Glen Hansard

At thirteen, Glen Hansard left school and began busking in Dublin, on Grafton Street by day and after the pubs closed at night. “It’s a tougher gig, but you make more money,” he has said. “Everyone is drunk. And it’s much more dangerous.” Those hours on the pavement taught him the trade: vocal projection, physical contact with the listener, the ability to hold attention without a safety net. It was a training that marked everything that came afterwards.

In 1990 he founded the Frames, who became one of the most followed bands on the Irish scene without ever fully breaking into the international mainstream. In 1991 he played guitarist Outspan Foster in Alan Parker’s The Commitments, a role he would later say he regretted because it had distracted him from music. His stated influences are Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan.

In 2016, during Dublin’s housing emergency, Hansard joined the Home Sweet Home collective and took part in the illegal occupation of Apollo House, an abandoned building turned into a shelter for homeless people. The action ended with a High Court order, but the gesture remains one of the most significant expressions of his civic commitment.

International fame came with Once (2007), a low-budget film shot in seventeen days with a small crew, natural light and lightweight digital cameras, in which he plays a Dublin busker alongside the Czech musician Markéta Irglová. The soundtrack, especially “Falling Slowly”, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2008. The film led to the duo The Swell Season and a successful Broadway musical. Hansard released his first solo album, Rhythm and Repose, in 2012. In April 2025 he recorded Don’t Settle — Transmissions East & West at Berlin’s Funkhaus, a studio album recorded in front of a live audience, in two volumes, spanning thirty years of songs. The first volume was released on 24 April 2026. For Hansard, the stage has always been the original format of the song; the recording, its derivative.