Hozier

I'm quite tame as touring musicians go.

It's a surreal experience filming promotion with Ryan Seacrest and meeting Top 40 pop artists.

Religion wasn't imposed on me.

I dabbled with faith, and I explored religion quite thoroughly.

By the time I was in my teens, I was listening to Delta blues and jazz.

I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties.

I spent quite a bit of time in choirs, growing up, and in the world-touring music group Anuna.

Rarely do I finish a song lyrically before I have a musical idea there, but then again, rarely ever would I finish a song musically before starting the lyrical ideas. So a lot of the time, they come in tandem, or they just come at a glance.

I find lyrics can come at any time during the day, as can music.

Especially on the road, it's very hard to find time to actually sit down and write.

If I don't think something's worth saying, I don't think it's quite there, I'd rather just not say it, to be honest. In that case, I'd rather wait 'till the thought is ready, 'till I feel like I'm happy with everything.

I love a good party - but I'm not all that attracted to a celebrity lifestyle.

I hate nightclubs, and I get fed up very quickly in crowded rooms. I enjoy being around people I know.

I was always drawn to gospel music and the roots of African-American music. It's the foundation of rock and roll.

There's not a lot of room for thinking in popular culture; there's not a lot of room for being conflicted.

The public discourse online is not done through the polite language of debate.

It sounds like I'm joking when I say it, but when I wrote 'Take Me To Church' and a lot of these things, I didn't think they would be hits. I thought I was writing for a potentially smaller audience.

I figured the songs wouldn't make much of a splash. I didn't think 'Take Me To Church' would play on the radio or get in the charts, and I didn't think about dealing with a global audience.

I had just discovered jazz, and I started singing in a kind of blues cover band at the age of 15. We called ourselves - it was a terrible name - the Blue Zoots. We couldn't actually get our hands on zoot suits, nor did we dress in blue. We did covers of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and kind of Blues Brothers repertoire stuff.

The first time I heard Tom Waits, it was like everything just flipped. It was just this fascination with him. My cousin showed me 'Small Change,' and I just couldn't get over that this was a white guy singing.

I've been a total Tom Waits dork for a long, long time.

I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.

I'm an awful control freak at times when it comes to production and stuff like that.

I will play around with an idea for a very long time until it's found it's feet and it's good enough to become a song.

I'd love to do something with somebody like James Blake.

Things were never as exciting for me as the first gig in New York.

The more I come to L.A., the more it's amazing.

If I fall into a city, I fall into a scene, and I just don't want to get distracted and enjoy myself too much. There's too much work to be done.

I love a lot of Irish folk music and Irish folk songs.

I think my parents took me to see Sting when I was very, very young.

I remember one of the first albums I got was an album called 'Thin Lizzy: Live and Dangerous.'

All songs, all pieces of art, reflect the world that they were made in and the values of those artists and the hopes and aspirations of the people who listen to that music and who made that music.

A lot of the 'leave' campaign was centered around a thinly veiled xenophobia, just 'control our own borders.' It's not a good look. I don't think it represents Britain; I don't think it represents the U.K. all too well. It breaks my heart for my generation in Britain who are going to suffer.

I wish I had more time to read. I'm always traveling.

Regardless of the sexual orientation behind a relationship, it is still a relationship and still love.

As I listened more and more to the music that moved me, I gained more fascination with America.

I was definitely drawn to the mythology of one man, one voice, and one guitar.

I didn't know what to expect of real America. What shocked me was the diversity of it and how different every city is. But also just how polite and usually good-willed and optimistic most Americans are.

I'm not quite used to being seen through the eyes of fans yet. Being met with squeals and screams - I haven't gotten used to that.

I think it is important to differentiate between lip service towards something and actually making change.

I'm not cross about the idea of baptism; I just think the idea that when a child is born it is inherently sinful and carries sin and needs to be cleaned in order for it to be all right and all good with its creator, I just think that's an absurd notion.

It was amazing for me to even perform at the Grammys, but to do so alongside Annie Lennox was a truly incredible honor.

My hair grows into a fuzz ball - I just wanted it to grow downwards rather than outwards - but then I realized I couldn't play guitar with it that way. I couldn't do anything day-to-day without my hair getting in my mouth or my eyes or my food, so I just started tying it back, long before I knew what a man bun was.

One of my biggest influences of all time would be somebody like Tom Waits. David Bowie is another huge influence. I'm also a big fan of St. Vincent and Leslie Feist.

I have very strong feelings about a lot of things. I am sometimes reluctant to come straight to the forefront with it. You know, first and foremost, I'm a musician. I'm a songwriter.

I look at all good things with a bit of a dark lens, I suppose, especially with something like love.

Love isn't any one good thing; it's a very, very strange mishmash of emotions. Your love for somebody is, oftentimes, informed by the terrible things you might believe about yourself, and comparatively, the person you see them as is everything that you're not.

I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.

Someone had an eye on me as I was leaving high school. I had a chance to record demos, but they were kind of wanting to make a pop singer out of me, of the 'X Factor' variety. I didn't feel comfortable with it. I wanted to be a songwriter.

I am a politically motivated person, and that will come through in the music.