Hozier

Andrew Hozier-Byrne is an Irish singer-songwriter from Bray, County Wicklow. The son of a musician, Hozier was raised on blues music. He told The Cut: "My dad was a blues musician around Dublin when I was a baby, so the only music I would listen to growing up was John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It's music that feels like home to me. Then I discovered Motown and gospel and Delta blues and jazz, so a huge amount of my influences are all African-American music."

Hozier began playing publicly in his mid-teens by performing Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf songs. He recalled to Grantland: "I started learning open tunings, so some of the first guitar I was good at was slide guitar, because it's quite intuitive in a way. I used to do it at talent shows and stuff like that, and I suppose in a way it was something that was very much my own, and when you're a teenager, it's nice to have something that is very much your own thing. People didn't know where I was coming from with that, and it certainly wasn't anything my peers were into."

He was a member of the Irish choral group Anúna from 2009 to 2012, and appears as a soloist on their 2012 CD Illumination singing "La Chanson de Mardi Gras."