Hozier Quotes

Everybody used to be busy writing songs - great songs - that became hits. Now everybody's writing hits. Everybody's desperately writing a hit because they know they can't survive if they don't have a hit. Where in the past, we were writing a song like 'More Than Words' on a porch, not really believing it was gonna be a hit.

I didn't think anyone was going to buy 'Do You Really Wanna Hurt Me?' It was really personal, not a hit record, I thought. I wanted us to sound completely different. Shows how much I knew.

It's a total big difference between a person that got lyrics and a person that can make hit singles. I'm a person that can make some hit singles. I'm not in no booth trying to be a lyrical genius. I'm preparing to make me some singles, and as I develop as a man, then they'll respect my emcee skills.

I always try to write a song, I never just want to write a record.

No one was more surprised that that first Boston record took off than the record company itself.

When I did 'Horses,' I never expected to make another album.

Things like 'Lucky Man' were never written to even be a record, let alone a hit record.

In the mid-1980s to the early 1990s I was writing songs not because I particularly liked what I was doing, but because I was desperately trying to get back into the charts. I really didn't enjoy it. I didn't like the music I was making, I wasn't proud of it, like I have been before or since.

Well, what's interesting, I try not to think about the radio when I'm writing a song. I want people to love the song, and that means it might not be exactly thinking about the radio, but it's thinking about your audience and saying, 'I want people to like this song after it's done.'

Artists don't always know. Almost every song I ever recorded that was a hit at the majors that the promotional people picked I didn't think it would be a hit. I was wrong every time!

It's really hard to write personal songs. I'm not good at writing ditties because as far as writing hit songs that you pitch to the national artist, I just don't write that way.

I really want people to know I'm a songwriter.

I moved to Nashville to be a songwriter. I found out that was a job, that someone would pay you to sit in a room with a guitar and make up songs! It is the greatest job in the world. I wrote three or four songs a day. That's what I lived for.

When I first got into the major label system, they were like, 'Hey, you're great - now write with a million people so we can get songs.' That was something I hadn't done before, and the songwriters I was working with had worked on some massive numbers - like 'True Colours.' One of the guys wrote 'Livin On A Prayer.'

There was a period in my life when I was trying to write standards: songs that everybody recorded. I did a pretty good run of it.

The success of 'Take Me To Church,' I never imagined it. I never imagined that it would work on radio, that it would find its way onto the charts, even at home and certainly not in America.

I want every song on it to be a hit.

As a songwriter, I've always loved to tell stories. But in my band, it was always about what would make sense for a band to put out.

Getting a beginner publishing deal really helped me gain the skills. I just kept writing and writing. You just take everything out of life and turn it into an idea or a melody or a song and find the best writers you can to write with that fit you and know what you want to do.

I didn't set out to write pop hits.

I think people sometimes confuse 'catchy' with something that should automatically be a hit in today's world. I mean, obviously we write a lot of stuff that's catchy, that sticks in your head. But that doesn't necessarily mean that middle-school kids are going to want to listen to a song about a lawyer or a Subaru or whatever.

I was always trying to write standards, songs that anybody can sing. I figured that's where the money was.

The way I made 'Diamonds and Dirt,' which had all those hits in a row, was that I was just making a record. It was just the one that rolled up in my natural process, and it happened to be commercial.

Being a songwriter, my job is just to write songs for people. I'm not attached to them.

I've learned by experience that, if I get too clever with lyrics, or if I'm not totally embodying my own wants and needs in the songs, I can't remember them.