Remembering Irish Troubadour Glen Hansard

We lost an Irish music legend this week, after Glen Hansard died in a motorcycle crash outside his home of Dublin.

Glen Hansard sang like the walls didn’t matter, like it was just him and whoever needed to hear it.

He busked for years on Grafton Street before anyone knew his name, fronted The Frames through years when nobody outside Dublin was listening.

He then made Once, that small, unlikely film where he and Markéta Irglová sat at a piano and turned “Falling Slowly” into something the whole world claimed as its own. The Oscar surprised everyone except the people who’d already felt what his voice could do.

One of the most charming aspects, is that he never really changed. Even as the rooms got bigger, he kept singing like he was still trying to convince one person on a street corner that the song was worth stopping for.

That was his gift, an ache in his voice, and his worn, tattered guitar. He stayed generous, exposed, and real.

He was 56. Gone in a moment, on a Dublin road, doing what people who love machines and speed and being alive out in the world do. It doesn’t square with how much life still seemed to be in him.

There’s a lyric of his that people keep returning to today: “raise your hopeful voice, you had a choice, you had a choice.”He raised his. For a long time, and generously. That’s the part that stays.

Rest in peace, Glen.