With His No. 1 Smash ‘Too Sweet,’ Hozier Went From Literary-Minded Album Artist to Pop Idol
Victory was sweet — definitely not too sweet — when it came to Hozier staking out a place at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 this year. Not everyone would have seen it coming, to say the least. The Irish singer-songwriter had not even had a song crack the top 30 in the decade since his breakout single, “Take Me to Church,” peaked at No. 2. And then “Too Sweet” seemed to have been more or less picked off the discards pile, arriving on a March EP (“Unheard”) that collected a handful of songs considered for but not used on Hozier’s 2023 album (“Unreal Unearth”). But what seemed like a longshot on paper was a sure shot once the world heard that fuzzy opening lick, let alone got into the grist of his amusing tale of mismatched lovers.
“I’ve always thought of him as an album artist first,” admits Betsy Whitney, Columbia Records’ VP of marketing, who’s worked with the artist from his first record. As long as his rabid fan base was streaming the albums and selling out his shows — as they’d already done with his amphitheater/arena tour of 2023-24 — who needs hit singles? Well, that is a question that no label ever asks itself, actually. And, as of this year, they didn’t have to. “Too Sweet” landed on Variety‘s year-end Hitmakers chart (powered by data from Luminate and Billboard) as the eighth most-consumed song of 2024.
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“To have these 10 years bookended by ‘Take Me to Church’ and ‘Too Sweet’ is remarkable. To have the biggest song of his career 10 years after what everybody thought was his biggest song of his career is just wild,” Whitney says. “I think this song’s just easier to insert yourself into and participate with than maybe some of his more literary-inspired songs or deeply emotional and evocative tracks; this one just had a nice little bop to it that that fans wanted to create with immediately.”
She means via TikTok, of course. Hozier let the cat out of the bag earlier than anticipated by excerpting a portion of “Too Sweet” on a podcast, “and fans immediately ripped that and started making content right out of the gae. I remember that morning that it first played on that podcast, we were all panicking because that was not part of the plan. And then by about four hours later we were like, ‘Wait a second, we’re onto something. This is going a lot faster than anyone anticipated.’ And it was just kind of off to the races all in that same day, the first day it hit the internet. I’d never seen a seen a song react that fast and so organically.”
Columbia’s team moved to invest in further content creation. One TikTok meme focused on “identifying what your two drink choices are — your fun drink and your morning beverage,” taking off from the lyrics, “I think I’ll take my whiskey neat / My coffee black and my bed at three.” Another, Whitney says, had to do with “male thirst traps… handsome but innocent, nerdy-looking guys being seen in a different light than usual.” Although no one would ever accuse Hozier himself of being nerdy-looking, the song does have him playing a more roguish, if not caddish, character that stands apart from the Dante-quoting, high-minded nature of most of his other material.
That virality was quickly followed by radio success, with Columbia’s Lisa Sonkin leading the charge as “Too Sweet” topped four formats — pop, rock/alternative, adult pop and AAA — by either spring or summer. Radio listeners didn’t burn out on the song, either. A sure sign of its future strength as a recurrent is how the Song of this Summer contender re-ascended to No. 1 at pop radio just before Thanksgiving.
So how is it that a song as undeniable as “Too Sweet” got relegated to an odds-and-ends EP this year, instead of landing on the “Unreal Unearth” album last year, where, to many minds, it obviously would have stood out as a hit? Ah, but there’s the rub. It might have stood out too much, as an outlier on that more ethereally minded concept album. But also, there’s the fact that the album in question was conceived partly as a meditation on Dante’s circles of hell in “Inferno” — and while “Too Sweet” was considered for a slot that would have represented the sin of gluttony, he had another tune to represent that that felt like a smoother fit for the album. “it was a choice between two songs for the album, and ‘Too Sweet’ was kind of placed to the side a little bit,” Hozier explained in an interview with Variety when the single came out.
Daniel Tannenbaum, aka Bekon, a producer known more for hip-hop projects like Kendrick Lamar’s “Damn” than rock albums, was the principal collaborator when he and Hozier jammed through the first demo of “Too Sweet” during the album sessions. He notes that it was nowhere near being a finished track when Hozier opted to set it aside during the sessions for “Unreal Unearth.” Bekon admits he was disappointed that it didn’t make it onto the album at that time, but he’s learned not to get too attached to personal favorites during recording sessions.
“Many years ago, I worked on that infamous album that never came out called ‘Detox’, by Dr. Dre,” Bekon says. “And if you could imagine how many pieces of music I would get excited about, when I’d hear Dre and Jay-Z over a beat… imagine how many of those songs I heard that no one will ever hear. I can tell you I know of several other artists out there in the world that are sitting on songs that I could tell you are as good and incredible and potentially life-changing as ‘Too Sweet,’ but they might never come out. And I have to be OK with that. One of my mentors told me, ‘Look, on on the day that you’re afraid you can’t write another song, then get precious over your songs.’ When you look at the world through that lens, you can sort of detach from the outcome, because there’s always another song.”
And Bekon didn’t mind that Hozier was truly committed to the Dante-referencing arc of the album, even if that meant leaving off hits. “Part of his artistry is his commitment to the concept, right? He reminds me of Kendrick in that way,” the producer says. “I know that musically their styles are so different, but as two artists that I’ve spent a lot of time with, they remind me of each other in how much they’re willing to stick to and really dig into a concept.”
But Hozier had the idea of releasing two EPs to cover many of the outtakes from “Unreal Unearth.” (The whole volume of material from the album and EPs is being collected together into a deluxe edition of the album, “Unreal Unearth Unending,” that is coming out on vinyl and CD Dec. 6.) So one day, after the album in question had been out for months and been toured behind, Bekon got a call from Hozier that began, “Do you remember that song…?” He sure did, and they made an appointment to reconvene and finish it.
The tune had originally started on a very stripped-down day, without a lot of other people around. “We started with the real simple little drum loop, and before we had a real guitar on the trac, it was actually just a MIDI bass” playing the signature riff. “We got the groove going, and then he had been sitting on the bigger concept of the hook, ‘I take my whiskey,’ that part. And we just started jamming.”
When they took up working on it again, Bekon brought in the full team of writer-player-producers he had used for a number of the album tracks, finishing the writing and working up an ambitious production that is more complicated than it might sound at first, mixing live instruments with loops and chopped-up samples. “We brought what he and I had started in that very sort of low-key way with the MIDI bass line and very basic beat and I brought it in to the whole crew. Daniel Krieger replayed the bass line and added the guitar. Stuart Johnson, a drummer who’s part of my crew, took my (drum loop) part and doubled it. Pete Gonzalez took for the hook and brought that newer groove in. Sergui Gherman, who has been part of my crew for a long time, added sampling and other X-factor things. Me and Andrew (aka Hozier) went back and forth on the writing, and this was definitely one where he did a lot of the heavy lifting.
“What was unique about our process overall is he’s definitely used to writing alone,” notes Bekon, affirming that the artist went out of his old comfort zone in opening up to group writing for his third album. “My way of making records a lot of the time is I love to be on a microphone and to sort of freestyle back and forth with the artist, whatever the genre is. We just took to feeding off of each other, and I could hum something, and his ability to take that and just make it his own was so special. … Hozier is a rock poet, but that process of sampling is forever attached to my production style because even when I’m just writing a song, I can’t help but think about things from that perspective of, what happens if we reverse this, chop it up, screw it or do something to it?”
Still, he never lost sight of what was at every song’s center. “I took it as a personal challenge,” says Bekon, “to say, ‘You’re not a great producer if you can’t figure out what to do with a voice as great as Hozier’s.’ I felt like I was a race car driver at Le Mans or something, and I got that first Ford GT and I’m like, ‘Wow, what am I gonna do with this thing?’”
Bekon watched the virality unfold at a rapid-fire pace no one could have predicted for Hozier in 2024, even given his massive fan base and touring acumen. “You could call it the underdog story in that he’s been left out of the conversation for a while — the pop conversation,” the producer clarifies. “But you know what’s funny? The TikTok generation embraced him. And the one metric today I would say that dictates the potential of a hit more than any other metric is TikTok. It doesn’t matter if we like the idea of it or not — there’s a huge correlation between virality and streaming and then hit songs. Hozier does stadiums and arenas, but he definitely was not in the iHeartRadio conversation. So to see him there, I love that, because it represents the idea that you can be just outside the traditional system and if you make good music and you’re connecting with your fans, the fans can drive a hit, which is very different than the old guard. Now fans can actually very much directly impact a song becoming not just a streaming hit, but then a radio No. 1, which is even more difficult.”
Looking at the triumph this past summer, Hozier was thinking in terms of how it reflected his heritage. “I think what’s a a really sweet thing for me is that it was the very same week that the last Irish artist got a No. 1. Sinead O’Connor was the last Irish artist with the No. 1 in the U.S., and that was 34 years ago. It was the year that I was born, and it was the very same charting week in April, 34 years ago. So… there’s something very wonderful about that.”
If it’s hardly the biggest factor in a hit, being a good soul that people are rooting for (unlike the cad Hozier plays in “Too Sweet’s” lyrics) doesn’t hurt, in either the direct results or the incalculable karma factor.
Says Columbia’s Whitney: “He’sone of the absolutely most gracious and thankful people I work with. He could walk down the halls of Columbia Records and probably greet most people by first name and know what they do, and remember who’s been with him for 10 years. So for him to be that kind of a person, and then also get this kind of a hit… Yeah, this is a business, but it’s so rewarding to see him be a wonderful person and achieve such incredible things. He is a unicorn — unique in being able to be this creative and successful, but staying so normal and kind.”
Hitmakers:
Dan Tannenbaum (Bekon), producer
Caroline Downey, manager, Rubyworks
Betsy Whitney, VP marketing, Columbia Records
Lisa Sonkin, SVP promotion, Columbia Records
Songwriters:
Sergui Gherman, Hozier, Daniel Tannenbaum, Peter Gonzales, Stuart Johnson, Tyler Reese, Daniel Krieger
Producers:
Bekon, Hozier, Sergui Gherman, Peter Gonzales, Chakra
Publishers:
Bekon Productions, Calowayfrombd, Konscious Studios Publishing, Little Drummer Boy Publishing, PW Arrangement, Sergfrlmbd, The BDA Kid LLC, Evolving Music Co Ltd, Universal Music Corporation, Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Co.
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