You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece

tell the story of how they remained.

My name is Tao Wen.

Andrew Hozier Burn is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter from Ireland.

His debut single from 2013, Take Me to Church, was a massive multi-platinum hit.

In September 2018, Hozier released the song, Nina Cride Power, which features the legendary gospel singer, Mavis Staples.

In this episode, Hozier breaks down how he made the song, and Mavis Staples tells the story of how she got involved.

Mavis Staples.

My name is Andrew Hozier Burn, a co-by-hozier.

Early 2017, after tour, I moved back into the countryside near where my family is from,

and was living alone in a bungalow in Caddy Wicklow in Ireland, which is just where the countryside begins near the coast.

And was kind of taken some time out, and I was getting back into the writing process.

I fell into a late night's sleep schedule where I'd work till, you know, 3, 4, 5 in the morning and sleep till whatever time.

Late one night in Wicklow, I just was playing around with some dark chords in my nakey on this piano I had in the house.

For a certain type of ballad, maybe it seems to be a place I tend to go to, but I might just be a soccer for a dark piano sound.

I fell on, I think, a chord progression, and then just one sort of couplet, one sort of lyrical idea of,

it's not the waking, it's the rising.

It was just this kind of tongue-in-cheek inquiry into language of political awareness that we hear kind of bandied around on social media,

about being woke and the language of wokeness, etc.

Being aware and being conscious of an issue which affects people negatively and could change, that is a very, very positive thing.

But there is the awareness of something, and then there is the actual doing of something about it.

There is the first step of being awake, and then there is the second step of actually getting out of bed.

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