A FRIDAY FAREWELL TO GLEN HANSARD VIA WIND BACK WEDNESDAY
- 16 hours ago
- 7 min read
“Darling, you simply must, I insist, come and see The Frames. I won’t forgive you if you don’t but you will thank me. They are simply divine.”
In the second half of 2002, my friend Gaynor Crawford, promoter, publicist, woman of impeccable taste, holder of great loves and even greater hates, would brook no argument. As she hadn’t steered me wrong in the decade or so we’d known each other (and would not in the subsequent decades either, especially when it came to Irish acts, or folk artists) I dutifully attended the show at The Metro.
A show which was sold out, heaving with every Irish man and woman in the vicinity of the city, and more than a few of us locals, everyone swept up in a storm of rock and folk and soul and a show that didn’t subvert the cliches of passionate, very human and yet almost god-like inspiring Irish performers, but reshaped them and showed you why cliches aren’t always wrong.
Mostly since that night it would be seeing singer/songwriter/passion point frontman Glen Hansard – sometimes alone, sometimes with a band, sometimes in the Swell Season with Marketa Irglova – though the last time I saw him it was with The Frames again, in another crowd of locals swamped by travelling Irish, at the Misneach Festival in early 2025. And they were, as Gaynor would have said, once again divine. Even topping the riotous fun of Kneecap.
Beyond the shows – in a tent, the Opera House, the Domain, a club – I had the great fortune to interview Glen quite a few times, and each time I walked away feeling like I’d been connected to someone special. More than that, I was inspired to feel something as strong as he did when his art or his sense of social justice or his friends and family came up. Not because he demanded it, but because he showed why it mattered.
There’d been talk in the past year about Gaynor bringing him back soon, but things kept getting in the way so the date was pushed back a few times, everyone understanding that it would happen though, because he loved coming here. And loved Gaynor. And then two nights ago a late night accident on his way home from a gig – of course a gig, and the brief footage that someone there posted of the night showed him in full voice and full beard and full commitment, of course – ended that chance and his life.
But we don’t have to be without him completely. Which is why Wind Back Wednesday firstly dips into the archives for this 2016 interview, and then says for this week we shall be Wind Back Friday. Because why the hell not?
There’s more to read at the end, including a link to another interview where Glen talked about the album which flowed from the events discussed in this story. It was a continuing discussion, a continuing story, a continuing life. And yes Gaynor, I do thank you.
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GLEN HANSARD WON’T TELL YOU won’t tell you this but it’s true, his album Didn’t He Ramble is the best thing he’s done in his long career: intense but melodic, lyrically focused but musically touching on folk, pop, rock and soul, and that peculiarly Irish territory between them all.
It’s well ahead of the admirable and invigorating work with the force of nature that was his band, The Frames – who for several years topped the voting for Ireland’s best band ahead of, yes, U2, and sold out shows in Australia without ever getting near a radio playlist.
Better still than the emotionally wrought material he had for the film Once and the band Swell Season, the twin-fronted group with Once co-star Marketa Irglova, which spun off from the film’s Oscar-winning song Falling Slowly.
And Didn’t He Ramble is a continued improvement on the solo recordings he’s produced in recent years as he’s put into practice lessons learned from his “holy trinity” of musical giants, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, and his mother figure, Joni Mitchell.
Once reason Hansard won’t tell you this is for a good, long while he thought the opposite.
"I usually have a panic attack when the record is finished. I usually think, ‘can I put it away, can I just leave it where it is now?’,” he says. ”With this record, when I got the songs in sequence and stuff, I had a total panic and thought this is the worst piece of shit I have ever written. I thought everything I had done up until this point at least I was doing my best but now I’ve just done it, I just made that terrible record that no one plans on making but they make: the record that's really middle-of-the-road, got nothing to say.”
What turned him around was playing the songs live, the place he’s always felt the most comfortable and been at his most compelling - one gig in particular in a dilapidated Georgian house in Dublin, hitting home.
“I thought to myself, shit man, I'm actually really enjoying playing these songs. These songs work,” Hansard says, laughing at his own surprise, but then admitting that the key to his discomfort may have been in pushing his writing harder than ever before.
“In the past I might have written a song and got somewhere, got the essence of something in the song and then I would stop writing it thinking I don't want to mess with it anymore and ruin it. So I would leave it almost half baked out of some suspicion, or some voodoo thought that if I touch it now I've ruined it.
“On this record, I ruined it and I ruined it and I ruined it until I rebuilt it. So part of my fear was that I had rebuilt these songs to such a degree that they had lost their spark.”
Now, nearly 30 years into his career, he’s grasped that "I can really work and work on a lyric until I'm satisfied that it’s speaking on my behalf, on behalf of whatever emotion I was trying to put into it". Better late than never to have this realisation.
"It's funny. You spend most of your life singing songs that are more than a decade old so it's strange to be singing a song now that I wrote when I was 25 or 30 and sometimes find myself going ‘Jesus man, you let yourself away with some real fucking lazy lyrics’,” Hansard says.
“Certainly from me now you get the sense that there’s a craftsman at play. There was never a craftsman in me; I never operated from the position of craft, I only ever operated from the position of inspiration. It happened quickly and then I would wash my hands of it. When I look at older songs of mine I can see that. I got lucky a few times.”
He’s beating himself up too much given he does have more than a handful of good songs in a catalogue, but it certainly is true that one thing about Hansard live is he can completely convince you of the "truth" and power of each song, no matter its flaws.
Few people can do passion like him. There are other songwriters can outdo him as technicians but none who can sell their songs as well as him. For better or worse, it may have been that passion which earned him an invitation to complete a journey from Ireland to Spain begun by fishermen from the west coast of Ireland earlier this year.
Hansard has long enjoyed sailing, but this epic journey of endurance, pain and crusty beards rowing for 600 kilometres seems like madness.
“There’s a great Irish philosopher called John Moriaty who talks a lot about the importance of doing things that don’t make any sense, what they can actually do for your life,” Hansard says. “When my friend asked me would I like to row across to the Bay of Biscay, the north of Spain, my heart heard the question first and my heart responded yes before my brain sat down and thought about it.”
He had the five weeks needed and was in, “but I have to say it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life ... and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
“After the first week my arms were hanging off, my back was killing me, we were sleeping rough at nights, we were probably drinking a little more than we should but it was helping us sleep. But in 10 days my body, my spirit, was in complete harmony with the trip itself. It all got a bit feral, a bit wild and I fucking loved it, fit in with it.”
The morning of the day he was to catch a flight to Amsterdam to start his European tour they were still rowing, only just making it before he would have had to be taken off to meet his other commitments. A day earlier even this had looked unlikely as the winds were hard into them and blowing them away, the boat and the men pushed to their limits as they made 50 kilometres in 13 hours and broke the back of the last part of the journey.
Hansard says now he can’t really remember the gigs he played on the tour that followed - “I kind of arrived on the tour bus in a weird haze.” -- but leaving early, giving up on the passion, was never an option.
“I didn’t want to let them down. I could have arrived a week earlier, taken a rest, but I thought I won’t abandon the lads, I’ll stay with it.”
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