Take Me to Church

What the song is actually about

The most common misreading of "Take Me to Church" is that it is blasphemous — a song that mocks faith. Hozier has been consistent that it is not. What the song attacks is an organisation, and specifically what that organisation teaches people to feel about their own bodies.

The mechanism is simple and it runs through every line. Every word that belongs to religion gets reassigned to a person. Worship, shrine, sins, confession, absolution, heaven, deathless death — none of them are pointed at an altar. They are pointed at a lover. The narrator is not refusing to believe in anything; he has moved his belief somewhere it is not punished. "The only heaven I'll be sent to is when I'm alone with you" is the whole argument in one line.

Hozier put it plainly in an interview with The Irish Times: falling in love, he said, felt like "a death, a death of everything … you kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way." That is where the song's strangest image comes from. A "deathless death" is not a morbid flourish; it is the loss of self that the song treats as the genuinely religious experience on offer.

The sex in the lyric is not incidental either, and Hozier has said so directly: an act of sex is "one of the most human things", and an institution that "through its doctrine would undermine humanity by successfully teaching shame about sexual orientation" is the thing being answered. On that reading the song is not a rejection of worship at all. It is a claim about where worship honestly belongs — which is why the chorus can sound both devotional and furious at the same time.

Where "we were born sick" comes from

The line listeners most often ask about is "we were born sick, you heard them say it". It sounds like a paraphrase of original sin, and it nearly is — but it has a specific literary source. Hozier is paraphrasing the English poet Fulke Greville, whose verse runs "Created sick, commanded to be sound." The complaint is 400 years old: a doctrine that declares you broken at birth and then holds you responsible for the breakage.

The song is also shaped by Hozier's reading of Christopher Hitchens, and by growing up Protestant — specifically Quaker — in a country whose public life the Catholic Church dominated. "Growing up, I always saw the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church," he told Rolling Stone. "The history speaks for itself and I grew incredibly frustrated and angry. I essentially just put that into my words."

That context matters for dating the song. It was written in 2013, two years before Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote, and while the Irish state was still reckoning publicly with decades of institutional abuse. The anger in it was not abstract.

Written in an attic in Bray

In 2013 Hozier was an unsigned musician playing open-mic nights around Dublin. He wrote "Take Me to Church" at his parents' house in Bray, County Wicklow — after a bad breakup, and over roughly three months — and recorded the demo upstairs, over a programmed backing track. "The vocals were recorded in my attic at 2 o'clock in the morning," he later said. "So it's a real homemade job."

The demo reached the independent Irish label Rubyworks, which paired him with producer Rob Kirwan. Live instrumentation was overdubbed onto it, but the original attic vocal was kept: Kirwan judged the take too powerful to replace. Only two musicians play on the finished record — Hozier himself and drummer Fiachra Kinder.

That is worth holding onto when the song sounds enormous. The gospel choir is Hozier stacked on top of himself, the sermonising quality is one man in a room, and the vocal that carried it to the Grammys was recorded in the middle of the night in his parents' roof. The sheet music puts it in E minor at a slow 63 beats per minute — a tempo closer to a hymn than to anything on 2014 pop radio, which is precisely why it stood out there.

The video that made it a hit

"Take Me to Church" was not broken by radio. It was broken by a music video that cost €1,500.

Released on 25 September 2013 and made by Brendan Canty and Conal Thomson of the small Irish production company Feel Good Lost, it was shot in black and white, mostly in Cork. The story came from Hozier himself, who wanted to draw attention to the persecution of gay people in Russia. It follows two men — played by Emmet O'Riabhaigh and Daniel Coughlan — in a relationship; one is taken from his home, dragged into a forest and beaten by a mob.

The official video, on Hozier's VEVO channel. Contains depictions of homophobic violence.

It went viral on YouTube almost immediately, and the labels followed: Hozier signed with Columbia in the US and Island in the UK on the strength of it.

One point of confusion worth clearing up. A second, very widely shared "Take Me to Church" film — the one with the dancer Sergei Polunin, directed by David LaChapelle — went viral in 2015. It is a separate piece using the song, not the official video, and it tells a completely different story.

What it did on the charts

The song's American breakthrough came through discovery platforms rather than programmers. It caught on first at an adult album alternative station in Nashville, became the most-Shazamed track in that market, crossed to local top 40, and by the end of 2014 was the most-streamed song on Spotify that year, with 87 million plays.

It first charted at home, reaching No. 2 in Ireland in late 2013. Columbia sent it to US modern rock radio in June 2014, and it spent 23 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Rock Songs chart — at the time tied with Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive" as the longest run in that chart's history. It crossed to the Hot 100 late and peaked at No. 2 for three consecutive weeks across December 2014 and January 2015, Hozier's first US top ten.

It topped the charts in a dozen countries, among them Austria, Belgium (Flanders), the Czech Republic, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland. It reached No. 2 in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Norway. Certifications have kept climbing since: 15× Platinum in the US, 18× Platinum in Australia, Diamond in Canada, France and Brazil.

It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards in 2015 — a songwriter's award, which for a track written alone in an attic is the right category to have been beaten in.

The lyrics

The lyric rewards a slow read, because its most quoted lines are its least literal. "I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies" is not a compliment and is not meant as one; the devotion in this song is knowingly abject, and the narrator knows what he sounds like. "Worship in the bedroom" is the joke and the thesis at once. The knife being sharpened while sins are confessed is the part people tend to skip past — the song never pretends that offering yourself up is safe.