“Why write about one thing as opposed to just writing pop bangers? I just find it more interesting, if nothing else. It's a fascinating world out there. Not always a pretty world. In fact, a terrifyingly brutal world at times.”
“Writing songs and putting them out there into the world is serious business. When you think about a song as a vehicle and what that vehicle can carry, a song can be a very, very important medium for spreading the message. For example, it can remind institutionalised power where true power lies – that is with the people.”
“Of course a song matters and has always mattered. Nina Simone, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, they sang about the times that they lived in in their work. They did so as honestly as possible. They put their values into their work. And I suppose the questions that they posed will always be relevant. The questions of what it means to be a person and what does it mean to be free, what does it mean to live without shame in this society? Those will always be relevant.”
“It's that thing of the personal being political. Everything that's personally experienced has a political dimension to it. If you're struggling to pay the rent, to pay for the clothes that you wear, the food that you eat, they all have a very important political dimension to them. You absolutely can put the essence of the bigger questions, of the bigger issues, into a song.”
“An act of protest can be many, many, many things. And especially nowadays and increasingly so, I'm sorry to say, it's true that telling the truth and just being honest can be a radical act. Telling an uncomfortable truth can be a very, very important and radical act.”
“Take Me To Church was first a series of lyrical ideas where I was reflecting quite a bit on the legacy of the institutionalized Roman Catholic Church at home in Ireland. How it had treated people et cetera, how the soft power that it had held over people's lives for so long. It was this organisation that had managed to instil in a society this matrix of thought and values which was deeply hypocritical and incredibly damaging.”
“To use the church's own words, they view homosexuality as something that is intrinsically disordered, something that is unnatural. When you have an organisation of that power, that provides that sort of God-given justification for alienating and othering and persecuting people of that sexual orientation.”
“We find ourselves in music. And we feel less alone. To me, that is the North Star and the guiding light of what a song can do.”
“When you’re in a collective space and you're all sharing and listening and singing a song that you found yourself in, you found your own sorrow in or you found your own loss, your own grief in, you found your own joy in, it's something, ultimately, that makes us feel less alone.”
- Hozier on This is Pop: What Can a Song Do?