Saskia's Studio
Welcome to the blog and website of Merri-Todd Webster
Notes from the hermit hut
It's a Hozier day here, July 11, 2026
Every so often I take a day and listen to Hozier.
Andrew Hozier-Byrne, professionally known as “Hozier”, released his self-titled debut album in September 2014, and I am still not tired of it. Since then he’s released two more studio albums and eight EPs and been on three tours, each one a bigger deal than the last. I saw him live twice on his second tour in 2019 and it was one of the best performances of any kind that I’ve ever seen.
His first single, “Take Me to Church”, was not quite a number one, but it made a big splash. Hozier has said in interviews that he thought it would never be heard by anyone, but apparently, the world was ready for a song with powerful gospel-inflected vocals, moody piano accompaniment, and lyrics that at once celebrate sex as a religious experience and criticize the Church’s theology and high control of the faithful. Its music video powerfully pointed out the brutal attacks on gay men that were occurring in Russia and Ukraine at the time, which boosted the song even higher on streaming services.
How to describe the music that has been most of the soundtrack of my life for the past twelve years? One day a friend messaged me and said I should tune in the college radio station where she was working; there was going to be an artist performing live that she thought I would like. I did, and almost as soon as the live performance was over, I started looking for Hozier’s music on YouTube. That was before his first album came out, but after his first EP in 2013.
Here’s Hozier’s origin story, paraphrased from his own words: When he was about three, his father, a former drummer for blues bands who had to retire after being injured in a car accident, sat him down in front of the tv and put on The Blues Brothers. Take a little Irish boy who has heard Irish trad and folk music all his life and expose him to Black American blues, gospel, and soul, and you have Hozier. And in that story and practically every interview he’s ever given, he has acknowledged the Black artists who shaped him and how the civil rights movement in the U.S. influenced rights movements in his native Ireland.
Why am I so crazy about this man’s music? I can give you plenty of reasons:
- In addition to listening to and studying Black vocalists, he sang for three or four years with the Irish choir Anuna, getting strict vocal training and a solo on one of their albums. His live performances have a very ensemble feeling despite his being technically a solo artist; every musician on stage with him sings as well as plays an instrument.
- He has an amazing voice and amazing control of it. He is basically a tenor, but he has a highly flexible falsetto, a warm chest voice, and no break between any of his registers. Many of his songs have a wide tessitura because he can glide effortlessly between chest, head, and falsetto.
- His melodies are actually melodies. Not a sort of chant with a cadence at the end (which is fine if, say, you’re singing Gregorian chant!), but an actual melody with scales and leaps. I’ve caught many of his songs by ear after just a couple of listens.
- His lyrics are complex, allusive, and I dare to say poetic even though he himself doesn’t. In a song about being attracted to random strangers, “electing strange perfections in any stranger I choose” struck me with its internal rhyme. “Swan upon Leda”, a lament on cycles of violence, references Irish legend, Irish history, his own family history, and Greek mythology, centered around women and childbearing as “the gateway to the world” that men try but fail to control. Orpheus and Icarus recur across multiple songs. It’s a feast for the mind as well as the ears.
- It doesn’t hurt that he is, to my taste, splendidly beautiful, or that he is openly, gently, firmly political, or that he has a morbid, twisted sense of humor that is bred only in Ireland, or that he is kind and generous to his fans.
Notes from the hermit hut
The welcome mat, 1 July 2026
Once upon a time, there was a blog.
Once upon a time, there were a lot of blogs. People wrote them, people read them, people made lists on their blogs of other blogs they read regularly, people added blog urls to their Google feed reader.
Now Google Reader is long dead and so, I hear, are blogs. But I want one. I miss blogging.
It’s not that I hate social media, though sometimes I do. I just really like blogging. I was a long-time user of Dreamwidth and, before Dreamwidth, Livejournal, back when Livejournal was still owned by the folks who originally coded it. Those sites were partway between blogs and social media webs (and still are, especially in the case of Dreamwidth). I’m now a long-time user of Tumblr, over ten years on the blue webbed site that I keep hearing is dead. My feed there is pretty lively.
But I got out of the habit of using Dreamwidth, and Tumblr has always felt more about sharing other people’s stuff than my own. And I’ve wanted for years to make money as a writer, but “monetizing my content” on Patreon or whatever has never worked for me. I don’t do well with meeting deadlines or writing under pressure.
So, a blog. A space for me to write about what interests me. A link to my Ko-fi so readers can throw me some financial support if they want. No schedules. No pressure, not on me to “create content”, not on readers to subscribe. Just me and my interests and my fingers on the keyboard.
If you don’t know me already from another site, you might wonder what I’m interested in, what I might write about here. Well, here goes:
- religion and spirituality
- sex and gender
- erotic and romantic fiction (my own and other writers’)
- birds
- books, music, movies, television
- and did I mention birds?
You also might wonder about my religion and my politics. Well, I’m an Episcopalian, a sometime Pagan, a sometime Buddhist; queer and genderqueer; anti-racism, sexism, and fascism; would have voted for Mamdani if I were a New Yorker. My politics are progressive/lefty, but I rarely write about political topics except in very general ways. I think art is political, everything is political, but thinking incisively about politics and writing about it is not my job.
My job, as a writer, is to explore where sexuality and spirituality overlap; to show that there are alternatives to our fixed gender roles, our heteronormative marriages, our constrictive interpretations of Christianity (being a Christian myself); to demonstrate how sex and religion can combine into fuel for a creative life. So if any of that stuff interests you, come hang out here.
Welcome to my studio.
Merri-Todd, aka Rembrandt's Wife
Writer, musician, friend of birds. Anglican and amateur monastic. Devotional poetry, mediocre reviews, erotic romance.
Tags
Books Music Film and TV Poetry Fiction Memoir Religion Birds Links of Interest Works in Progress