Glen Hansard

Glen Hansard

Glen Hansard is an Irish singer-songwriter, actor, vocalist and guitarist from Ballymun, Ireland. He is associated with folk, folk rock, rock and singer-songwriter music, and records on Plain Records Limited. He is a member of The Frames, The Commitments, The Cake Sale, The Swell Season and Eddie Vedder and the Earthlings.

Career

Hansard leaves school at 13 and begins busking on the streets of Dublin. He forms The Frames in 1990, and the band continues to play regularly in Ireland. He first comes to wider attention as Outspan Foster in The Commitments, the 1991 Alan Parker film, and later appears in Once, a music-based film in which he plays a Dublin busker opposite Markéta Irglová. His performance in Once brings major awards, including the Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Falling Slowly”, which he writes with Irglová.

In 2003, he presents the RTÉ television programme Other Voices: Songs from a Room. In 2006, he contributes to the Oxfam charity album The Cake Sale. He also records covers for the Today FM series Even Better than the Real Thing, including Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” and Britney Spears’ “Everytime”, the latter with Colm Mac Con Iomaire. He voices an Irish busker in an episode of The Simpsons, “In the Name of the Grandfather”.

The Swell Season and solo work

Hansard records The Swell Season, his first album outside The Frames, with Markéta Irglová, Marja Tuhkanen and Bertrand Galen. He later releases Strict Joy as The Swell Season with Irglová. His solo album Rhythm and Repose follows, with “High Hope” appearing as a single from that record and “Love Don’t Leave Me Waiting” featuring on American Songwriter’s The Muse July Sampler. “Come Away to the Water” appears on the deluxe edition of Rhythm and Repose, and he also writes and records “This Gift”.

His songs appear in film soundtracks including The Odd Life of Timothy Green and The Hunger Games, where he sings “Take the Heartland”. He also records “On Love” with Lisa Hannigan for the soundtrack to Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

Performances and collaborations

Hansard joins Eddie Vedder on Vedder’s American solo tour in support of Ukulele Songs, and later performs at Pearl Jam’s 20th Anniversary Festival, PJ20, at Alpine Valley Theatre in Wisconsin. He gives a solo concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Guitar Heroes exhibition and performs at Cape Cinema on Cape Cod. He also performs with Bruce Springsteen at Nowlan Park in Kilkenny and with Ed Sheeran at Croke Park in Dublin. In 2018, he sings “Coyote” at the Joni 75 birthday concert in Los Angeles.

He often performs Van Morrison songs, including “Into the Mystic” and “And the Healing Has Begun”, which appear on the collector’s edition soundtrack for Once. He cites Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan as key early influences, with Dylan “in the centre” of that trio. He and The Frames tour as support act for Bob Dylan in Australia and New Zealand.

Instruments and other activity

Hansard plays several guitars, including a battered Takamine NP15 acoustic guitar known as “The Horse”. He takes a four-week filmmaking workshop at the New York Film Academy in 2008. In 2016, he becomes a prominent member of the Home Sweet Home Group, a coalition of activists and homeless people that occupies Apollo House in Dublin. He is also a devotee of Krishna and performs for the 80th birthday of Swami Prabhupada in London.