I'm uncomfortable with selfies and status updates documenting mundane pieces of my life, which I don't think should be of interest to anyone else.
— Hozier
By nature, I'm an awkward person; I'm a gangly introvert.
Blues is a very physical music.
Growing up, I always saw the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. The history speaks for itself, and I grew incredibly frustrated and angry. I essentially just put that into my words.
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.
When I first started to sing, I just swung at it with an axe.
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.
I used to almost not look forward to recording, because it was like, 'Okay, what am I going to have to sacrifice?'
Being 16 is the worst time to be anybody, there is not enough tea in China to persuade me to be that young again. I wasn't very happy with myself.
I tried to avoid anything that caused me frustration or grief or duress. I played FarmVille and procrastinated like all teenagers.
I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.
Social media is an advertisement for the superficial extroverted self.
I just hate getting my hair cut.
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.
I love Muddy Waters and Nina Simone. I also watched 'The Blues Brothers' movie over and over.
The best vocalists I can think of are female.
I've definitely received a lot of support in Nashville; it's a huge music town. I like country music. Like any genre I'm largely unfamiliar with, there are elements I really enjoy and elements that go over my head.
One of my first festivals was Oxygen 2006. It had this amazing lineup with the Arctic Monkeys on their first or second album, the Strokes, Kings of Leon, the Magic Numbers and then the Who and James Brown. I waited in the pit for a good eight hours to see James Brown.
Being in a studio is quite a creative and energetic process.
For me growing up, I had a Christian upbringing, and I just noticed this Catholic influence in school.
My musical education was grounded in blues and Chicago blues - John Lee Hooker and Otis Redding.
There are a lot of recurring themes that I resonated with when I read 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.'
I feel my duty is to make music.
There are a few Irish writers who have a very strong influence on me, especially on the 'Take Me to Church' EP.
I never wrote music for the mainstream.
I always thought of myself as a very, very obscure artist.
I think it all started with Nina Simone. When I was maybe seven or eight, I used to listen to one of her albums every night before I went to sleep. For me, her voice was everything.
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.
I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death: a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment - if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes - everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.
Some of the earlier stuff I did in studio with producers was very pop-directed, which I was uncomfortable with.
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?'
Biggest musical influences would be people like Nina Simone and Tom Waits. A huge amount of writers like Leslie Feist and Paul Simon.
