Meaning of “First Time” by Hozier
The initial teasing of Hozier’s “First Time” seemingly took place a couple of weeks before it was dropped on 18 August 2023. This is one of the tracks from Hozier’s “Unreal Unearth”, his album which came out on the aforementioned date via Rubyworks and Columbia Records.
This song was written and co-produced by Hozier and Jeff Gitelman, with Alex Ryan serving as an additional writer.
The Lyrics of “First Time”
“Unreal Unearth” does not have a title track, but this song is in part based on a metaphorical motif of the vocalist having, up until this point, “lived mostly underground”. On “De Selby (Part 1)“, the opening track of the album, Hozier goes about celebrating the darkness.
But in the case of “First Time”, we rather find him “reaching up for sunlight”, like a flower if you will, a concept that appears to be reflected on the project’s cover art also.
But the above observation is not to suggest that those two tracks contradict each other, because “First Time” is in fact a love song. In other words, Hozier may value the concept of darkness being symbolic of emptiness as suggested in “De Selby (Part 1)”, but that doesn’t mean that he actually idealizes being a loner.
And what we’re met with in “First Time” is perhaps the most-commonly used thematic trope as far as love songs go, i.e. the vocalist noting how beforehand he was woefully disturbed, but the love of the addressee has totally flipped his disposition. Or as we like to say at Song Meanings and Facts, his life has been edified by the love of the addressee.
But of course with this being Hozier, he’s not just going to come out and say something like that. Rather he goes about referencing “the River Lethe” and all types of stuff, keeping in congruence with the theme of “Unreal Unearth” as inspired by Dante’s Inferno.
It has been pointed out that said waterbody is a fictitious one, as referenced in Dante’s Inferno, in which souls who are about to reincarnated would drink its water in the name of forgetting their past life. And so it is with the vocalist at hand, i.e. from the “first time” the addressee expressed her for him, it’s as if he has been granted a new, uplifting lease on life.
