Glen Hansard has died at 56 after a motorcycle crash in Dublin
The Irish musician who won an Oscar for Falling Slowly, from the film Once, died on July 29 in a motorcycle accident in Dublin. He was 56, and he started out busking.
Some voices you recognise by the third note. Glen Hansard’s was one of them — cracked, always a fraction away from breaking, and for exactly that reason able to fill a whole room with one guitar. The Irish musician died on July 29 in a motorcycle crash in Dublin. He was 56.
Who was Glen Hansard?
First of all, a Dublin kid who left school at 13 to go and busk. Out of that street came The Frames, the band he founded in the 1980s that became something close to a national institution in Ireland without ever landing a single global hit. He was also half of The Swell Season with Czech musician Marketa Irglova, and a solo artist with a small body of work and not one spare song in it.
The wider world met him in 2007 through Once, a film shot on almost no money in which he played a street musician falling in love while writing songs. Falling Slowly, written and sung with Irglova, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song — one of those rare occasions when a small song, recorded practically in secret, walked off with the statue ahead of musicals with twenty times the budget.
Why has Ireland taken this so hard?
Because Hansard was the kind of artist who never really left home. He kept turning up to play Grafton Street at Christmas, kept touring with Eddie Vedder, and it was him singing Fairytale of New York with Lisa O’Neill at Shane MacGowan’s funeral — a moment the country filed away as a send-off done properly.
What is left is a catalogue that needs no anniversary reissues to justify its place: Once, the Frames records, the nights he would walk into some bar unannounced and play two songs. If you want a place to start, start at the beginning — it is all the same voice. The Academy’s nominations and winners are in the official Oscars archive.
If you were after more listening this month, our round-up of July’s albums has plenty to pick from.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: Bernhard Holub / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
