Episode 132 - Hozier

Hi everyone, Simon and Brian here. Welcome to Soda Joker on Songwriting, episode 132. Joining us today is an Irish Ivanovello winning singer and songwriter who enjoyed an astronomical rise back in twenty fourteen with the release of his self-titled debut album and the staggering success of his breakthrough hit, the anthemic Take Me to Church.

He's just released his eagerly awaited second album, Wasteland Baby, a fine, passionate piece of work which should cement his status as one of the most powerfully distinctive vocalists and intelligent, insightful young songwriters around today. We're delighted to welcome the excellent Hosier to the show.

We met with Hosier at Wise Budder Studios in central London just a couple of weeks ago and found him to be a very affable and down to earth chap who speaks very articulately about his craft, as you'll hear in just a few minutes.

Andrew Hosierburn was born in nineteen ninety, on Saint Patrick's Day no less, in County Wicklow, Ireland, just outside Dublin. He grew up in a musical and artistic household. His dad was a local blues musician, and his mum a painter. She would later paint the artwork for his son's first album, in fact. The young Andrew developed a particular affinity for his dad's blues albums and was also influenced by R&B, soul, jazz and gospel music.

He sang in his school choir and began to teach himself the guitar and write songs around the age of fifteen, which was when he also joined his first band. Age sixteen he joined the Irish choral group Anuna, with which he toured internationally and featured as a soloist. A few years later he enrolled at Trinity College Dublin to study music, but left to concentrate on writing and recording and signed a development deal with Universal.

Jose was later taken on by independent label RubyWorks and in 2013 released his first EP, Take Me to Church. The video for the stunning title track subsequently went viral, which brought him to the attention of Columbia Records in the US, who acted swiftly and decisively. Another EP, From Eden, came next, followed by his eponymous debut album in late 2014.

The record reached the top ten in eleven countries and went multi platinum. Take Me to Church meanwhile received a twenty fifteen Grammy nomination for Song of the Year and won the Ivanovella Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. It was also the most streamed song on Spotify that year with more than eighty seven million plays, and I think the number's only gone up from there, hasn't it, Bright?

It has, yeah, incredible. Having completed an intensive promotional and touring schedule for the first album, Jose took some much needed time out to work on the follow-up. In September last year he reemerged with the four track Nina Cried Power EP, the title track an explosive duet between himself and legendary soul singer Mavis Staples with the certain Booker T. Jones on B3 organ.

You can hear some tracks from Wasteland Baby and some other choice cuts if you check out our Spotify playlist for this episode. Just head to Sodajerka.com slash podcast, click on Hosh's page and there's a link under the episode player. Keep up to date with all his news and tour dates at Hosier dot com, at Hosier on Twitter and Facebook.com slash Hosiermusic. It's safe to say he has a rather busy few months ahead.

He has indeed. Keep in touch with us at Sodajeker.com, at Soda Jaca on Twitter and Instagram, and Facebook.com slash Sodajeker. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode, and while you're there be a poppet and leave us a full sum review and five star rating to help any poor lost souls who haven't discovered this yet.

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Before we continue, many thanks to Callum for his help setting up the interview. Okay, here we are, down in London with the brilliant.

Hoshen, nice to have you with us.

Thank you very much. Glad to sit down with you.

The um new album sounding huge. You must be delighted with the results.

Yeah, I'm proud of it. It's a large body work, like and I kind of I went into studio a few times with a few different producers and just wanted to write'cause I knew I'd be torn for a while either way. Just wanted to get as much work done as possible. So I'm thank you. I'm happy with it and happy to just get it out there now.

And the title Wasteland Baby sounds kinda post apocalyptic to us, but there's some uh very uplifting stuff in there alongside the bleaker elements, isn't it?

Yeah, I would hope so, yeah, definitely. And like Wasteland Baby, the title track is obviously, you know, about the worst case scenario, let's say, the worst thing happening. But it's also just saying, look, even in that, there's still good things to be. You know what I mean? There's still a bit of a squeeze of the hand there. I hope there's a warm center to it, you know. Mm-hmm.

We're interested to ask about the writing of uh Nina Cry Power. It's such a striking title, uh a great track. It felt to us like you really captured the energy and the spirit of protest through the decades with that song.

Right. Yeah, thank you. I think it was just trying to write something that pointed to artistry or maybe a time where artists sang a bit more about things that they felt was important. and things that matter to them and things that were just going on in in the world at the time or going on in in their world at the time. And as a result, we have this kind of fantastic document in in music from the twentieth century of

Did you have that sense of energy about the song when you were actually writing it?

I did. I I was excited about it, yeah. When I first stumbled upon it. I was excited about it. In that I I just was just throwing lyrical ideas around and I felt it might be a nice song if done correctly and if done right. I don't know what the correct way is to do a song. I don't know if it was done correctly, but um working with Mavis on that was really important and a big part of that song, I think. It was a difficult song to write, but I was happy we did it, you know.

Did you find that Nina was the most singable name out of the options that you had?

Possibly, yeah. There's a few reasons why it's it's Nina. It's also Nina Simone is an artist that I discovered a as a very young kid and just has always shaped the way I I view music, the way I listen to music and she's somebody who just really lived her music and lived the message of it as well too. There's that it's a very singable name. But there's also

Thank you.

I think it was mixed by our pal Microsoft, that one.

Mm. It was. It was, yeah. Did an amazing job of it actually. Are you guys from from

Oh yeah, we met him at at Lipper, the performing arts school uh God must be nearly twenty years ago now.

Yeah, yeah. And he mixed it from LA actually, and I mean he's out there and out at the moment. Yeah. And he mixed a great deal of my first record. So pretty much most things that went to radio on the first record apart from church, a lot of that was Mike's work, Mike Crosby's work. And did a fantastic job on it.

Oh yeah, no, he's obscenely talented.

Yeah, pretty good.

So did you have to sort of squirrel yourself away to do this work?'Cause as you mentioned, you've been touring a lot, you've been very busy. Yeah. I do remember reading at one point that you said that um on the first album I think it was you got into a habit of writing at night. Yeah. And I wondered did you have to come up with any kind of routine like that this time round?

I did a bit. I tried to be I made a conscious effort not to be too much of a night owl,'cause after about a month of seeing no daylight, especially in winter you get very uh You get very weird, you know. And um I can kind of hermit myself away at the best of times. I was living alone in a bungalow and I think

And um Almost Sweet Music is one of the others that kinda pays homage, isn't it? Did you start out with a list of great works that you wanted to cite in that song?

Yeah, I it kind of a bit of both. The first idea for that was the guitar riff and the chorus idea, which was sitting in my pockets for like years, I think. And I just didn't have a way of of making that into a song, you know.'Cause it's kind of an angular, oddly rhythmic thing. It starts on the one and then it moves off the one and stuff like that. So and wasn't sure how to make that work. And then I had a concept for it, I suppose.

Seems far removed.

I know you've always been a big blues fan. Your dad was a drummer, wasn't he?

He was really

introduce you to a lot of kind of blues and and jazz and stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, big time. So he was in a lot of bands, a lot of live bands and primarily like blues music. And before I was born was kind of a drummer by trade and then I suppose when the kids came along he kind of went into a more traditional nine to five type environment. But so the house is just full of music and before the internet as well too, you just listen to what music is in the house, you know, and when I was a kid.

I can see that you must have been influenced by some of those great singers as well, like Billy Holiday and people who have that commanding presence.'Cause you yourself have a very commanding presence as a vocalist, I think.

Thank you, yeah. I always considered myself a singer before I was anything else. So I taught myself how to play guitar as a teenager when I was a singer first. I don't have any technique whatsoever because, you know, you teach yourself you make a mess of it and you it's a slow process of getting there and making the instrument make the noises you want it to make.

And were there any particular songwriters you were inspired by? Nina Simone, I suppose.

N Nis Moan was was a big one. I think it was far outside my you know, I was listening to her more awestruck by like listening to jazz music and also she was a classical pianist who moved into jazz. So for me it was like a Labrador looking at algebra, you know what I mean? Um Tom Waits was a was a huge part of of those years and

And would you say you developed your voice through choir? I mean the approach you take to vocals on the album is is really intense, it's really effective, we think.

Thank you, yeah. Um that was a big one. Yeah. And you know, first listening to gospel music, listening to the voices in in harmony and then I would have sang in choirs. First of all'cause you're forced into them as a kid, you know, and then you gain a taste for

Would you say that you had that sort of intensity to your lyrical approach early on? Um

A little bit a little bit I think it was Tom Waits really. I just I loved his lyrics and I loved the imagery of them. He used to populate the songs with like mad characters and stuff like that. They they've got names and stuff. So As he's naming characters in the songs, he just made a very vivid, crooked little world in a lot of his pieces. And I really love that.

You've always had the taste for the dark side too, haven't you? Um thinking of something like in a week. First album, um that's a really good example of that kind of sensibility, isn't it? Yeah.

There's a bit of something that's kind of tongue in cheek with that. It was like, what's the most gruesome imagery that you can actually put into a song and can you make it romantic and can you make it a love song? So there's a bit of fuckery to that. And I was also kind of taking the mick out of the idea of the romance of the fields and the hills around me in in Wicklow, because locally we would joke.

Yeah.

It reminds me a bit of um there's a Sufi Ann Stevens song about John Wayne Gacy. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Yeah. But it's taken such a delicate, kind of beautiful approach to

Christy Harris.

Yeah.

It's a lovely combination that one is.

Racist. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Is that kinda one of the reasons that you tend to go it alone with your writing? Because I mean the songs are kinda so specific to your personal kind of beliefs and preoccupations, aren't they?

little bit, yeah, it's also it'd be hard to sit in a writer's room with three pop writers and say, Look, I wanna write a song about in a week like you know what I mean? Like Jesus. I would, I would write alone and if I do write with people it's often

Wait. I think someone new was one that you collaborated with.

Yeah, there was one co-right on the first album and that was the oldest song from the first record and it survived a few generations of demos and I wrote that in a kind of a I suppose in in a bit of a past life with somebody with another artist. when I listen to it now it's a very unlikely song for me to to write, you know what I mean? But half of that song is one person, half of that is is the other. It was kind of a

And when you're writing alone, is it typically the guitar that you turn to first or might it be piano?

Oftentimes, yeah, piano I find quite immediate. I really enjoy writing on piano more recently. If nothing else is that I'm a really bad piano player. I know that sounds a bit counterintuitive, but you're excited about the sounds that you can get out of an instrument that you that you don't really know how to play very well and you're not familiar with what you can and can't do with it.

We do get lots of guests talking about those kind of experiments, don't we? Yeah. You know, in a different tuning you get totally different set of chords.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. So I I'm looking forward to spending a bit of time with that, you know.

And are you thinking particularly sort of technically when you write or is it all quite instinctive?

It's usually quite instinctive, yeah. I'm a total committed college dropout when it comes to like theory and stuff like that. So I have enough to get me by. But I try not think all too deeply about it until the time comes that you have to structure it. Right. You know, when you have to self edit a little bit. But yeah, for me it's just instinctful. It's kind of

It's interesting that'cause your songs are I think really well judged in terms of, say, the way the choruses open out on shrike or movement. Mm. It seems you're just hitting that sweet spot in your voice at that moment.

Right.

The chorus opens out and I wondered if that was kind of a very deliberate thing that you would plan or

Not so much, no. I mean the key might be changed from a demo. I might write something in a key because I can write in this key easier than I can another, and then the key might be changed just to make it more comfortable for the voice. I think I wrote that in a different tuning and then moved it to like an open sea tuning, which was a nice um experiment. And I think the chorus came out of that.

Mm. And would you actually layer vocals in that demoing process maybe as you write it?

Totally, yeah. So once the core instrument and the lead vocal is down, before I bring it to a producer and before I get into studio with it. I would arrange the fundaments of the drums and arrange the keys or whatever instrumentals I could throw at it. So if if it's gonna have organ or whatever. Usually though the backing vocals are are recorded before I get into studio. So like the arrangements are pretty much as close to done as as I can.

Sunlace is a great example of that, isn't it? That kind of layered sound. Yeah. Sort of Irish folk meets like gothic horror.

Yeah. It's a funny one, I don't I think that was written as just voice and hand claps and sort of voice and rhythm and stuff and then chords came into it and then I wanted to kind of write a sort of a sibling to a song called Work Song from the previous record, just in the way it presents itself with like, you know, voices and stuff like that. But yeah, it was a lot of harmony build up there and definitely those would have all been on the demo.

I wonder if it's your ability to do that with voices that is the reason that Take Me to Church became such a phenomenon? Like people sort of Cottoned onto that, you know, in that moment.

A lot of things just aligned with that song, you know? And the production was so sparse when I listened back to it, like such a sparse production. No bass at all, you know. A lot of it

But when you combine that with your approach to words, which is also slightly unusual. Right. Worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies. That's not a normal phrase that you hear in the

Maybe not, certainly not in the pop song, yeah. I was surprised that that crossed over into a kind of pop realm and we were doing songs on award shows next to likes of Taylor Swift and stuff like that'cause it w just was not consider that they would fly, you know what I mean, as a as it pops on. But yeah, maybe so.

And you wrote that one at the piano, I think.

Yeah, that was written on on a piano, on an electric piano in my attic at the time.

And did you have the Cheese the Giggle at her funeral line before the music came?'Cause that kinda sounds like it would be something that would drive you to finish the song that way.

Yeah. I think that actually weirdly came later. I remember standing and scribbling the notes for the chorus lyrics and some of the verse lyrics, the second verse lyrics. one summer in the middle of Ireland and a friend had taken some big road trip. This is just a silly story. We'd we'd known some people who had gone to see this mystic.

Mm-hmm. So is it generally the case that the words will provide the impetus for the music?

I think so like I find that more often than not. Sometimes I I would have a nice melody but there is a lyrical theme in place. For me I would let a song go if the lyrics aren't good enough, if I'm not charmed by them. And the music could be amazing. The music could be really fun. But I'll let it go by the wayside. I would rather I would rather the lyrics mean something to me and the music be simpler and be less ambitious, you know, than anything else.

So have you experimented with writing poetry and other forms like that or are the lyrics really just a vehicle for the song?

I've thought about it. I really would love to go back and study in third level, I'd love to go and study literature and study poetry possibly. I think there's a huge gap between what lyrics can do and what poetry can do. And I mean a huge respect and massive awe of poets, but I do think it would be a huge disservice to poets and poetry if I said I could do it, you know what I mean?

Mm. You do tend to be a fan of distinctive words though, I've noticed like your titles, for example, you know, Dinner and Diatribes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know, yeah, I suppose there's enough songs out there with the kind of pop the hit lyrics, you know what I mean? And it's just fun to write other stuff and you know, I can digress a lot and I'm quite verb not I won't say I'm verbose, but I'm or waffle a lot. I suppose that finds its way into the music, you know.

Angel of Small Death and the Codeine scene. Yeah.

Totally, yeah. I think so, yeah. Yeah.

Can we go back to movement? I just wanted to talk a little bit more about that one. Um I think that's a a really interesting one because movement is kind of an everyday concept, but you manage to take it and do something quite incisive with it, you know, by focusing on that, as you say, sort of romantic idea of movement. Mm-hmm. Does it take a lot of revisions in the process to get to the nub of an idea?

It can do, yeah, sometimes. In the verses there they're they're quite sparse and it's really just trying to convey on the surface level that the singer or the protagonist is singing about somebody who's dancing or moving. Just them expressing how much they love that, how much they appreciate that. But then just trying to draw from imagery that is sort of uh not supernatural, but like in times biblical and sometimes there's like references to

It's a reference to Fred Esther.

Yeah, Fred is there.

Once I heard that I understood that sort of romantic sense of movement.

Okay, yeah. Yeah, totally. So you're less poloon and leaping polloon and s is um ballet dancer or Fred Esther in in sequence. You know, your Atlas and is sleeping, and so Atlas like a reference to the Greek tale of Atlas who's forced to hold up the celestial spheres. So he's often represented holding up the world. on his shoulders. And just imagining him sleeping and

So there's a sense of the political movement as well.

Exactly, yeah, exactly. So um I'm just kind of playing with those two ideas and putting them side by side, you know. Which is just a fun exercise I suppose.

Can we close on um one of my favourites on the album which is to noise making? Yeah. I was really struck by that line, uh put your emptiness to melody, your awful heart to song. Yeah. Yeah. Love phrases like that that seem to be kind of like an oxymoron. Like They have kind of a built-in tension to them. What can you tell us about the writing of that one?

I had to write something that credited the limitations of making sound and making music and Like Nina Crite Power is very much like a hopeful, shamelessly hopeful song. It's like, you know, looks to a legacy of what has been achieved when people sing out about stuff and and put their shoulder to the wheel for stuff that they believe in. to noise making, I I I wanted to be a bit about the the limitations of song and the limitations of of ourselves and what music does.

It's a lovely up tempo track. I really really enjoy that.

It's a poppy one, yeah. Rhythmically definitely there's kind of a pop thing going on. It was a fun one to write, fun one to record as well. We had incredible gospel singers in yeah in LA. Ariel Reich did uh produce that with me and yeah, it's really fun to do it. And it was a very different song for me and also his sonic approach is very different from my From where I was coming from. So really enjoyed working with him on that, you know.

Yeah. Okay. Well this has been a real treat for us. Thanks so much for the

Pleasure. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

With the album and sour as well.

Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to it.

That was Hosier talking to us in central London a couple of weeks ago. Really genuine danceworth fella and a very thoughtful guy too.

Yeah, I really enjoyed meeting him. He was great and very tall.

Yeah, we felt like two Tom Cruises to his Nicole Kidman.

Rydyn ni'n gwneud rhywbeth o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn o'r hyn.

Yeah, I was really fascinated by how the lyric to take me to church lay around for like a year, was it, before it found its natural musical habitat, so to speak.

It's weird how that happens sometimes though, isn't it? You've just gotta have patience and just keep hold of those things.

He was also very honest, wasn't he, about the feeling of sort of pointlessness he sometimes gets when he sits down to write, like, you know, Does the World Need This Song? Which I think all writers can identify with.

Yeah, and as someone, you know, doing promotion for his new album, that was honest, wasn't it, for him to actually say, Does any of this matter? You do feel like that sometimes, don't you, when you're trying to create something new, you add into this mountain of material that's out there and you're thinking, Does anyone really care? But then you know, every year you get those songs that change the world, so I guess people do care.

Yep, it's always worth persevering. So thanks to Hosia and also to Callum and Angela for their help and Wise Brother Studios for having us. Wasteland Baby is out now, so go forth and listen and purchase, and Hosier will be on tour later in the year, so check out his website, Hosia.com, for the date.

We'll be back very soon with another great guest. In the meantime, look after yourselves.