Illinois Entertainer July 2023 | Page 22

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IE : What were some strange connections with nature that you ’ ve made ? HOZIER : Well , I could go off in many directions with that question . I did a Temazcal , a sweat lodge ceremony in Mexico sometime late last year , and that was a real connection with nature , in a way . But I will say that I started keeping bees . I just became a beekeeper overnight . I was gifted a beehive , and my neighbor who keeps them gave me a queen and a collection of workers , so I ’ ve watched as that has grown and harvested and spun the honey . And I have to say , that ’ s a really wonderful pastime , it ’ s a really wonderful thing to do because they ’ re surprisingly easy to take care of . But to slowly open up a hive ? You have to use that smoke , and you have a little tool that helps you pry apart the frame because it ’ s covered in all this gluey , sticky stuff that bees use to build their hive , and it ’ s something that you have to be very careful with , and you have to be very slow and deliberate in your movements . And very often , without meaning to – and with the best intention in the world , like putting in some vitamins for them , something that will sort of help them – you could end up crushing a bee in just the tiniest movement . But it breeds a great deal of compassion , and it puts you in a space of having a lot of compassion for these tiny , tiny creatures that are so complicated . In some ways , they ’ re so simple , but in other ways , deeply , deeply complex , and so determined . In some ways , bees are just immaculately perfect .
IE : On a more personal scale , almost every track on the album feels like a breakup plaint . Are you in a decent relationship right now ? HOZIER : Well , I think the album reflects on a lot of love and a lot of loss . So I ’ m still sort of figuring my way through and in between a lot of those things . And I ’ m not a father yet . But maybe one day .
IE : The song “ To Someone From a Warm Climate ”? That ’ s pretty much just about everyone in a few years . HOZIER : Ha ! Yeah . To me , it deals more with the interpersonal this album . And there are some larger macro questions , I guess , in “ Eat Your Young ” and “ Who We Are ” – there are some reflections on our socio-economic predicament . But a lot of it is just personal , and it focuses on the interpersonal , or what takes place in the internal world , with regards to love , etcetera . But yeah , I think it ’ s a weird time . And the title “ Unreal Unearth ”? When I was starting to write those songs at the top of the pandemic , it was a great time to be a conspiracy theorist with regard to misinformation and red herring narratives , and false narratives . So it was just a strange time , and also what was happening around it became so surreal , to sort of sit and watch case numbers and death tolls come in every single day . It felt very dreamlike . I felt like
we ’ d stepped into this very surreal situation rather quickly .
IE : People forget how dark it was . HOZIER : It was . It really , really was . And just [ to ] give context , I had a friend who was working in the government , describing how there were contingency plans to turn ice rinks into makeshift morgues because no one really knew in those early parts how bad the mortality rate could become , if it got out of hand and hospitals were overrun . And it was a strange , scary time . But I think we ’ ve kind of gone back to the point where it seems we ’ re just happy to get back on track quickly . And it seems like we ’ re contented to treat that as an anomaly rather than an outcome of the way the world once was or as an inevitability of the way our society was functioning and what its priorities were .
IE : “ Butchered Tongue ” instantly reminded me of how the Welsh in British history once had their tongues cut out by English overlords to keep them from speaking their native language . And that song has one of the coolest lines on the record ... “ The distance between what is lost forever and what can still be known .” HOZIER : Yes . And I suppose viewing the Irish language , and Gaelic is something that we learn in school , and there ’ s a great written history of it . And yet I would say less than 20 % of the island ’ s population still speak the language in the day-to-day . And it is a very beautiful language , and it describes things – especially in the natural world – that there is no other way of describing . It ’ s a language that really was developed around , in a lot of ways , a life in accordance with nature . And it can be humorous , also – the word for a jellyfish is literally just " seal snot ." And the word for a ladybug is BOWeen DAY , so it ’ s this very lovely , unique way that this language describes different things . So I think it ’ s very beautiful , and I have some grasp of it . But I wish I had more . But I suppose that line reflects upon traveling to different places in the world , like Australia and maybe some places within North America , and asking a local what the name of the town means , or what the name of the region means , in the indigenous language where it gets its name . And there just not being anyone present to tell you that . So there are some histories that are really lost . And there are some oral or spoken histories that are lost in a way that we can be grateful [ for ], just reflecting on that . So there ’ s a huge difference between the Irish experience because as difficult and challenging as that history is , we were so lucky in so many ways to have what we have left now because not all cultures survived the colonial experiment .
IE : “ De Selby ,” parts one and two , are sung partially in Gaelic , right ? HOZIER : There is . There is a moment of Gaelic in “ De Selby ,” for sure . And the passage basically translates to , that first song reflects upon darkness , and what ’ s freeing about it – what part of yourself is lost , and how you ’ re invisible and nailed into the darkness , and there ’ s something freeing about that . So that passage opens up the love song of “ De Selby ( Part 2 ),” and it ’ s
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