‘We weren’t the next big thing’: Irish singer-songwriter’s unusual path to success

The road to stardom for Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard and his band the Frames began when he dropped out of school in the mid-1980s.

“I have been making music since I was 13,” marvelled Hansard on a recent Zoom call from the attic of his home in Dublin. “I actually met the Frames on the street busking. There was no way to break into the music industry back then. We developed a direct relationship with the audience.”

Hansard and his reunited Frames will play their only Australian date in Sydney, at the Irish music festival Misneach at the Domain on March 16. (Misneach is Gaelic for “courage” and is pronounced, organisers say, “mish-nyach”.)

Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard with the Frames.Credit: Daragh McDonagh

The fest was organised by Dermot Kennedy, another former Dublin busker who’s turned his contemporary take on Irish music into success, and who begged Hansard to bring his longtime bandmates to Sydney for the event.

“Dermot reached out to me and said it would mean a lot to him if the Frames would be willing to do it,” Hansard said.

Some 40 years on, with decades of struggle, stardom and ever-earnest, ever-more rewarding music behind him, Hansard says he’s beginning to relax and understand what the industry – and life – is really all about.

“We never did depend on the good review, the press guy or the promoter,” he continued. “Generally speaking, the reason people booked us was because we could put a crowd in a room. We weren’t the next big thing. We were the people continuing a tradition of people filling a room and playing songs in it.”

How to mix the life of a rock and roller with life generally is a harder trick, but Hansard said he is working on that as well. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t involve dying before one gets old.

However – in keeping with the mordant literary history of his homeland – it does involve accepting that it’s all going to end at some point.

“I had this feeling of passing through the centre of my life, and I have lived a good life. But I have a two-year-old son now,” he said.

“It doesn’t mean you don’t keep digging and you don’t keep working, but you realise that your job on Earth has just begun now. You have to build his future, to give him confidence and send him on his path.”

Hansard’s years – and it was not just a few – as a busker, and then his years with the Frames, were just two of what now, in retrospect, can be seen as a bucketful of musical lifetimes in his varied career.

His work is both steeped in the tradition of great singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen, and shot through with the influence of his own Celtic forebears: Van Morrison, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, and perhaps James Joyce, too (who knew a thing or two about epiphanies himself).

Legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.Credit: AP

But it didn’t always pay the bills. In 1990, Hansard, then sporting a blond “Weird Al” Yankovic-style hairdo, got a gig in a small movie filmed in town. The film was about a shambling bar band that delivered high-octane soul standards. The film was called The Commitments – and it became a worldwide hit.

The fake band from the movie was a real-life concert draw for a time. When that all died down, Hansard spent another 10 years recording and touring, on his own and with the Frames.

Then things got weird.

The Frames’ bassist, John Carney, had dreams of making a movie set in the busking milieu Hansard had literally grown up in. Hansard agreed to write songs for it, with the then-rising Irish actor Cillian Murphy in the mix. As the micro-budgeted production struggled to get off the ground, Murphy dropped out – and Hansard was asked to star in the film.

In Carney’s script, the unnamed busker meets a talented young female pianist, played in the film by Marketa Irglova. In an unforgettable scene, the pair find themselves in the back room of a Dublin music shop playing, haltingly and then confidently, a song called Falling Slowly.

The film Once became a huge art-house hit, and Hansard and Irglova found themselves at the 2007 Oscars accepting a statuette for best original song.

Then and now, Hansard kept recording, delivering solo records, records with the Frames, and even a pair of albums with Irglova under the name the Swell Season. He was supported, of course, by royalties from the film (and the spin-off mega-hit Broadway production, which won eight Tony Awards in 2012, including best musical).

The Frames playing live.Credit: Charlotte Blokhuis

That was one level of fame; another was unfolding for Hansard based solely on his recorded work. You can track the rise of his reputation in the rarefied world of serious singer-songwriting on YouTube: back in Dublin, busking on the street with Bono, on a solo acoustic tour with Eddie Vedder, on the road with the Frames and Bob Dylan, even at an event laden with joy and tears, singing Fairytale of New York at the funeral of his friend Shane MacGowan.

Hansard captures the passing of time with a lyric that gives him the title of his latest solo album: All That Was East Is West of Me Now. He is definitely older now, with his grey beard, wild Caledonian eyes and Leonard Cohen-like gravitas.

Hansard makes clear that his gig in Sydney will be a Frames show. Once fans might not hear Falling Slowly. But you will hear a cross-section of the rest of his career from a man who has never brooked compromise.

“We’re at that spot where we either fall to the side and give up and lose our way and get a bit fat, or we keep on thinking about what it is we do and stay f---ing slender,” he said.

“You go where the heat is, you know? You go to where it’s exciting, and you go where there’s joy.”

Misneach takes place at The Domain on March 16.