A language for longing: Five of Hozier’s best lyrics on love
Since the release of his debut single ‘Take Me To Church’ in 2023, Hozier has felt like an unlikely star. Don’t get it wrong, he’s certainly deserving with his velvet smooth choice that has a punch of power behind it. But his lyricism has never felt like the kind of catchy, easily understood penmanship that typically catches mass attention. Instead, his work is imbued with poetry as he’s crafted his own language for longing across his releases.
So many of Hozier’s songs simply feel like poems put to music. They also undeniably come from the mind of a well-read man who routinely references the classics. On ‘Talk,’ he evokes the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. On his latest album, he dove into Dante’s circles of hell. Across his love songs, he embodies the spirit of the classic romantic poets with language that feels more fitting for an 1800s writer than a 21st-century hit.
But fans eat it up. With each album, Hozier’s own lyrical language has only got more complex and intricate as he hones his craft. Able to weave rich musings on love and longing into an equally beautiful instrumentation, the result is something special but utterly his own as there is really no other artist to compare him to.
In particular, it feels like no one can rival Hozier when it comes to the topic of longing. Sitting in a specific place somewhere between love, lust and a bittersweet sting of heartache, longing in itself is a tricky thing to nail down. But across these five lyrics, Hozier, or Andrew John Hozier-Byrne, has the talent down to a tee.
Five of Hozier’s best lyrics on longing:
‘Unknown / Nth’
“Do you know I could break beneath the weight
Of the goodness, love, I still carry for you?”
Longing and let down converge in Hozier’s track ‘Unknown / Nth’. Taking inspiration from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, as many of the tracks on his latest album Unreal Unearth do, ‘Nth’ refers to the ninth circle of hell, which is treachery. Throughout the track, the artist sings about ignoring red flags and turning a blind eye to clues of betrayal in order to keep on loving and not have to falter in his devotion.
But in the intermingling of hurt and hope, that’s where the beauty of the song lies. As the tender verses break into a powerful bridge, Hozier doesn’t so much sing but howls this devastating yet gorgeous line on the endurance of love, even when it’s time to let go.
‘Francesca’
“If I could hold you for a minute
Darling, I’d go through it again, ah, ah”
Another lyrical best moments comes from Hozier’s most recent album, too, as the track ‘Francesa’ could be the artist’s most epic anthem yet. As another track-taking influence from Divine Comedy, he references the story of Francesca da Rimini, a real-life Italian noble who was murdered by her husband when he discovered her having an affair. In his tale, Dante encounters Francesca and her lover in the second circle of hell, Lust.
In his own reimagining, Hozier declares that he would suffer the fate of death and hell over and over again just to have another moment with his lover – which is surely the ultimate proclamation of hell. Similar to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice that he references in other tracks, ‘Francesca’ is a love song that defies mortality to make his longing immortal.
‘To Be Alone’
“Honey, when you kill the lights
And kiss my eyes
I feel like a person for a moment of my life”
Perfectly balanced with love in Hozier’s discography is lust, with his language for longing essentially bridging the gap between the two. But ‘To Be Alone’ certainly exists in the camp of the latter as one of his most desire-driven tracks. According to Hozier himself, this is a song about “trying to love a damaged person in a modern society,” as he sets himself and his lover in opposition to the dark world around them.
But as he sings about in this lyric, nothing can touch them in the dark and in their intimate privacy. Burst things into a chorus of “It feels good, girl, it feels good / Oh, to be alone with you”, the song’s longing cuts through the chaos and difficulty to prioritise pleasure.
‘Work Song’
“I just think about my baby
I’m so full of love, I could barely eat”
In this track from his 2014 debut album, Andrew John Hozier-Byrne shook off his County Wicklow irish identity to transform into a classic blues artist from the deep south it seems. Borrowing from gospel music or from the true origins of blues rock, ‘Work Song’ feels like it should have been written decades if not centuries ago as such a timeless take on love and lust.
This line is a perfect example of that. Singing, “There’s nothing sweeter than my baby,” Hozier croons the classic cliche of being “full of love” but does it so well that it almost sounds like he invented it. Set against a sparse yet seductive instrumentation, ‘Work Song’ is easily one of his sexiest.
‘Better Love’
“And I’ve never loved a darker blue
Than the darkness I have known in you”
Leave it up to Hozier to be asked to write a track for a Tarzan movie and come back with the sonic equivalent of a classic romantic poem. Far more complex and high-brow than the film it was crafted for, ‘Better Love’ is a song about seeing every side to someone, all their flaws and quirks, and still wanting them.
In his own lyrical annotation of the track for Genius, Hozier said, “its about reassuring, having seen how hostile and how brutal the world is, how you can kind of come to a rather cold conclusion that there is no better love outside that which you find in your lover and therefore, you redress your view of the world in the arms of that person.” To him, there is no better phrase to encapsulate love and longing than there promise that there is no “better love” to find elsewhere.
