicked acoustic guitar the only instrumentation. Don’t let that sweet sound fool you, though. As has often been the case over the course of the album, there is a very interesting dissonance between the music and the lyrics. The words of this song call to mind an abusive relationship, written from the point of view of the abused. The way the narrator is treated by their female abuser is sometimes cold and indifferent and sometimes angry and violent. A careful tightrope must be walked to try to avoid setting her off one way or the other. She frequently transgresses and ‘stains the sheets of some other’, but turns everything around and makes it the other person’s fault – never hers. There’s almost an air of Stockholm syndrome to the need to try to explain it away rather than admit the reality of the situation – ‘it may look ugly from the outside, but it works for us’ – even going so far as to justify occasional bloodshed as a sweet way of expressing her love in the chorus.

The way she shows me I’m hers and she is mine

Open hand or closed fist would be fine

The blood is rare and sweet as cherry wine



Through all of this, the narrator loves her so much that they can’t help but stay despite knowing how dangerous it could be. ‘Like sleep to the freezing’ expertly sums all of this up. If you’re freezing, falling asleep can kill you – but it also offers relief from your discomfort. In much the same way, the narrator knows that staying with her is dangerous but just can’t break away from the temptation of being with her. The love she sometimes shows is enough to outweigh the abuse: ‘it’s worth it… I have this some of the time.’ As the album fades to its conclusion, the chorus of Cherry Wine gives you one last chance to decide where you stand – is it just their own kind of love or is this all pretty fucked up? It may leave you chewing on that for a while, as the album lilts off into silence.

This is the version that appears on the album. It’s being recorded as this video was shot.

Give this album a listen, especially if you can get your hands on a physical copy. After you do, drop me a line. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading this installment of The Spins.