NORTHERN EXPOSURE IN THE SWELL SEASON part one

Angle it to the sun Glen! The Swell Season in the studio.

COMPLICATED HISTORIES? PERIPATETIC MUSICIANS? And then some! You are advised to take a deep breath before reading this next paragraph.

The pianist and singer/songwriter Marketa Irglova, born in what is now the Czech republic, and previously a resident of Ireland – where she made the 2007 Oscar-winning film Once, playing a Czech pianist and young mother– is at home in Iceland for this call. The guitarist and singer/songwriter Glen Hansard, once-and-still-occasionally of the band, The Frames, born in Ireland – where he played an itinerant musician who becomes rather fond of a Czech pianist and young mother in Once, and before that was high of hair in another Irish musical film, The Commitments – is at home in Finland.

What’s the story here? Like the pair returning to the studio for the first time in 16 years as The Swell Season – the group that emerged from Once, rode on the best original song Oscar for Falling Slowly, made two albums, and then, like their off-screen love affair, scattered into pieces – it sort of makes sense. If you squint a bit and play their new album really loudly so you can’t ask too many questions.

Tracking Irglova’s movements since we first encountered her, the trend is all northward, with only the north pole left after Iceland. Some people chase the sun, does she chase the ice?

“No, but I thought about it and think there may be something about the island,” she says. “Not mentality, or community even, maybe just the nature or energy -wise. First Ireland, and now Iceland, and even Manhattan, where I moved to for a little bit, is an island.

“In the same way, I’ve only ever lived on a hill. I went through all the places I’ve lived, from when I was born, and all the places are on a hill, above the rest of the town. It’s strange, I don’t know how that works.”

She likes to be above people and isolated from them?

“Yeah,” she laughs. “That’s it.”

To her south-east comes a muttered “Mordor” from the listening Hansard, which while not technically correct (there was a volcano in it and the all-seeing eye observed far and wide, but Tolkien’s hellscape was not any higher than anywhere else in Middle Earth) does get everyone laughing. Then again, the burning ground of Mordor is not a million miles away from the volcanic surface and bubbling hot springs of Iceland.

“A powerful place, either way,” says Irglova. “I’m kinda drawn to places with high-energy I think, because I get a lot of creativity out of that.”

Mind you, for the Irishman in Helsinki – which I can attest gets down below -20 regularly in winter, and is uncomfortably close to the empire-building Vlad Putin – there is a question to be asked: having rowed a flimsy boat in the Atlantic Ocean from Spain to Ireland a few years ago, did Finland offer some new way to torture himself?

“I have to say, I just followed my heart up here,” Hansard grins, with the fruit of that heart-move, a young child, hovering in the background. “But it’s a really interesting town, it’s teaching me a lot. The Finns are quite different to the Irish: I kind of need banter, and I need back-and-forth. I have to spark off people. The Finns are a challenge in that. Someone said the other day that some people are coconuts and some people are peaches. As in, peaches are lovely and sweet and soft and then you get to that hard bit in the middle, and some people are lovely and warm upfront and then you hit that rock where you can’t penetrate.

"Some people are coconuts in that they are hard outside but then you get to that soft loveliness in the middle. Definitely the Finns are coconuts, like the Czechs who can be cold upfront but then as you get to know them they are the opposite, which I think is a more honest way around in a way.”

They may superficially be different fruit, the Czechs and the Irish, the Irish and the Finns, but Hansard reveals that he grew up in Ballymun, on Dublin’s northside “and Ballymun is the only big hill in Dublin, and I grew up in high-rise flats on a hill” not far from Dublin Airport.

“When we grew up we could see the aeroplanes coming in and taking off, we could see the boats leaving with all the immigrants, the migrants leaving Ireland for England,” he says. “Literally seeing the mechanics of the country, and it was a fascinating perspective. So when I say Mordor, it’s a thing of being on a high place observing everything.”

Hmm, maybe Sauron, rather than Tom Bombadil, was the Middle Earth singer/songwriter. He certainly had the cruelty …

Anyway, enough Tolkien nerding. Beyond observing the world from above, and the willingness to trek to not always hospitable parts of the world to live, there must be something that has always held these two connected, even tenuously at times when they weren’t really speaking, and now has brought them back together.

“I think it has layers,” says Irglova. “The deepest one that I perceive is there is a soul connection. We’ve probably known each other in other lives: I definitely believe that we reincarnate and we have these different lives and that me and Glen have known each other before and lived through things before. And on top of that, in this life we went through something really powerful and life-changing together, so that kind of stuff really forms a connection. It’s forged through fire somehow, which makes it more durable.”

(Like a ring forged in Mount Doom you might say. Sorry, as you were.)

Hansard, more likely to quote Cohen or Dylan than reincarnation, buys in.

“I think it might be one of those things where in life you meet a lot of people, but you meet very few people who, when you around them, it’s almost like you are checking back in with something in yourself. It’s almost like you go to these people when you seek counsel, getting back in touch with the harsh truth of yourself,” he says. “There are people in your life – and Colm Mac Con Iomaire from The Frames is another – that you can’t kid. We spend most of our lives doing that on stage, we spend most of our lives presenting an image of ourselves, and there are some people in our lives when you meet them or reconnect with them, it’s like, yeah yeah yeah, get rid of the mask now, I see you.”

As the eight songs on the new Swell Season album show, the masks have long gone with these two as they sing about revisiting mistakes, remaking themselves and trying to live honestly, whatever that might mean.

“That’s a beautiful thing. It’s a challenging thing, but it’s really good musically because it gets back to the core, like ‘what are you saying here, what is this song? Are you posing here, or are you actually saying something?’,” Hansard says of this absence of subterfuge in their personal and working relationships. “For me, that’s powerful because I can kinda get lost, I love filigree and I love the process, and I love how words sound, and sometimes I’ll make up a word and I don’t know what it means but I love the sound of it and I’ll stick with the sound of it the meaning of it.

"And Mar is one of those people who’ll come and strip the paint off and be like, well, I don’t believe that.”

Given their creative partnership began when she was essentially inexperienced in every aspect of professional music and he was this flamboyant star of Irish music, and now has evolved to them recording in her home studio near Reykjavik, is she comfortable saying “I don’t believe you” in a creative environment?

“For sure. To Glen, yes,” Irglova says. “When you know somebody that long that well and you feel like they allow for that, it’s not about being difficult or being cruel, or enjoying being contrary. For me, it’s not about that. Like I said, I am drawn to places that have high-energy and in a similar way I look for in people that certain vibration, the authentic way of being. I feel like when you tap into that place, that’s when things really flow beautifully because you are aligning yourself with the flow of the universe, and everything gathers more speed and momentum. All that is required is being yourself and showing up.

“Intuitively, I’ve always been drawn to watching that unfold, both for myself and in my collaboration with Glen, and in my collaboration with Glen it’s a hundredfold.”

In the cross-currents of these new songs, whose songwriting is evenly distributed among the two, there are sonically and lyrically few opportunities to hide even if they wanted to. Past lives or current ones are laid open.

“I feel the dressing up part is when we feel like we are not enough and we should be like somebody else, but whenever I’ve looked at Glen and his creation, whenever I felt that he has been his authentic self, that was my favourite song or my favourite sound or my favourite lyric. I could always tell that this is Glen and that’s what I love about his music,” Irglova says.

“Whenever I felt he was been a little bit Bob Dylan or a little bit Leonard Cohen or any of his heroes, that he would respect and want to imitate, I don’t want Glen to sound like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. I like those guys, but I still prefer Glen, especially when he is being truly himself.

“It’s hard to apply that maybe to yourself, but it’s easy to see it in a person that you love.”

TOMORROW. In part two of this interview: Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard on what the images we have from this new recording tell us about the sounds (hint: family, fun, future), and why understanding of the people they used to be is as important as looking forward for the people they are now. “So, do we judge the people we used to be? Yeah, sure we do. Do we forgive them? We try. Sure we try.”

READ MORE

Swell Season Face The People They Used To Be - part one of this interview

The Swell Season – Strict Joy: album review 

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Swell Season’s Forward is out tomorrow, July 11.