Hozier
Andrew Hozier-Byrne is an Irish singer-songwriter from County Wicklow whose father's career as a jazz and blues drummer left him steeped in blues, soul, and gospel records from childhood. He broke through in 2013 with the genre-crossing single "Take Me to Church," and has since built a catalogue that runs his gospel-schooled voice and blues guitar through Celtic folk and protest songwriting. Across three albums he has kept returning to the same well: the American blues and soul tradition, and the debt songwriters like him owe to it.
Hozier has said his musical education was "grounded" in artists including Nina Simone, and her example of using a stage to carry the weight of the civil rights movement shaped his own turn toward protest songwriting — he named "Nina Cried Power" directly after her.
listen forPlay Simone's ten-minute "Sinnerman," where she cries out "power!" against her band's answering chant, then Hozier's own "Nina Cried Power," which borrows that exact word as its title and its organizing idea — both build a slow-burning gospel-blues groove into a communal shout.
Hozier has said Van Morrison's influence on him was "significant" — proof that soul music could be sung through an Irish voice, and Morrison's habit of name-checking his own blues heroes on record became a breadcrumb trail Hozier followed as a teenager. That mystical, incantatory quality, soul phrasing stretched past the lyric into something devotional, surfaces across Hozier's more spiritual material.
listen forCue up Morrison's "Into the Mystic," where the voice trails off into wordless, hymn-like moaning over a slow-rolling groove, then Hozier's "Work Song," built on a similar call-and-response, gospel-work-holler foundation — both treat the voice as an instrument reaching for something past the words.
The son of a blues drummer, Hozier has repeatedly cited Chicago and Delta blues, John Lee Hooker chief among them, as his "first musical education," and that grounding shows up in his droning, foot-stomp rhythm guitar and talking-blues cadences.
listen forSet Hooker's one-chord, foot-tapping "Boogie Chillen'" against Hozier's stripped-down protest stomp "Jackboot Jump" — both ride a hypnotic, repetitive groove that owes more to trance than to conventional song structure.