love

Hozier’s Unreal Unearth, is, in addition to being one of the best albums of 2023, is a wonderful exploration of love, morality, and the contradictions inherent in how we think about them. In Part 1, we discussed the album’s fourth song, Francesca, and the moving narrative of unconditional love which it represents: love unreservedly, unapologetically, with abandon, at whatever cost. This narrative has power, I argued, because it represents something salient to the way we think about love: we find stories of love without limit — like those of Romeo and Juliet, Jack and Rose, and Francesca and Paolo — deeply romantic. But Hozier does not leave the story as is; later in the album, he presents us with a different picture, one which challenges that romantic picture and flips it on its head. He draws out a contradictory set of emotions which poses a different question: is there a length to which we shouldn’t go for love?

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The sixth song of Unreal Unearth is not a love song. In fact, it’s about as far from one as it could be. The soaring vocals of Francesca have been replaced with something more sinister, a change in theme evident in the track’s title: Eat Your Young.

The symbolism of Eat Your Young is not as clear as Francesca, but its overall themes are apparent, especially when its music video and Hozier’s own analysis of the lyrics are taken into account: Eat Your Young is a song about gluttony, greed, and war. The first verse begins:

“I’m starvin’, darlin’

Let me put my lips to somethin’

Let me wrap my teeth around the world

Start carvin’, darlin’”

Hozier himself describes these lyrics as “potentially lustful,” but notes that “the lyrics so grotesque, in a way, that there’s a dark humor to them as well” — drawing an interesting contrast with the portrayal of lust in Francesca. But the lyrics, sung by the singer to a lover, take on that substantially darker tone in the chorus:

“Pull up the ladder when the flood comes

Throw enough rope until the legs have swung

Seven new ways that you can eat your young

Come and get some

Skinnin’ the children for a war drum

Puttin’ food on the table, sellin’ bombs and guns

It’s quicker and easier to eat your young”

There’s much to be said about these lyrics. Perhaps we can take the lyrics more literally, and focus on the theme of greed: an elite class literally pulling up the ladder behind them, and throwing just enough rope to hang oneself with. Perhaps we can also understand the lyrics in a more metaphorical way, centering on the theme of war and the heavy cost which we — and our children — pay for the violence we bring to the world. But I, personally, find it interesting that the song’s message is situated in the context of a relationship: the singer and his unnamed “darlin’.” We can also, then, take these lyrics as a commentary on relationships, on love, and how both can drive us to dark places.

The lyric which encapsulates this theme, I believe, is last line of the final couplet: “Puttin’ food on the table, sellin’ bombs and guns.” This lyric, in and of itself, poses ethical questions; but in the broader context of a relationship, the picture it paints is slightly different, and contrasts with that which we find in Francesca. In any relationship, and especially in love relationships, we have certain obligations: depending on our role, we may have obligations to care, to protect, to provide, among many others. And while Francesca describes a love which is beautiful in its reckless abandon, Eat Your Young asks: what length would you go to fulfill those obligations? Would you bear any cost, as Francesca did? Or is there a line — some moral limit which you would not cross, even if it meant those obligations went unfulfilled?

In Eat Your Young, Hozier seems to be arguing that there is such a line; hence the final line of the stanza: “It’s quicker and easier to eat your young.” This final couplet directly states the challenge: would you sell bombs and guns, weapons of war which will almost certainly be used to oppress and kill innocents, to provide for your family? Maybe you would in extreme need — but would you do it to send your kids to college? To buy your partner the house they’ve always wanted?

To what extent are you willing to do wrong for love?

I will not, and perhaps cannot, give an answer to such a question here — it is a question about your values, your relationships. But it is a question which we must sit with, especially if we are to understand the philosophical tension between a song like Francesca and a song like Eat Your Young; and it is a question which we should take seriously. Perhaps the most typical examples are not quite as dramatic as those which Hozier imagines, but life does present us with choices which walk this tightrope between love and morality. Lying to protect a loved one, for example, or stealing to provide for them.

Perhaps, when you reflect on these questions, you find a tension in yourself between doing what love motivates and doing what you believe is right. I feel it too. Unreal Unearth, like much of the art which resonates with us the most, represents the human condition as it is: a mess of contradictions, full of feelings without clear sources and intuitions without clear reasons. The complex relationship between human love and human morality is no different, with contradictions which we, if we seek to love fully and be virtuous, must understand. Unreal Unearth’s success as an album, beyond its beautiful music and wonderful lyricism, lies in revealing these contradictions to us, especially as they manifest in our own lives, and our own relationships.

Andrew John Hozier-Byrne — better known by the stage name Hozier — released his third studio album, Unreal Unearth, in August of last year. Since its release, the album has met critical acclaim, garnering celebratory reviews and a spot among the Rolling Stone’s top 100 albums of the year.

If you haven’t had the chance, I’d highly recommend taking a listen: it’s Hozier’s lyrical folklore in its most refined form, and if you’ve been a fan of Hozier since Take me to Church first broke into the cultural zeitgeist a decade ago, you’ll find yourself immediately at home. But, if you listen closely, Unreal Unearth also challenges us; it presents emotions and philosophies in contradiction with one-another, drawing out the contradictions in our understanding of love, sacrifice, and morality. Unreal Unearth is an incredibly rich case study on the lengths to which we’ll go for the people that we love.

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The fourth song of the album, Francesca, presents us with the first face of the coin.

The song is firmly based in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: the famous descent through hell’s nine circles. In the Comedy’s fifth canto, Dante descends to the second circle of hell, which is reserved for the so-called “carnal sinners:” those who were overcome by lust in their corporeal life. Dante tells us that the second circle is “mute of all light,” and dominated by a “infernal hurricane that never rests.” The souls of the damned are to be found in the whipping winds of the hurricane; for their tempestuous sin, Dante tells us that the souls are swept up and battered by the hurricane, never to find peace or rest for eternity. Here, Dante sees the souls of many historical figures known to us today: he sees Achilles, Paris, Dido, Cleopatra. But as he surveys the souls, he sees two which are intertwined, who “seem upon the wind to be so light,” and calls out to them.

The first to speak is the soul of Francesca da Rimini, a noblewoman from northern Italy and contemporary of Dante. Though the historical record is sparse, we believe that young Francesca had been married to one Giovanni Malatesta as part of a political deal: her family and Giovanni’s both aspired to political power, and the competing dynasties aligned themselves through Giovanni and Francesca’s marriage. Francesca, however, would soon fall in love not with Giovanni, but with his younger brother Paolo; and when Giovanni discovered their affair, he murdered both his wife and his brother. One commentator, writing some forty years after their death, dramatized it as such: “he found them while sinning, took a sword and pierced them at the same time in such a way that locked together in one embrace they die.”

What is remarkable about Dante’s telling of Francesca’s story is the sympathy with which she is portrayed, especially when compared with the many other damned souls which Dante encounters on his descent. Francesca tells her story unapologetically, with command; and Dante, upon hearing it through the winds of hurricane, is overcome with sadness. He writes: “and all the while one spirit uttered this, the other one did weep so, that, for pity, I swooned away as if I had been dying, and fell, even as a dead body falls.”

It is this story, this Francesca, which Hozier draws upon in the fourth song of Unreal Unearth. Hozier continues on the path that Dante laid, giving a similarly unapologetic voice to Francesca and Paolo:

“Now that it’s done

There’s not one thing that I would change

My life was a storm, since I was born

How could I fear any hurricane?”

Hozier’s thesis, though, is most apparent in the song’s chorus, sung over a driving drum set and guitar:

“If someone asked me at the end

I’ll tell them put me back in it

Darling, I would do it again

If I could hold you for a minute

Darling, I’d go through it again.”

Francesca, here, is imagined as not only unrepentant, but defiant of the punishment which Dante imagined for her and her lover. The hurricane is no tempest; and if given the choice to love again, even knowing the cost which would be paid and the eternity which awaited them, Francesca would whole-heartedly embrace the chance. For Paolo, there is no length to which Francesca wouldn’t go.

Francesca de Rimini’s story, as told by Dante and retold by Hozier, is moving: it is a love story which, in the defiance and commitment which it expresses, shows Francesca as both heroine and tragic victim. Part of the emotional power of the story and song, I believe, is how they capture a powerful part of how we understand love, whether romantic or platonic. Francesca loves in the way we might want someone to love us: unreservedly, unapologetically, with abandon, at whatever cost, in full embrace of whatever consequence, even those eternal. It is this sort of unconditional love which is our cultural and emotional ideal; it is reflected in our wedding vows (“for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”), in our literature (Jane Eyre and Romeo and Juliet), in our films (Titanic, The Notebook). Love, when it takes a form where no distance or length is too great, resonates with us in a deep way.

But Francesca’s story, alongside many of the stories which investigate this form of unconditional love, show a form of duality. While we find the idea of a love for which no length is too far romantic, or even an ideal, there are some distances which still give us pause. Some might judge Francesca’s story in this way: perhaps you find the idea of an adulterous affair, however loveless the marriage, unethical. I will not come down on this question here (though I would argue strongly for one answer); I merely wish to illuminate one side of our cultural understanding of unconditional love. That which, as many find in Francesca de Rimini’s story, is hopeful, inspiring, and reflects what we might want in love.

Hozier, however, does not leave this theme with the ending of Francesca. He poses to us, later in Unreal Unearth, a question: is there a length to which we shouldn’t go?

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Francesca’s final chorus does not fade, but builds over its guitar to a key change, where all of the track’s energy in the drum set is moved to thundering downbeats on the base drum and crashing cymbals. The voices of Hozier and his accompanying vocalists split and overlap, coalescing into a shout chorus which invokes both the image and sound of a divine host; the electric guitar sustains on a frantic vibrato bar, mimicking the winds in which Francesca and Paolo were both damned and united for eternity. Under Hozier’s soaring vocals, his accompaniment sings:

“Heaven is not fit to house a love

Like you and I.”