my favorite song from the album for a number of reasons, but most importantly it never fails to make me cry. the number of times I had to bring myself to skip it only because I was in public and couldn't cry my heart out listening to it... uncountable.
Butchered Tongue being on the Unreal Unearth album is so quintessentially Hozier to me cause he was like yes I’m going through a terrible breakup yes it has changed me in irreversible ways and YES I’m still pissed off and disgusted by colonialism if you were wondering btw
Ik that I can’t fully relate to Foreigner’s god or Butchered Tongue but to the people that those songs resonates to, I KNOW that they have to hurt on a spiritual level
literally the best explanation of what this album is oml-
thinking about the recurring theme of identity in unreal unearth, and how the speaker's sense of identity is most frequently tied to his relationship, and the connectedness between them, where the relationship was so transformative that it fundamentally changed him, and now that the relationship is dead, he needs to bury those parts of himself that were born out of the relationship and forge new ones, in which we follow him as he travels through the circles of hell in the afterlife to deposit those fragments of identity and moments from the relationship so that he can emerge changed and with a new definition of himself and his identity in this essay I will-
A while back I saw a Hozier related post about people simplifying Hozier’s lyrics and as an example of songs that are actually just about naughty stuff they gave Butchered Tongue.
Butchered Tongue. The song SO clearly about Ireland being colonised and his relationship with the Irish language.
“As a young man blessed to pass so many road signs and have my foreign ear made fresh again on each unlikely sound” is him reading signs in Irish.
“The ears were chopped from young men if the pitch cap didn’t kill them. They are buried without scalp in the shattered bedrock of our home” Irish men being killed, having their ears cut of and having their scalp cut off.
Ireland is probably the only country in Europe that has been colonised. They have been fighting for their rights for centuries and you wanna write this song of as “just about sex”????