Beloved reader, I feel like you and I know each other well enough to speak openly about certain things, and if you’re unfamiliar with Glen Hansard, well, you really need to get your life in order.
You might be aware of him from his role in Once, which nabbed him Best Song at the Oscars, or for his work as the frontman of The Frames or The Swell Season. Suffice to say, there are so many avenues into Hansard’s oeuvre that once you start walking them, you’ll never turn back. For a man whose life is so often on the road, it’s rather fitting he proves exceptionally keen to invite us on the journey.
“Touring is such a strange, nomadic thing,” Hansard muses. “It’s a fascinating existence, and when I think about it, it seems to be everything I hoped it would be. When I think back to the 16-year-old Glen, who had a wish to play music and was busking every day, everything now seems exactly where I would have it. The path to it hasn’t exactly been what I imagined.
“It feels like a wonderful thing, touring. To go to Australia and be fairly confident that there are people who are wanting to hear what you have to say – it changes the nature of what you do. You might go into a small town in the middle of Spain and play for 300 people, and the next night be in Vienna playing for 3,000. So you need to constantly be readjusting your expectations while at the same time staying true to what you do. If I’m searching, doing my thing and doing it for real, and somebody else has the opportunity to catch something that’s real to them…”
He pauses; reflects. “I mean, if I’m just going up there every night and doing a show, then it’s just entertaining. Which isn’t vacuous, but it also isn’t that interesting for me. If I catch myself doing that, which I do sometimes – just being the singing, dancing monkey – then I have to remember, ‘Fuck, that’s not good enough.’ You have to find the centre of your song again, and if you can’t, then you’re really in trouble.”
I’ve been fortunate to catch Hansard live a number of times, and without exception I have always left his concerts amazed by both the power of his voice – look no further than ‘Say It To Me Now’ or ‘Bird Of Sorrow’ for proof – and by the scope of his catalogue. Fanboy I may be, but chief among the reasons I rate Hansard as a musician is that the quality of his songwriting hasn’t dipped as his career has advanced. Innumerable artists find their peak early and then stutter down to a steady plateau, and that fear of running out of things to say is never far away.
“The bottom of the keg is something every single musician fears and at some point probably reaches,” Hansard says. “It’s just the point where you really have nothing more to report, or the songs you’re writing now are just rehashes of songs you wrote years ago. That shit happens, and that’s the fear. Even talking about it now gives me the heebie-jeebies.
“I have another record to write now, another [solo] Glen Hansard record I think. I’ve got a couple of ideas; a couple of orphans scrambling around. They don’t look like much. They might dress up lovely when I put a band on them, or I might try them out acoustic and see how they stand up, skinny warts and all. But you can’t just switch it on.
“I’m not the kind of person who wakes up in the morning, makes coffee and sits down at the piano. It’s very hard to call yourself a songwriter, because there is no mastery in it. You’re constantly being surprised by it: there is no formula. Honestly, someone asked me to give a few days of a class on songwriting in Ireland, and I had to ask myself how it’s done, and there’s no answer.”
Nonetheless, talking with Hansard you quickly come to suspect that were he to indeed settle on an answer – some simple solution to corral a song into shape – he wouldn’t stay satisfied for long. Part of the craft is the struggle, the efforts to turn over distant stones and find fresh perspective.
“I think every artist goes through that,” Hansard agrees. “You lose perspective, and I think that’s the one thing you hang on to in your life as a creative person. ‘Do I believe this?’ That should be your criteria. If I believe it, then that’s all that should matter. But if I hear posturing in my own music…” he laughs.
“Some songs, when you finish them you sincerely think that you nailed something, and a couple of years later suddenly it’s like, ‘Jesus, I’ve totally lost contact with whatever this was. Don’t believe it anymore, and I don’t believe the guy who’s singing it.’ It’s funny when people ask for a song that you’re not believing. That’s a time you’ve got to reckon with yourself. ‘Look, I can do what’s being asked of me here, or I can be true to myself.’ If you don’t believe it, the best thing you can do is respect it by not singing it at all.”
Didn’t He Rambleis out now through Plateau; and Glen Hansard performs at theSydney Opera House on Saturday October 22 and Sunday October 23.
