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oscarisaacasimov · 7 months

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Hozier's interviews, radio & podcast & tv, August 2023

Aug 3, 93.1 WYEP, Joey Spehar hosts

https://wyep.org/feature/an-interview-with-hozier/

On the power of music to unite us globally: “I wish I had a more decisively optimistic outlook on it. If we’re looking to musicians for the answer or the cure, for the real serious challenges we’re facing, to heal them or fix them, we’re really in trouble…That being said, a song can really capture a collective moment, a collective experience, and maybe it can bring people together on an issue, or resonate with large amounts of people, and hopefully then those people could collectively turn to those who do have power and hold them to account.”

Aug 8, RadioEins

“De Selby part 1 more resonates with that character…he’s this lunatic philosopher, has an Alice in Wonderland way of seeing the world. Because light moves at a certain speed, when you look in a mirror you’re technically looking back in time, and then if he had enough mirrors, he could see himself as a child…That nighttime is not an absence of light, but the sky secretes “black air” and the world is wrapped in that…The song is writing from his perspective, when you can sit in complete darkness and complete quiet, you can establish for yourself that you no longer exist and that’s very freeing.”

Aug 8, FluxFM, Wencke Fiedler hosts

"It was important to allow each song to be what it needed to be instrumentally, texturally, each song fulfilled itself."

Aug 10, My Turning Point, Steve Balkin hosts

“Alex Ryan the MD would come in at sound check and say I want to try something - what if in this section you do that. Once upon a time, I would have said, let’s not deviate, but watching the set change is part of our experience of the tour. You become less precious, less dogmatic in the way you want to do things…It’s way more fun if you’re with people smarter than you.”

Q: Which Tom Waits song do you wish you had written? H: Soldier's Things…it's him listing all these items that belong to an unnamed soldier, "this one's for bravery, that one's for me, everything's a dollar in this box." It's this subtle anti war song, there's a terrible sadness to it, but it doesn't preach. There's a brilliance to that.

Aug 12, RTE Radio One, Brendan O'Connor hosts

H: “The early demos were far too concept, were a little too prog, a little too music theater." BC: "You nearly did a rock opera! Maybe that's next."

BC: “How did the pandemic challenge you?" H: “When you’re on your hamster wheel and you’re running, keeping yourself busy. When you step off, you’re forced to sit in the cage of your life that you’ve built for yourself.”

Aug 16, Behind the Song

On De Selby

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De Selby is part genius part lunatic, he sees the world through a very dreamlike logic, it’s a way to open the album with a reflection on darkness, as something that’s very freeing, all things are lost in that darkness…If I can’t see where my hand ends and the darkness begins, they become literally one and the same…The Irish expands upon that in the direction of a love song, you come to me like nightfall is saying, you & I mixed up together, you and I metamorphasize when you can’t see where one ends and the other begins…We’re lost together in this darkness, we are everything, there’s no beginning or end.

Aug 16, The Current On the Circles of Hell

“It was hard to find a choice for heresy, because I was writing a lot of stuff that you could class as heretical, which is fun always to do.”

Aug 17, Hugendubek, Booket List

Discussing favorite books (Dante’s Inferno, Fairy Tales by Oscar Wilde, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ulysses by James Joyce, 1984 by George Orwell)

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“I wish I read more. I’m not a good reader, I’m not a committed reader, but when I obsess over something, I allow it to ruin my life.”

“With books, people could stand to gain a wider palette of understanding different human experiences.”

Aug 17, Diffus magazine

Reading Dante's Inferno, not a true interview but delightful.

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“That day (after he kissed me), we read no more.” A nice way of saying Netflix and chill for the medieval period.”

“Dante is by our standards a fundamentalist thinker… Dante the character is sympathizing with people in hell, and yet Dante the poet put them there.”

“Virgil is so taken with Beatrice and her perfection and her beauty, he says “So perfect is your command, if I already obeyed, it would have been too late,” how moved he is to do anything Beatrice would ask him.

Aug 17, Amazon Music

Q&A

“An album I know by heart? Bon Iver’s debut For Emma, Forever Ago, I listened to that like an absolute psychopath when it first came out. Also Aretha Franklin's debut, and Moondance by Van Morrison.”

"If I was a worm would you still love me?" "Of course, yes. As a fisherman, who needs to catch fish."

Aug 18, CBS, Anthony Mason hosts

Q- Did you make peace with it all? Hozier - "Yes he says as he's welling up! I made an album."

Hozier - "As a teenager I fell in love with Tom Waits work. I was amazed that noise was coming out of his mouth." Q - Interesting because vocally he's nothing like you. Hozier - "Well, we'll see!"

Aug 18, Good Morning America brief interview + De selby part 2 performance

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“The title Unreal Unearth got its hooks on me early in the process. I started writing some of the songs in the early parts of the pandemic which felt surreal. But then also some of the songs play with myths and fictional characters, so there’s the unreal in that. For unearth, I enjoyed that, to dig and uncover and explore.”

Aug 18, Hozier reads TikTok comments, Linda Meiden hosts

"Theres a lot for me to live up to, allow me to disappoint!"

"I have an amazing mum, but she is married to my dad."

*I should show them to my exes, I don't know if they'd agree with you."

Aug 18, Chicks in the Office

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“I used to covet alone time, what I found out in the pandemic was the upper limitations of what solitude can give me…. I was energized to work with other people when I got to LA…I haven't jammed like that since I was 15.”

“A good idea is like putting your ear up to an abandoned well and going, oh something's in there.”

Aug 19, NME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HlEYnU8n7g I am a private person but I haven’t had to work hard. People work hard to be famous, I don’t have to do that, I don’t want to do that…I do reveal a lot of myself in the work and in interviews like this, most people don’t sit down and do a chat.

Aug 24, Spotify UK TikTok

"Victoria Canal, Swansong switched me into her work, The Last Dinner party, I'm excited what's ahead for them, Rachel Lavelle, I'm excited for her career, I'm excited we have artists like her."

Aug 27, Lipps Service, Scott Lipps hosts

"Take me to Church was the first song I released, and I think we worked extra extra hard to catch up. Something I’m very proud of, somebody does an aggregate of how many miles a touring group has travelled and how many shows it’s done, and based on that, we were the hardest working touring group of 2015. We’d do two radio shows a day and then a gig that night, it was inch by inch. Looking back, I thought everybody did it that way. "

Q: Top 5 Irish acts ever for you? A: Christ, no I can’t. In no order, Thin Lizzy, Rory Gallagher, Van Morrison, the Pogues, U2… it has to be top 7…Sinead O'Connor, the Cranberries. For more traditional acts, Paul Brady.

Q: Top 5 greatest voices in music today? A: I’m always astounded by Yebba, by Brandy. You've got to look at soul and r&b, when you're talking greatest vocalists. Aretha Franklin, I think greatest vocalist ever to have lived. Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday was a huge voice for me, Otis Redding was a huge voice for me. I can’t give a solid five. An old favorite is Nina Simone, for what she carries.

Aug 28, Apple Music, Zane Lowe hosts

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Z: In 2020 most of us were drinking wine, watching family feud, pretending this wasn't gonna last more then two weeks, homie went straight into Dante's Inferno. H: One line that really spoke to me at the time was "Through me, you enter into the population of loss." Anyone who lives long enough will go through their own hell and out the other side.

H: There is a spot called Glendalough, and something hums in that valley. Z: Like a lay line almost? H: For those who believe in that, Ireland is very rich in lay lines, there's a thrumming, these sites that have been centers of worship and burial for thousands of years. Z: Well there you go, thousands of years would suggest - and why would you not want to believe in something way bigger than ourselves? I'll never understand people trying to disprove it. Why would you want to think, this is it. Don't you want to believe in magic? H: As you get older, you cultivate a relationship with joy and wonder that you never had as a child.

H: The hard work is nothing, you love what you do, it's fine. The work gets done, you've got no choice, nothing in your body says I can't or I won't. It's the sacrifice, the relationships, the time you never get back…To be in step with yourself, to be fulfilled, to feel whole, to feel connected, to feel in place, the biggest part of that is community.

Aug 31, KXRW, Chris Douridas hosts

"With Ella, the ease with which she would forget a lyric and just riff in that empty space, do an impression of Louis Armstrong…The fresh invigorating runs, this incredibly creative way she uses her voice as an instrument, Ella Fitzgerald as a vocalist, is somebody I don’t think we’ll ever see the likes of again. I love those old jazz standards, how cyclical their lyrics are, setting up a premise of a lyrical motif and then concluding it in a successful way."

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