Andrew Hozier-Byrne Quotes
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It's funny: Your relationship changes with a song over time. After a year or so, you're a different person, so your songs, you don't connect with them like you did.
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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.
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Things were never as exciting for me as the first gig in New York.
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There are a few Irish writers who have a very strong influence on me, especially on the 'Take Me to Church' EP.
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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.
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I dabbled with faith, and I explored religion quite thoroughly.
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I didn't know what to expect of real America. What shocked me was the diversity of it and how different every city is. But also just how polite and usually good-willed and optimistic most Americans are.
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Social media is an advertisement for the superficial extroverted self.
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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.
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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?'
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I was essentially raised on blues music. 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.
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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.
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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.
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I think all that we would know of America back home is foreign policy, and maybe the snippets of the madness of political culture.
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Either somebody has equal rights, or they don't. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There's no mention of a man and a woman.
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I'm an awful control freak at times when it comes to production and stuff like that.
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It's a very, very interesting experience to be talking to people who are such icons in their own right. When Adele came to a show, I was just talking to her, and at the time, I thought, 'I'm just having a chat with somebody.' But then I heard myself say, 'Oh, I was talking to Adele the other day,' and it's as strange as you'd imagine.
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I just hate getting my hair cut.
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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.
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A lot of the 'leave' campaign was centered around a thinly veiled xenophobia, just 'control our own borders.' It's not a good look. I don't think it represents Britain; I don't think it represents the U.K. all too well. It breaks my heart for my generation in Britain who are going to suffer.
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If you can say something beautiful in a very terrible way - I was always drawn to that.
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I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.
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I tried to avoid anything that caused me frustration or grief or duress. I played FarmVille and procrastinated like all teenagers.
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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!