Glen Hansard always found a way to bring the music out of people

OpinionWriterJuly 30, 2026 — 11:58amGlen Hansard was a shining light of Irish music. He was a maverick and a true artist – a gregarious, warm, thoughtful and caring lover of people and songs, to be found at the centre of so many good things, strumming his guitar, singing and playing because that’s where he found his best self. And so many other people found their best selves with him.I was shocked to hear of his death, in a motorbike crash, aged just 56. I had been listening to one of his songs just a couple of days ago, a live version of When Your Mind’s Made Up that builds to a torrent of wild music and ends with the audience picking up the tune and singing it back to him with the delicacy and finesse of a choir. Hansard always found a way to bring the music out of people.From busking to winning an Oscar for songwriting, Glen Hansard was one of Irish music’s shining lights.I knew him just a little from knocking around the music scene in Dublin. It would be hard to miss him: he was the busker made good, who dropped out of school aged 13 to play his guitar on Grafton Street, and wound up as an accidental film star and Oscar-winning singer-songwriter held in the highest regard by some of his own greatest musical heroes. Down a very crooked path of a lifetime making music, Hansard toured the world solo and with his atmospheric rock band The Frames, and shared stages, dressing rooms and deep conversations with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen.“I have been blessed,” he once told me. “When you strap on a guitar, you set sail for these moments. It feels like destiny.”The wider public may know him best from two film appearances. He played dopey guitarist Outspan in Alan Parker’s award-winning 1991 film of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, which went on to spawn a touring band that scored two hit albums, although Hansard had reservations about the experience.Plucked from the street: Glen Hansard (right) as Outspan in The Commitments.“I loved making that film,” he told me, “but everything afterwards was very confusing. It was a big promo gravy train, and the thing is, The Commitments weren’t actually a very good band. I felt like a fraud. And I was stuck with Outspan for years. Everybody I met, even my own family to a large extent, thought I was that guy. People have difficulty separating you from the character they see on screen.”Many years later, Hansard became even more identified with a film character after he (quite reluctantly) agreed to star in Once, a 2007 indie with a shoestring budget – made for under £100,000 ($192,000) – about an Irish busker’s platonic relationship with a Czech immigrant, played by his friend, Marketa Irglova. Hansard wrote songs for the film and helped director John Carney develop a script based on Hansard’s life, but only took the part when the original star, Cillian Murphy, dropped out a month before shooting.Hansard with Marketa Irglova, his co-star in the low-budget film Once, for which he won the Best Original Song Oscar.The film won multiple awards, including a Best Original Song Oscar for Hansard for Falling Slowly, and inspired a long-running stage musical. The film’s stars became romantically involved and enjoyed success for some years as a duo, the Swell Season. “I see myself in a tradition, songster or troubadour,” he told me at the time. “I set out following my heroes, really willing every cell in my body toward a life of song. And here I am. I’m living it.”There was a lot of compassion and humility to Hansard. I once bumped into him on the street in London, carrying his acoustic guitar on his back, and deep in conversation with a homeless woman with obvious mental health issues. He took her photo in exchange for a £50 note. He was also deeply involved in homelessness charities in Ireland.“There is something about street people that is very genuine,” he said. “You can see the life in their eyes, a wildness that I respond to. I come from a family that has been decimated by drugs and alcohol and domestic violence and homelessness. So I grew up around it; I saw what it did to my own people.”He started volunteering in soup kitchens at the age of 15, and, in the years that followed, would lead a charity busk in Dublin each Christmas, accompanied by Irish stars such as Bono and Edge from U2, Sinéad O’Connor, Shane McGowan, Imelda May, Hozier, Damien Rice and Liam Ó Maonlai of Hothouse Flowers. When Glen called, his peers came.Even after he had become a star, Hansard still liked to describe himself as “a street musician”. He lived by the notion “have guitar, will travel”. It was a peripatetic life that took him from spells in Prague, New York, Paris, Helsinki and Dublin, but he had settled down in recent years. He married longtime girlfriend, the poet Maire Saaritsa, and they had a son in 2022.“At every juncture of my life, I chose music,” he admitted to me, during the early years of that relationship. “When my bandmates settled down and had kids, I thought I’m not made of that stuff. I wanted to prove myself every time I stepped on stage: I’m here, I exist, I wrote this song. And then, in time, thankfully, those defences diminish and crumble, and you realise maybe there are other things. Love, friendship, relationships, being a decent human being. When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears. I’m ready to learn.”Glen Hansard’s life has been cut tragically short, and it will leave a big hole in the Irish music community. But wherever there is a sing-song in an Irish pub, or a busker playing for passers-by, his spirit will endure.Neil McCormick is chief music critic for The Daily Telegraph in London.Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.From our partners