Glen Hansard is a singer songwriter from Dublin, Ireland. He has been releasing music either with his bandmates in The Frames or collaborator Markéta Irglová in The Swell Season and most recently under his own name for close to thirty years. He still occasionally performs live with both bands or can be found on tour as a solo artist.
Glen wrote music for and starred in the film Once, which won he and Markéta an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The film would later go on to become a Tony award winning musical.
His most recent release was 2019’s This Wild Willing (Anti Records). “This collection of songs is mainly made up of those that came through while improvising and following the melodic lines and threads. Sometimes when you take a small musical fragment and you care for it, follow it and build it up slowly, it can become a thing of wonder,” Hasard says. Lead track “I’ll Be You, Be Me” finds Hansard weighing the risks of such vulnerability, his restrained vocal masking the fury of the underlying instrumental’s building storm, and to which Hansard advises “on first listen, please turn it up loud in your head phones!
Glen visited the Woody Guthrie Center in 2016 while on tour and has been making plans ever since for a return visit.