Andy of Small Death
Andrew Hozier-Byrne would never pass out on the floor while visiting a sick neighbor at the hospital, attracting everyone’s attention to the wrong person. He’d bring a guitar and play his own song from the visitor’s chair and the people in the room would actually want to hear it. Hozier wouldn’t slip and make a tactless remark to an infertile couple. Hearing his music from the other room would alleviate the futility of their obligatory sex, even the line about the empty crib. He would never make a person feel like a loser, it wouldn’t even cross his mind to think it.
Hozier tops a list of men who cannot have ever done anything creepy without disrupting the space-time continuum, ahead even of Eddie Vedder. A lot of people like him because they want a man who. It’s probably a bad idea to try to expand on online shorthand, but they want a man who is sincere but also witty, who can convince you that everything he says is true and important no matter what it is, like Ella Fitzgerald. They want a man who is thoughtful, who sees the awfulness of the world and wants to talk about it. They want a man who is undone by the love of his baby but gets better by singing about how he falls in love with someone new every day. Hozier isn’t so much the ideal man as the man men would be if they could be people.
I´ve lived outside the English-speaking world for a while, so I guess that’s how I missed Take Me to Church. I mean ok, English-language pop music gets airtime everywhere, there’s no escaping Ed Sheeran and Rhiannon, but I somehow made it through much of the two thousand tens without hearing Hozier. I was on a long flight home watching music videos the month after I turned 40 when I saw one of Hozier in a flannel shirt, performing his first album, and I said WHAT IS THIS.
I’ve listened to all the songs I could find, I can cite specific recordings of his performances, and I know the backstory and vocal ranges of the people who have toured with him. I´ve read articles in magazines like Hot Press that were photographed with someone’s mobile phone and posted on Twitter the day of publication to learn things like how his mother made the cover of his second album. I sat through a long fundraiser for Irish television with its attendant highly exclusive jokes to watch him perform the last act. A large part of the people I follow online are on Hoz stan Twitter. I am sure I would listen to Hozier’s songs just as much if he looked like Har Mar Superstar, but the Tiger Beat avidity is pure adolescence spillover and I admit it. I’m not sure how much of it was being youthfully felt and how much was strictly musical, but listening to Hozier for the first time brought me a reborn enthusiasm for music that I hadn’t felt in years.
I studied classical piano formally for about a decade when I was young and I’ve continued to play more or less daily since. My first few years of piano were grindingly uninspired and included a bout or three of hurling the metronome to the floor and the supervised placement of masking tape on the clock to show when I could stop practicing. I listened to cassettes on the tape deck I got for Christmas, but my taste until adolescence reflected the music I was exposed to at the time. I knew Saint-Saens and The Temptations Christmas album, basically.
Late in my teens I got really into grunge and Ani DiFranco and made mixed tapes off WEQX. The definitive non-athlete, I ran all six miles to my friend’s house by listening to Soundgarden´s Superunknown on a Walkman. By then I also played trumpet, poorly, and I bought a guitar at one point. I didn’t have to time my piano practices anymore because I finally liked it, and I played for long and often enough that it was the only time I could do anything by ear.
I played the dorm’s basement piano until I moved out, and then I snuck into my college boyfriend’s self-governed scholarship house to play their grand piano and got yelled at for waking people up. I bought a toothless hippo of an upright that I told myself I’d learn to fix, and I talked a bunch of guys I didn’t know into moving it for me in a rented U-Haul. In my excessive optimism, I miscalculated the piano's ability to fit through the front door and it sat outside in the hallway, forcing people who were putatively fleeing for the exit to squeeze past it for two years. When I moved out, I begged the people I´d bought it from to take it back.
When I moved to a new town, I volunteered to teach piano lessons for a guy around the block who had a music studio full of grand pianos, and even when his pants fell down one time, probably accidentally but I was never sure, I would go back as often as I could. I took his copy of Bach’s French Suites, sorry Dave. I moved to another state and snuck into the music building until I got a very heavy upright that I had professionally moved through a series of deteriorating roommate situations until I finally gave it away when I left for another country. There, I had to go to the bank on my lunch break to pay a fee to get into the music school’s piano rooms, and I would break out in a sweat when asking for the key in laborious, heavily accented Spanish. I bought an electric piano, the particle board underbelly of which grew mold during a really wet year. Eventually I sold the electric piano and bought a small upright, hip-height, having developed a sense, over time, of the appropriate scale.
In spite of that I am no talent in music although I have, with lots of practice, sometimes been able to feign competence. My routine involves a 10-minute series of scales and arpeggios so ingrained that thinking about them would destroy my ability to remember them, followed by one of a dozen or so of the same songs I’ve played forever. Occasionally I will look up a new song and print out the free version on the printer at work before anybody else gets there. For me, music is both a secret no one else knows and a daily workout on an elliptical in a windowless basement while other people talk knowingly out in the hall.
After thinking of the piano more as a gym than anything else, listening to Hozier’s songs made me want to dwell within every chord again, and he made me almost believe I could write a song (although I have not). I could identify with him (I have the same hair) even though I have never learned to sing, let alone had the ability to span all those textures, the detailed forms he stretches across the masts of a few notes. Beyond musicality and lyricism, Hozier brings out all these other artists online, these mostly young and delightful people who are smart, not infrequently queer, politically engaged, and talented. They want to talk to each other and to him and to show everyone the drawing they’re working on.
Holding up a man as some sort of vector of inspiration is naturally going to court disappointment. Over the summer there was consternation about his slow response to Black Lives Matter protests in view of his relationship to Black American music, and there are ongoing flurries of comments asking him to apologize for singing a slur referring to Roma people during a Van Morrison tribute performance. These types of things will happen again. There will also be people who post the make-up art and poems and paintings they made because of his music, and I hope I get to see them. I hope I’ll always be able to go back to music in exactly that way.
