At the Orpheum Theatre on Sunday, February 15

He had me at Skip James.

What are the odds that the most buzzed-about songwriter of 2015 idolizes the bleakest, meanest, and most musically adventurous of the original Mississippi Delta blues singers? Not very high, even if Andrew Hozier-Byrne grew up with Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker on his parents’ stereo.

Chances are even slimmer that the YouTube sensation known as Hozier would be able to take one of James’ lesser-known songs and turn it into a quiet triumph, midway through his triumphant return to Vancouver. (Last time he was here he sold out the Commodore; this time, he packed the Orpheum, with scalped tickets commanding over $300 a pair.) Yet that’s exactly what he did with an impeccably fingerpicked rendition of the pimp-turned-preacher’s “Illinois Blues”.

Hozier gets further points for choosing one of James’s gentler songs to cover, rather than going for the hate-filled “Devil Got My Woman” or the world-weary “Cypress Grove Blues”. At 24, he’s too young to truly own the darker shades of blue—but his self-penned “In a Week”, which preceded “Illinois Blues’ in the Irish singer’s set, indicated that he’s already faced down hellhounds of his own.

Cellist Alana Henderson fused her gorgeous singing voice to Hozier’s dusky croon in this intimate and enigmatic duet, which resists easy interpretation but could possibly be written from the perspective of a suicide’s ghost, watching as his body is devoured by insects and foxes.

Yes, it’s morbid—but it’s also animated by a weirdly cheering form of nature mysticism, which might well be part of this instant star’s mass appeal.

Clearly, there’s more going on here than a couple of well-made music videos—both for “Take Me To Church”, a heterosexual love song with anti-homophobic underpinnings—and a handsome young performer with a guitar. Hozier’s the man of the hour because he’s found a way to tap into several distinct societal yearnings: for honest, handmade music after a decade of computer-controlled, focus group–tested hits; for communion, in the true, non-religious meaning of the word; and for a sense, however fleeting or illusionary, that everything’s going to be all right in the end.

In concert, as on record, he delivered.

It’s not that there weren’t languors here. “Someone New” proved a predictable relationship plaint set to a sluggishly overwrought mid-tempo groove, and it wasn’t the only offender in that regard. But a matched pair of nouveau-blues numbers—the slide-guitar-spiced “It Will Come Back” and the introvert’s anthem “To Be Alone”—countered the cliches with honest self-exposure, before Hozier turned the Orpheum into the secular equivalent of a Pentecostal tent with “Take Me to Church”. For that, as for much of the headliner’s set, the audience was on its feet and singing along with most un-Vancouver-like fervour.

“It’s all the Irish in the crowd,” my Erin-born neighbour explained, but if that’s true then on this night we were all St. Patrick’s children—and, most definitely, converts to the creed of Hozier.