Sometimes it all comes down to one perfect moment. Having spent his late teens gigging and recording with the Irish choir Anúna, the newly solo songwriter Andrew Hozier-Byrne signed a development deal with Universal records and began trying to refine what he wanted to say into one song. It wasn’t easy, sometimes other people’s expectations would cloud what he was trying to do, sometimes the music didn’t come. And then, as if sent from the heavens (to a self-professed atheist) there was Take Me To Church.
That song was the first on his debut EP, and started being passed around on social media, becoming first a YouTube hit, then an iTunes hit, then a chart hit in Ireland, and then across Europe, before finally arriving at the No.2 spot in the American charts, and securing Andrew a Grammy nomination and the chance to duet with Annie Lennox at the awards themselves. Along the way there have been countless YouTube covers and reinterpretations—most notably when it was used as the soundtrack to Sergei Polunin’s muscular ballet in a barn—and a new army of fans for his self-titled first album. And that was just the first of many perfect moments. Church or no church, watch him take to the heavens and soar.
Sometimes it all comes down to one perfect moment. Having spent his late teens gigging and recording with the Irish choir Anúna, the newly solo songwriter Andrew Hozier-Byrne signed a development deal with Universal records and began trying to refine what he wanted to say into one song. It wasn’t easy, sometimes other people’s expectations would cloud what he was trying to do, sometimes the music didn’t come. And then, as if sent from the heavens (to a self-professed atheist) there was Take Me To Church.
That song was the first on his debut EP, and started being passed around on social media, becoming first a YouTube hit, then an iTunes hit, then a chart hit in Ireland, and then across Europe, before finally arriving at the No.2 spot in the American charts, and securing Andrew a Grammy nomination and the chance to duet with Annie Lennox at the awards themselves. Along the way there have been countless YouTube covers and reinterpretations—most notably when it was used as the soundtrack to Sergei Polunin’s muscular ballet in a barn—and a new army of fans for his self-titled first album. And that was just the first of many perfect moments. Church or no church, watch him take to the heavens and soar.
