I've written here before about my love for the Blindboy Podcast, the delightfully irreverent weekly rant by the infinitely empathetic, vulgar, and curious Irish hip-hop-artist-slash-short-story-writer known as Blindboy Boatclub. Blindboy's podcast is incredibly popular across the Atlantic and elsewhere, and to celebrate his 2 millionth download, he had fellow Irishman and pop star Hozier ("Take Me To Church") as a guest on the show this past December.
There's a lot of good stuff crammed into the (admittedly meandering, in a wonderful way) 2-hour podcast, which covers topics ranging from mental health, to the bizarre nature of "celebrity" as a concept, to songwriting, to asylum seeking and surveillance, and beyond. But my favorite part comes about 90 minutes in, when Hozier how, in the process of buying a new house, he consulted with a professional Divining Rod expert to detect the nearest water source.
The art of Divining Rods, also known as "dowsing," is more common in Ireland and the nearby UK than here in the United States. And, to be fair, the idea of banging two metal sticks together in order to find water based on some vague vibrational wavelength theory does sound pretty ridiculous on the surface. But Hozier relays his experience—of which he, too, was initially skeptical—with such an endearing sense of open-mindedness that, dare I say, it left me curious to learn more about the tradition. And that alone is impressive and worth sharing (along with the rest of the podcast).
Hozier on the Blindboy Podcast
Image: Kayla Johnson / Flickr (CC-BY-SA 2.0) and The All-Night Images / Flickr (CC-BY-SA 2.0)
