Glen Hansard’s Street-Corner Stories
There’s a YouTube video I love of Glen Hansard standing on a rainy street in Dublin, wearing a black jacket and a scarf, cradling a guitar that shows signs of wear, which was something of a Hansard signature. He’s playing a cover of Van Morrison’s song “Astral Weeks,” and some people have stopped to stand in the rain with him, smiling as they stare at the man’s hands tearing up and down his instrument with incredible ferocity, the camera spinning in a circle as Hansard shouts out an extended “THEEEEEEERRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEE” before landing on the line “there you go.” Then, with divine timing, he looks down and says, “There my string goes,” as one of his strings surrenders to the beating it has taken and hangs down loosely from the worn-out guitar.
There are other videos of Hansard busking that live on the internet, some from his early career and some from after the runaway success of the 2007 film “Once,” the musical drama in which he starred, with the Czech singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová, his romantic partner at the time, and which won an Oscar, for their indie-folk love song “Falling Slowly.” In one clip, he’s singing in Grafton with Bono. It’s a charity event, and a production. People are glued to the street, a thick crowd with cameras out. But I’ve become attached to the clip of Hansard singing Van Morrison for its simpler manifestation of lineage—one Irish storyteller stepping into the heart and mind of another, alone on the streets of Ireland. Hansard honed his busking skills as a teen-ager in Dublin, after dropping out of school. In the Van Morrison video, people are shuffling around him, walking directly in front of or around him, some of them appear to be hustling to somewhere more urgent, some of them may be stopping for a brief glance, and then moving on. Hansard knew that a busker is not only playing a song for people in hopes that they’ll toss some coin into an open guitar case. Sure, that is a nice and beneficial outcome, especially if you are a teen-ager—one of six children, from a family enduring financial insecurities—who quit school and needs to bring a little bit of cash home. But you are also trying to sell a transportative moment. You are attempting to get people to enter, for a few minutes, into a portal that reshapes a day. The street is a story, and the city is a story, and the people within it all have their different stories, and then, at the center of all that, there is an artist who stops by and insists that he can make you and those next to you feel one single thing. The busker sells a miracle and a myth. Now, hearing a song on the street, you are remembering when you were younger or when you were maybe just a little bit more in love than you are now, or you are remembering your beloved dead or the beloved living whom you haven’t heard from in a little while.
Glen Hansard died on Wednesday, in a motorcycle accident, at the age of fifty-six. I saw him play live just earlier this year, in Philadelphia. It was my fourth or fifth time seeing him live in the course of twelve years. I often tell people that the stage can be a lonely place. It can be as lonely as you want it to be, as a performer. If you, for example, look out on an audience of hundreds and decide that you would benefit from distance, you can put up as many invisible barriers as you’d like to signal that you’re not interested in close engagement. You can avoid talking between songs or poems. You can reduce eye contact. You can not respond to shouts or cheers. The stage itself is a hierarchical tool, and the person upon it has the power to dictate its terms, for better or worse. What I loved about seeing Glen Hansard live was that he, spiritually, never stopped being the guy playing on a rainy street, trying to capture the attention of people walking by, and that takes rigor, and care, and a willingness to insist upon the stage as a communal space. Hansard would weave long stories in between songs, or sometimes stop songs in the middle to tell a brief tale before starting up again. He’d often take the stage with the same beat-up guitar from the older videos, and he’d often play it with such volume and intensity that the strings would break. Even when they broke, he’d keep playing until the song was done. He was a folk-music hero, singing songs of triumph and heroics and loss, and the heart. His voice was so loud that it could fill a large room, even without a microphone, but it could also draw you in with a whisper. This skill, too, was undoubtedly learned on the streets. And yet, as musically talented as he was, he felt to me at times like someone you’d just run into somewhere, a wise elder (despite the fact that he wasn’t that old) who moved through the world eager to dispense some wisdom about the heart to someone who needed it, or someone who didn’t know they needed it. In his song “Bird of Sorrow”: “Love is gonna find us again / Love is gonna find us / We gotta be ready then.”
I will miss Glen Hansard. I will miss his writing, but most of all I will miss the urgency with which he brought writing to life, whether his own or that of others. Making the rounds this week as fans mourned were videos of Hansard singing the traditional Scottish song “The Parting Glass.” I watched him perform the song live once, in a city I can’t recall. I do recall that it was raining outside, because Hansard, preparing to sing the song as an encore, said that he was going to take his time with it, so that we didn’t have to go back outside in the rain. I recall being incredibly moved by that moment, as he began his leisurely rendition of a song that, among other things, insists we have reached a collective ending. We are required to leave, whether we want to or not. But in the universe of the song, until its final note, we were still together. ♦