Unearth Without a Name: Love, Death, and Rebirth in “First Time”

The surprising significance of a pet name.

Romantic relationships are often escalated to life and death situations through artistic expression. What is not as common—and what Hozier does excellently in “First Time”—is discussing love as a simultaneous death and rebirth. The song is about Limbo, the space between life and death, which is the first circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Hozier’s Unreal Unearth is heavily inspired by this work, and many of the tracks on the album correspond to these circles of Hell. Rather than simply rehashing this narrative, however, he adapts its themes to different stories and contexts; in this case, falling in love as the state between life and death.

Body and Soul

The speaker begins by asking the muse to walk down memory lane with him: “Remember once I told you about / How before I heard it from your mouth / My name would always hit my ears as such an awful sound?” He explains that he hated his name when other people used it, the violent verb “hit” fitting for the “awful sound.” The physicality of communication is stressed by his focus on “mouth” and “ears.”

In an immediate contrast to this physical form, the speaker notes an incompatibility between his name and identity: “And the soul, if that’s what you’d call it / Uneasy ally of the body, it felt nameless as a river / Undiscovered underground.”¹ The “soul” and “body” are distinct but “[u]neasy all[ies],” as in the limbo space between life and death. In fact, this entire song rests on the juxtaposition of life and death as well as the life cycle of a physical form in the context of love. The phrase “if that’s what you’d call it” contributes to the speaker’s casual tone and is also a play on the theme of being “nameless.” The speaker’s identity is yet to be discovered, “nameless as a river,” but he goes on to name rivers in the following lyrics, as he falls in love. Rivers are in constant flow and motion, elusive in nature like the “soul,” as opposed to the fixed physical form of the body. For both, a name comes from being perceived by someone else; as such, identity and personal meaning are granted through relationships.

Transformative Rivers

As the melody increases in register, the speaker recalls how he was changed by the beginning of his romantic relationship with the muse: “And the first time that you kissed me / I drank dry the River Lethe / The Liffey would have been softer on my stomach all the same.” The Lethe is a river in the Underworld in Greek mythology known as the “river of unmindfulness.” Drinking from the river causes complete forgetfulness, as it is necessary to lose all memories in order to be reincarnated in a new form. The speaker thus compares their first kiss to this part of the rebirth process: forgetting everything he knew before being with this person and becoming someone new. In fact, he “drank” the Lethe “dry,” insatiable with the temptation of this love. The Liffey, on the other hand, is a notoriously polluted river in Ireland that is certainly unsafe to drink. If that were “softer” on the “stomach” than the Lethe, this is an ironic nod to the suffering involved in falling in love, as well as a play on the two similar-sounding names.

The speaker then justifies this pain with the positive aspects of love: “But you spoke some quick new music / That went so far to soothe this soul / As it was and ever shall be, unearth without a name.” The juxtaposition of two different forms of vocal expression, “spoke” and “music,” alludes to the unprecedented power of the muse’s words.² Their ability to “soothe” the speaker is replicated in the “s” alliteration throughout these lyrics. This also makes up for the suffering of the speaker’s “stomach”—the “soul” and “body” are in contrast but depend on each other, just like life and death do. As much as it is daunting to fall for someone, they can make up for this unease.

Name Me

Hozier plays with time in this song; it is a memory but it spans multiple phases of life and a relationship. In the final line of this verse, he delivers a reference to both the past and perpetual future with “was and ever shall be.” This lyric is also a quote of the Gloria Patri hymn: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end.” Hozier abbreviates the first half but alters the rest so that “unearth” replaces “world” and “a name” replaces “end.” The former pair of words are opposites, suggesting that the latter are as well: rather than an ending, naming is a beginning or rebirth. If read as a verb instead of a noun, “unearth” carries the meaning of discovering that “without a name”—the speaker is asking the muse to name him.

The chorus confirms this connection between naming and the cycle of life: “Some part of me must have died / The first time that you called me ‘baby’ / And some part of me came alive / The first time that you called me ‘baby.’” The “quick new music” from before is revealed to be this pet name. The muse gave the speaker the name “‘baby’” and made him someone new in the context of the relationship. He refers to a simultaneous life and death in falling in love, grasping the complex range of emotions involved.

Too Close to the Sun

In the second verse, the speaker expands on the dichotomy of life and death in his experience: “These days, I think I owe my life / To flowers that were left here by my mother / Ain’t that like them, giftin’ life to you again.” The “flowers that were left here” conjure the image of flowers at a grave, suggesting that the speaker is at least physically dead. Nevertheless, he considers a “part” of himself alive, as indicated by the phrase “I owe my life.” He likens the “flowers” and his “mother” to one another with “ain’t that like them”—both are sources of life and growth.³ He describes a form of rebirth in which a body is buried and then flowers grow up out of the ground. Hozier used this same image in “In a Week”: “So long, we’d become the flowers / Two corpses we were.”

This verse consists mostly of the speaker’s rambling metaphor comparing himself to this flower: “This life lived mostly underground / Unknowin’ either sight nor sound / Till reachin’ up for sunlight just to be ripped out by the stem.” Seeds grow into flowers “underground,” already alive but sheltered from the world. Without “sight” or “sound,” they are devoid of understanding, like the speaker not living life to the fullest before being named by the muse. Despite its wish to experience more of the world, the flower is met with the rude awakening that this is precisely what can harm it, as it “reach[es] up for sunlight just to be ripped out by the stem.” It may be closer to the warmth of the sun, but it is torn away from its life-sustaining soil.

Last Hurrah

Just when it has reached the peak of its life, the flower realizes it is dying: “Sensing only now it’s dyin’ / Drying out, then drowning blindly / Bloomin’ forth its every color in the moments it has left.” Like the speaker experiencing simultaneous life and death in love, the flower has a delayed reaction to its abrupt impending death, literally “[d]rying out” in the sun. At this point, the melody also increases in register, Hozier singing higher notes to mirror the flower reaching up from the ground. The flower grows into its peak beauty right before death, making an impression before it is gone. This part of the verse also evokes the image of the album cover for Unreal Unearth, with the flower held between teeth, nearly buried in the ground. On the cover, Hozier himself is “drowning blindly” in the earth, being swallowed up by the dirt with his eyes underground, unable to see.

The melodic climax follows as the flower holds on for dear life: “To share the space with simple living things / Infinitely suffering, but fighting off like all creation / The absence of itself, anyway.” Its life goal is to be in the company of other “simple living things”—the speaker similarly finds personal meaning through relationships. They are both “[i]nfinitely suffering” as they try desperately to stay alive. The speaker uses the negative terminology of “fighting off… [t]he absence of itself” to describe this act of hope, once again emphasizing the dichotomy of life and death. In my personal favorite comedic moment of the song, Hozier drops the melody back down on “anyway,” as if mumbling a dismissal of the poetic declaration the speaker has just made as inconsequential.

He then sings the second iteration of the chorus, which replaces the phrase “first time” with “each time,” indicating a progression in the relationship. This is followed by a simple bridge: “Whatever keeps you around, it keeps you around.” For the speaker, love is a paradoxical cycle, and this elusive “it” is undefinable. Rather, “it” is defined by the act of being done in the first place. Love, like birth and death, comes about mysteriously and creates itself.

Endings

In the third verse, the speaker recounts the end of the relationship: “The last time it was heard out loud / The perfect genius of our hands and mouths were shocked / To resignation as the arguing declined.” This time, “it” refers to the muse calling the speaker “‘baby.’” Hozier uses the passive voice for “it was heard” to highlight the perception of sound as opposed to the act of speaking or hearing. The contrast between “perfect genius” and “arguing” indicates that their “hands and mouths” can be both productive and destructive for the relationship. Once again, the speaker and the muse evade responsibility for their actions through the use of anatomical synecdoche. With “resignation” to their fate, the speaker realizes that this is also the “last time” that they argued.

He uses a philosophical question to try to understand his feelings: “When I was young, I used to guess / Are there limits to any emptiness? / When was the last time?” The speaker ponders the vastness of the unknown in general, reflecting on his youth as he struggles with the empty feeling of heartbreak. The notion of “limits” to “emptiness” is another counterintuitive phrasing: how can nothingness be constrained when it doesn’t exist in any tangible sense? This question could apply to both emotional and literal death as the speaker reckons with the finality of this “emptiness.” Regarding the final question in this verse, he wishes that the muse’s answer was “never”—that the answer itself was empty and there was no “last time.” This is also a reminder that the events of the song took place a while ago, as the listener is transported back to the perspective of memory from the first verse. The speaker’s sense of confusion reveals the immensity of his heartbreak, but it is also an astute acknowledgement of the fact that you don’t usually know that something as specific as being called a pet name is happening for the last time until after the relationship is over.

In the last chorus, Hozier replaces the previous iterations with the phrase “final time.” He retains the “died” and “came alive” lyrics, however. At every stage in the relationship, the speaker experienced simultaneous birth and death, even when it ended for good. Since death paves the way for reincarnation in this song, the end of the relationship sets the speaker up for a new life again in this bittersweet cyclical process.⁴ Notably, Hozier starts and ends the chorus each time with death and coming to life, respectively, which gives the song an optimistic ending despite the overall narrative going in a somewhat melancholy direction. To top it all off, the song’s upbeat and catchy nature contrasts its existential theme such that it is both lighthearted and contemplative—the perfect combination for a Hozier hit.

---

thanks for reading this essay on no, but listen! i’m happy to share my work for free, but if you’ve been enjoying my writing and would like to show your support, please consider making a one-time contribution below

you can also like, comment, subscribe, and share my work on substack or beyond! thank you for being here:)

1. The "un" words in these lyrics reference Unreal Unearth and the subsequent additions to the album.

2. Hozier described this song as "talk-singing," so there's another meta reference.

3. Another connection in the language is that being called "'baby'" by the muse grants the speaker life, and when his mother gave birth to him he was a literal baby.

4. As Hozier says later in the album, "All Things End.”