Glen Hansard, the Irish singer-songwriter and founding member of The Frames, died in a motorcycle crash in Dublin in the early hours of Wednesday 29th July. He was 56.
He grew up in Ballymun and started busking on Grafton Street as a teenager, and the street gave him a band as well as a trade. In 1986, when he was fifteen, he met Colm Mac Con Iomaire, a fiddle player working the same pitches; they went on to found The Frames four years later, both of them nineteen, then spent twenty-odd years touring the world together.
A year after the band formed, Hansard appeared as Outspan Foster in Alan Parker’s The Commitments. The wider world became aware of Hansard through the film Once: John Carney, who had played bass in The Frames, cast him opposite Markéta Irglová in his 2007 film, and “Falling Slowly”, written by the pair, took the Oscar for Best Original Song in 2008. Markéta Irglová and Hansard went on to record as The Swell Season. There had been years of feeling unrecognised before that, Mac Con Iomaire said in an interview paying tribute to Hansard on RTÉ’s Six One this week, and the film’s success landed as affirmation, long overdue. It changed nothing about where he liked to play. He enjoyed Grafton Street more for having played Radio City and the Sydney Opera House.
Mac Con Iomaire reflected on how more polished performers find a way of doing a thing and repeat it every night. Hansard didn’t work like that. Every audience was a new situation, and the aim, from the beginning of the show to the end, was for everybody to have a good time, to unify the room — and he was expert at it. Wherever the band travelled, they met street people or street performers, and those people would inevitably join them on stage that evening. Plans rarely survived. It sharpened everyone’s improvisatory skills.
Hansard’s solo career began with Rhythm and Repose in 2012. In his review of the album, Craig Walker concludes:
It has a general feeling of serenity which bleeds through the heartfelt story telling. It could be said that it offers few surprises for those familiar with his weighty arsenal of work, but perhaps this serves as the album Glen Hansard envisaged when he first busked on the streets of Dublin some twenty years ago – stripped-back, thoughtful and honest. Newcomers to his work will undoubtedly be inspired to delve into that back-catalogue to discover where this talent was formed.
This was followed by Didn’t He Ramble (2015), which earned a Grammy nomination, then Between Two Shores, This Wild Willing and All That Was East Is West of Me Now. Matt McGinn, a singer, songwriter and producer from Hilltown in Co. Down, reviewed his aforementioned 2019 album This Wild Willing for KLOF, said “I hope that history sees it as one of the finest albums to ever come out of Ireland”:
At first glance ‘This Wild Willing’ is twelve tracks on an album. In reflection, it is a Symphony made up of twelve movements. A symphony born from a desire to collaborate, to open new doors, connect with people from all ends of the earth, and completed with a joy and yearning to create something infinitely precious. Under no matter what guise, be it the Frames, the Swell Season, this is Glen Hansard’s best complete work by a country mile. …I hope that history sees it as one of the finest albums to ever come out of Ireland.
A proper Irish Blessing.
The last work was Don+t Settle, a twenty-two-song live retrospective recorded over two nights at Berlin’s Funkhaus in April 2025, on his 55th birthday—no overdubs, no second takes, no correction of any kind. Plateau Records released it in halves: Transmissions East in April this year and Transmissions West on 26th June, just over a month before he died.
His generosity has been mentioned in every tribute I’ve read, and always attached to something specific. He went back to Holy Spirit National School in Ballymun in 2008 with the Oscar in tow, played for the children, taught them songs, then took the school choir to Vicar Street. The school’s Principal, Vivienne Bryan, described a man who clearly wanted to give something back to the community he came from.
He found young musicians and pushed them towards the microphone while he stepped back. He led the Christmas Eve busk for the Dublin Simon Community for years, an organisation that called him a giant in the fight against homelessness. Mac Con Iomaire traced all of it back to Ballymun and an old proverb about people living in each other’s shelter — when a community has less, it binds tighter together, and he carried that through.
President Catherine Connolly described him as “one of Ireland’s great singer-songwriters”. Bruce Springsteen remembered him as “nothing but a great musician, a good friend and a generous and gracious man”. Bono, also touching on his generosity, wrote “For me, he will always be everywhere I see a coin spinning into an open guitar case,”
He was a recent guest on Track Star* – the stories he shared around music during this interview speak volumes about a man who always wore his heart on his sleeve.
Hansard is survived by his wife and young son.