“Damage Gets Done: A Soulful Ode to Youth, Love, and the Beautiful Ruin of Memory”
In the brisk late summer of 2023, two beloved voices from very different corners of the contemporary music world came together to deliver a song that feels like a wind-tossed memory gently pulled from the dusty corners of your heart. “Damage Gets Done”, a duet by Hozier and Brandi Carlile, stands as one of the quiet revelations on Hozier’s third album, Unreal Unearth — a track that refracts the bittersweet glow of youth into something achingly tender and deeply reflective.
Upon its release on August 18, 2023, the song found modest success on the UK Official Singles Chart, peaking at number 86, a statistic that hardly captures the emotional resonance of the collaboration but helps anchor the track in its moment in time.
From the very first verse, you are carried into memory: simpler days, too-tight laughter, nights spent on living room floors and mornings that felt like little universes of possibility. Hozier’s lyricism paints these scenes with a quiet precision — “Without shame, two outfits then to my name / You’d end up in one when you’d stay” — and thanks to Brandi Carlile’s crystalline and generous vocal, those lines become more than words; they become a shared recollection, something felt rather than merely heard.
But beneath that surface sits the deeper truth of the song: an exploration of how youth is remembered not for its recklessness or folly, but for the purity of feeling it once held. There is a youthful recklessness in the way both singers recall driving without direction and sleeping where the night let them, but the chorus turns that fondness into something more poignant: “I know being reckless and young / Is not how the damage gets done.” This line carries a quiet wisdom — that the true “damage” of life doesn’t come from youthful freedom, but from the slow loss of that freedom, the way adult burdens encroach upon that once-limitless horizon.
What makes this collaboration so moving — especially for listeners who have lived through decades of love, loss, change, and quiet revelation — is the unexpected harmony between two very distinct voices and artistic journeys. Hozier, the Irish troubadour whose poetic narratives have always touched on myth, love, and human complexity, converges here with Carlile, an American singer-songwriter whose own catalogue stretches back to the early 2000s, filled with songs both fierce and tender. Their voices intertwine like old friends reminiscing on a porch in the fading light, each line imbued with a kind of lived-in warmth.
The story behind the collaboration itself adds another layer to the experience. Hozier spoke openly about his admiration for Carlile — her spirit, her generosity, her voice — and how that translated into a duet that nods to the great vocal partnerships of earlier eras: moments when two artists brought out in each other something both playful and profound.
For older listeners, especially, this song feels like a mirror. It invites you to revisit those reckless, beautiful years when the world seemed so vast and your heart so open. But it does not romanticize those times in a shallow way. Instead, it captures their texture — how laughter mixed with longing, how late nights and early mornings taught you more about who you were than many of life’s more serious lessons ever did.
In an album that carries heavier thematic weight — inspired in part by literary works like Dante’s Inferno and suffused with reflections on emotion, struggle, and human continuity — “Damage Gets Done” is a breath of sunlight, a reminder that sometimes the most profound truths in music are the ones that feel most familiar: a shared smile, a melancholic chord, a memory that makes your heart ache just a little.
In the end, the song’s charm isn’t just that it makes you think — it is that it makes you feel. It is a testament to friendship, collaboration, and the sweet ache of remembering that once, not so long ago, we lived with fewer fears and more wonder. For those who have loved and lost, who have watched time reshape joy and heartbreak alike, “Damage Gets Done” is a song that feels like home and like a farewell, all at once.