Hozier

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

There was a moment, a few weeks after I signed, that it actually hit me. I was signed to a major label.

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

Being 16 is the worst time to be anybody, there is not enough tea in China to persuade me to be that young again. I wasn't very happy with myself.

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.