I know I'm not the kind of music that's going to have tons of screaming fans, and I'm not gonna be everyone's cup of tea. I just want to do as good a job as I can.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the acceptance of individuality and the desire to create art authentically, regardless of popularity.
Hozier's quote emphasizes the importance of staying true to oneself and maintaining integrity in one's artistic efforts, even when faced with the reality that not everyone will appreciate the work. It acknowledges that not all creations resonate with a mass audience, but the artist's commitment to doing their best holds significant value.
In practice
In a talk about creativity, you might use this quote to illustrate the point that true art is not about pleasing everyone.
Sexuality, and sexual orientation - regardless of orientation - is just natural. An act of sex is one of the most human things. But an organization like the church, say, through its doctrine, would undermine humanity by successfully teaching shame about sexual orientation - that it is sinful, or that it offends God. The song is about asserting yourself and reclaiming your humanity through an act of love.
It's funny: Your relationship changes with a song over time. After a year or so, you're a different person, so your songs, you don't connect with them like you did.
To be honest, the biggest reason I write music and became a musician was to create the amount of joy that I felt about music to anyone else. To me, that's a job well done.
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 found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death, a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment – if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes – everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.
Either somebody has equal rights, or they don't. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There's no mention of a man and a woman.
I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.
Ah, well, do I wish that we lived in a world where gender didn't figure so prominently? Of course. Do I even think about myself as a woman when I go to make art? Of course not.
I never consciously place symbolism in my writing. That would be a self-conscious exercise and self-consciousness is defeating to any creative act. Better to get the subconscious to do the work for you, and get out of the way. The best symbolism is always unsuspected and natural. During a lifetime, one saves up information which collects itself around centers in the mind; these automatically become symbols on a subliminal level and need only be summoned in the heat of writing.
The music we play has to be tomorrow's, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday.
As a songwriter, if you can touch people and make them feel a little less alone in the world, then you've done your job.
An often-repeated assertion in the body of film criticism I have written is the assertion that movies do not just mirror the culture of any given time; they also create it.
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