Someone New

@AMusicalSoul The first bit is basically a synopsis:

Go take this the wrong way, You knew who I was with every step that I ran to you, <- Our relationship is fine, don't get upset about this. Only blue or black days, <- When living feels bleak. Electing strange perfections in any stranger I choose. <- I see beauty in people (which may not even be there: "electing").

Would things be easier if there was a right way? Honey, there is no right way. <- There are a lot of different ways to live. If everyone was the same, virtuous, did what they were supposed to, the world might be less bleak. But there are different values and priorities between people, and that's not a bad thing, even while it causes misery and strife.

And so I fall in love just a little, Oh a little bit everyday with someone new. <- Therefore, because the misery is an inevitable product of people being different, and because no path is more valid than another, the speaker chooses to love people for their differences from himself. It's one way to escape the agony of existence.

The verses confirm this interpretation.

There's an art to life's distractions, <- When the world is miserable, distracting oneself from it is necessary. To somehow escape the burning wait, The art of scraping through, <- Emphasizing how hard it is to live and wait for death without doing something to escape the misery. Some like to imagine, The dark caress of someone else, <- Some people use fantasizing about sex as a distraction. I guess any thrill will do. <- That's acknowledged as no better or worse than what the speaker does, just different.

And then we get an example of the process of falling in love, the distraction the speaker is talking about:

I wake at the first cringe of morning, And my heart's already sinned, How pure, how sweet a love, Aretha, That you would pray for him.

Sing a Little Prayer for You woke him up in the morning, the imagery is of an alarm clock. And in that first moment of being awake he's distracted from how terrible things are by the purity and sweetness of her love for the man she's singing to. He's impressed with, falls in love with, her devotion -- largely because he doesn't have that devotion himself (he falls in love with people all the time, which is an infidelity, just an emotional one).

Hozier said somewhere, I think in the From Eden track-by-track that when one falls in love, it's often the traits that are missing in oneself that one sees in another and falls in love with. I think that's being referenced here. It's why stranger is better. It lets you fall deeper in love, be distracted more, simply because it allows you to see more traits you don't have but admire.