Musician Hozier: ‘I usually have a back-up plan for a back-up plan’

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1. What is your earliest memory?
   The birthday party of a sibling. I remember being fixated on a toy, and being young enough that I was still traversing the floor on my hands and knees.

2. Who was or still is your mentor?
   Many. A very supportive family. And friends I’m close with, who move through the world with such grace and sensitivity, and are so in step with themselves in a way I can only admire. I look to them all the time. They ground me and offer me a new rhythm.

3. How fit are you?
   It’s not a terribly athletic lifestyle that I lead. I try to keep healthy.

4. Tell me about an animal you have loved.
   There’s been plenty. A lot of good family dogs.

5. Risk or caution, which has defined your life more?
   In lots of ways I’m quite risk-averse. I usually have a back-up plan for a back-up plan. I’ll always be trying to think a few steps ahead. But everything I’ve done professionally — I can’t tell you when it hasn’t been a frightening prospect. Creating something that’s very personal and then showing it to the world is quite terrifying.

6. What trait do you find most irritating in others?
   People who are dishonest with themselves, to themselves, about themselves.

7. What trait do you find most irritating in yourself?
   Total time blindness. I forget things all the time. I don’t get back to people. My mind is like a sieve; things slip out of my brain. I get frustrated with myself. Forgetting things can look like a lack of care or interest.

8. What drives you on?
   A sense of duty to make the work that I feel I need to make. Yes, there’s the terror of sharing some very vulnerable, honest part of your heart. In a very public way, you can face backlash, you can be panned. But that sense of duty is the engine that goes beyond all the fears and anxieties.

9. Do you believe in an afterlife?
   Part of me is sympathetic to the Douglas Adams quote: is the garden not beautiful enough that you must believe there are fairies at the end of it? But a huge part of me trusts that all of us return to a source of some kind at the end of this life, and I reflect upon that source a lot. I don’t resist the idea — in fact I embrace it.

10. Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?
    I have spent much of my time steeped in the idea that the world is a very brutal place. But the older I get, I’ve a growing, closer relationship with joy. Suffering’s absence constantly astounds me — and lifts me.

11. Name your favourite river.
    The Lethe. It found its way into a couple of songs. I was in love with the idea of it. In the Greek afterlife, upon drinking of it, souls forget their past life, so that they can move on to the next one.

12. What would you have done differently?
    Tons of stuff — but that’s the thing about learning and growing up. When I was arriving into this career and making sense of it, it was easy to have the feeling that you must say yes to every single thing — almost that you’re risking everything if you say no. So: allowing myself to take a step back, to take a break. And going easy on myself a little bit, here and there.

‘Unreal Unearth’ by Hozier is out on August 18 on Island Records; his tour continues until December; hozier.com

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