Glen Hansard Interview

Nursing a strong black coffee in a quiet corner of the restaurant in Buswell’s Hotel, a slightly jetlagged Glen Hansard is trying to remember exactly where he’s been rambling over the last few weeks. It’s not coming easy...“Jesus, where have I been?” he muses, thoughtfully scratching his greying beard. “I was at home last night, but where was I before that?" The question hangs in the air.
"I’ve been over and back to the States a lot," he continues, "doing a bunch of press. I did CBS Saturday Morning in New York, I did a thing in Philadelphia for NPR, and I did a thing out in Queens for WFUV, which is one of the great supporters of our music out there. But where have I just been?”
The 45-year-old singer-songwriter brightens suddenly. “Oh yeah, I was in Nashville two nights ago,” he recalls. “It’s a great little town. Nashville Skyline... I got to experience the skyline for real.”
Two nights ago was Monday, September 21 – the official release date of Glen’s eagerly anticipated second solo album, Didn’t He Ramble. What better place to be on the day of your record’s release than Music City?
“Yeah!” he laughs. “We were playing at Cannery Row and it was part of some Americana week, which was interesting. The record company were saying, ‘You really should come down here, this is going to be a big deal. The world of Americana has somehow gotten into your record, and this is actually something you should be grateful for’.
“So I spent the day of my release in Nashville – and the gig was great. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of those industry gigs that can be really weird, but they were really responsive. It’s a bit like Ireland in that there are musicians everywhere. You could throw a stone and you’d hit a songwriter in the audience.”
Glen is anxious not to come across as arrogant – “I’m not trying to say I’m a jet-setter, man,” he laughs – but he isn’t faking his discombobulation either. His schedule has been incredibly intense. He’s in Dublin today to do a couple of press interviews. An hour after this meeting, he’ll be playing an instore around the corner in Tower Records. Later tonight, there’s a ‘secret’ gig in an old building on North Great George’s Street. The day after tomorrow, he’s off to Europe.
“It’s been pretty full-on,” he says. “I finished the record in April – I delivered it, finally! And we wanted to put it out in September, so basically everybody had to scramble because they didn’t think I was going to finish it, and we were going to have to put it back till next year. But I really wanted it out because the songs, if they get old, they get stale.
“So we had to rush to get any press we could in the States and Europe. A lot of stuff wasn’t coming in, and then it was coming in, and I ended up having to jump on flights over the last month.”
He’s still based in Ireland, some of the time at least. “I’ve got a place in Kildare. I was living in New York for a few years, and I loved it, but I’ve been touring so much that it was costing me €130 a night to have my gear in an apartment. I did the math and I figured out that I could stay in a decent hotel for much less! So I said, ‘Fuck it!’
“I rent part of a house just outside Celbridge. I’ve been there for the past 12 years. I always kept it on because I love it there. Ireland’s always been home. I didn’t buy anything in the middle of all the madness but, you see, I didn’t make any money until everything went tits up.”
As some of the new album’s strongest songs attest, Glen has endured many years of artistic struggle.
But surely, for a previously penniless musician unexpectedly enriched by massive Hollywood and Broadway success, that was the very best time to buy!
He grimaces. “I just didn’t trust it,” he shrugs. “I think you have to have a desire to be in a place if you want to live there, and where I live is just so ideal that I have no desire to buy another place.”
If he does decide to get a battered boot on the property ladder, he probably won’t be spending much time at home anyway. But that’s always been the story of Glen Hansard’s peripatetic life. Whether it’s been with The Frames, The Swell Season or as a solo performer, he’s been on the road for the best part of three decades. Is he a rambler by nature?
“It’s just worked out that way,” he says. “From, first of all, rambling across O’Connell Bridge to meeting Mic Christopher from Clondalkin, meeting Paul McDonnell from Ranelagh, Mark Dignam from Finglas and suddenly getting a whole new perspective on the world. You know, going from studying Seamus Heaney in school to being in his gaff.”
Originally from Ballymun, Glen famously left secondary school in his early teens to become a Grafton Street busker. A few months after abandoning his academic studies of Heaney, he found himself hanging out in the poet’s study.
“Catherine Anne, Seamus’ daughter, was a friend of ours,” he explains. “It wasn’t even planned, we were just out walking and we ended up going into the gaff and sitting up in Seamus’ study, smoking. At the time I didn’t really have the awareness to breathe in that high sweet air, but it was an extraordinary experience in retrospect. Once I left school, it’s almost like my education began again.”
He takes a sip of coffee and thinks of Ballymun. “Actually, today is the last day of the last tower," he says. "I went out yesterday morning and had a look. Jaysus, it’s heart breaking. The towers are gone; I lived in one of those towers. Now everything’s gone. Like, today they’ll finish the job. So today is literally the last day that Ballymun will be recognisable.
“All I knew as a kid was Ballymun. I knew Ballymun and a little bit of Finglas but that was my world, my block. If I had stayed…”
His voice trails off. What would have happened?
“I got into sniffing glue, taking drugs and robbing,” he admits. “I mean, I was doing all of that when I was a kid, and then my uncle ended up – he had to ‘go away’, shall we say (smiles), and his guitar was left in my house. That was it; everything was different.”
For all of their problems, the layabouts and lowlifes of his home patch had redeeming qualities.
“Luckily, the junkies in Ballymun, the one thing I can say about them is that they had great taste in music!" Glen says. "They were the ones who were sensitive human beings and they really knew their tunes. So I was getting turned onto stuff that was deep like Harvest or The Wall. I was getting turned onto stuff that was definitely wider than what popular culture was feeding us at the time, Duran Duran or Culture Club or Madness, who were great, but The Specials and all of the stuff that was a bit deeper.
“These guys were going, ‘You like ‘Ghost Town’ so here’s The Stranglers’. Finding music that was a little bit more like Quadrophenia: these guys turned me onto music that was amazing. But if I’d stayed in those circles, I pretty much know that I wouldn’t be here now. So I’m very grateful for that. When I went over to Grafton Street, it’s not like I suddenly became a teetotaller, but I saw the world. I noticed that there was a different attitudes different standards.”
Although the song itself doesn’t feature on the album, the song from which Didn’t He Ramble’s gets its title is about his late father, and takes its name from a northside pub. Glen played a rough version during a recent interview with US comedian Pete Holmes on his You Made It Weird podcast.
“I still haven’t finished it," he smiles. "I’ve recorded and I’ve played different versions of it, but I can’t decide. It has to be a fitting tribute and it’s not a fitting tribute to me Da, because it’s about him. His favourite bar was called The Ramble Inn, that’s where the title comes from. Me Da used to call it ‘The Ramble Inn and Stumble Out’, which is what he did pretty much.”
James ‘Jemo’ Hansard passed away in 2009. He died midway through the filming of the acclaimed fly-on- the-wall documentary The Swell Season, which followed Glen and his then-partner Marketa Irglova on their world tour in the aftermath of their 2008 Academy Award win for the Once song ‘Falling Slowly’. In the film, an emotional Glen tells an interviewer, “My Da died drunk. Whatever darkness he carried inside him, he carried it always. And growing up we felt it, you know?”
Whatever Jemo’s faults may have been, the song is ultimately loving towards his late father.
“Da was a drinker,” he says, softly. “So the song was really about, and it’s a very difficult thing to do, to honour someone in your life in a way that’s not judgemental. To stand up at his wake and say,‘Didn’t he ramble, didn’t he roam, didn’t he wander so far from home. Didn’t he go down in the dark for so long and don’t we look good now singing his song…’
“To say that without any judgement, just to describe the man and his achievements and, not necessarily his failures, but just to report it. I find that really difficult, because emoting is part of what I do for my living, in my work. I’m really interested in the idea of a non-emotive report on a man’s life and a farewell and a salute. You hear it in a lot of great Irish songs: they don’t judge, they just report a person’s transgressions or their achievements, and I guess all of the praise and all of the sorrow is in the reporting. It’s in the appreciation of the man.
“But I kept on getting stuck,” he continues. “There was a part that I kind of wanted to make into a chorus, which is, ‘Didn’t he work hard, didn’t he put food on the table, didn’t he wander off on his own way, didn’t he come back when he was able’. Even that felt too emotional. My dad’s whole mantra growing up was, ‘I paid my way and that gives me license to be who I am'. He really carved out that space for himself, and you have to admire it. But as the child of an absent man you really have to take stock of the impact.”
Did his dad live in the household when Glen was growing up?
“My dad was in the house, but he was a silent man. He died of lung cancer, and I often think that he died without using the function of expression. It was either anger or it was silence; it was very rare that you’d catch him in a mid-mood. A decent man, and a good man, a man I have a lot of admiration for in retrospect, again, because when he was alive it was difficult to see all that stuff.
“But, now at 45, I know what it’s like to fall into the bottle and to get pulled into it. I don’t have children, that’s one thing I don’t understand. But I know what it’s like to want to be present and yet not to have the capacity. So in a way I’ve made my work, for better or worse, made my work expressive – as opposed to bottling and shutting it out. ‘Bottling’ is a good metaphor because that’s kind of what he did! But he wasn’t a bad man. There was a lot of stuff in him that was actually really protective. Even though he was not really available, I think he was probably protecting us from something even through his unavailability, if that makes sense.”
How many were in the family?
“That’s a difficult question,” he smiles. “There was loads of us – typical Irish family. There was basically two brothers, my older brother and me. There’d been a few miscarriages and a couple of still-borns – but that’s part of my mother and father’s history but not really part of mine.
“There were two cousins that moved in when we were two or three. They left at some point and then there was another cousin that came to live with us when I was about five, six. She stayed with us until I was about 16. Then there was my other cousin that came to live with us: classic families breaking up or, you know, someone unfortunately dying or whatever.”
A bit of a train station, then?
“Yeah. Uncles – ‘drunkles’ as we called them – who aren’t related to us but came into the house and lived there for a while. There was always someone. My grandmother and grandfather lived in the house, so there was always someone in my bed. I was on the couch or I was on the floor in another room. So when I left school, I came home after having a great chat with my headmaster where I felt really sure of my next step, my parents were like, ‘Yeah, cool…’
“At the time I thought they were super liberal, but now I just realise that they were super busy with their own lives and their own madness. My parents weren’t much older than me, they were very young parents. Me Ma and Da were going through their stuff.”
Crossing the Liffey to busk on the southside was actually a huge psychological step for the teenage northsider.
“In a way, my adventuring over to Grafton Street was me leaving behind not just Ballymun, but my parents and whole extended family. I remember meeting a street artist, Temple Garner, he was painting on the pavement outside Trinity. On that corner outside the cigar shop? I ended up going back to his gaff and I stayed there for four years, till I was 19. I’d drop in on me Ma and say hello, but I was gone from the house at that point.”
He had other unexpected allies, kind and wise older souls, who recognised his latent talent and took him under their wing. He talks fondly of Grafton Street magazine vendor Pete Shortt (“He took me to poetry readings in Le Cave, and gave me books by people like John Fante and James Joyce”), and the Kildare-based landscape artist Philippa Bayliss, who put him up in her family home and paid for him to study music at the art college on Chatham Row.
“Pete and Philippa were two of the really great people in my life,” he recalls, gratefully. “Because I felt really insecure coming over to the southside. It was kind of a big deal to me. I almost can’t emphasise it enough. Because my mother used to talk about how one of my grandfather’s brothers was put in Artane from walking down Harcourt Street in his bare feet. There was a stigma about the southside, it was almost like England, and it had that thing about when you go over there… be careful!
“The reason I went over to Grafton Street was because me Ma sold fruit on Moore Street. I used to sell the rockets and the starlights every Halloween with me Ma, so I needed to not be on Henry Street because they all knew me there. So meeting people like Pete and Philippa was absolutely huge.”
There’s a lot of water under the bridge since then: not just O’Connell Bridge, but all the countless others from Prague to Perth that he’s since crossed. Many albums with The Frames, two with The Swell Season, a solo affair, an Oscar trophy, and more gigs in more far-flung places than his teenage self could ever have reasonably expected.
That was then and this is now. Didn’t He Ramble is his follow-up to 2012’s well-received solo debut Rhythm and Repose. A superb collection of folkish songs, with recognisable nods to the likes of Dylan, Cohen, Martyn and Morrison, it’s easily his best work to date. Curiously, there are no songs about unrequited love and regret.
“I set myself a few rules on this record,” he says. “I didn’t want to write any love songs. Love songs have become so much part of what I do and I really wanted to avoid the word ‘heart’ and I wanted to avoid the word ‘love’. As an exercise, every time I sang those words naturally, which I do, I had to replace them with the word ‘cock’! So I ended up having a lot of fun with it. ‘I love you from the bottom of my cock’, or, ‘I’m totally cock-broken since you left’.
“Those words are easy. When they’re said right they are perfect, but when they are just said in a lazy sense they lose their potency. So replacing them was kind of a fun game. You can come up with a lot.” He guffaws, “‘All you need is cock’.
“Not wanting to write love songs put me into any area where I was like, ‘Okay, what is actually important to me?’” he continues. “Being a brother, being a friend, being a son, being a lover. It’s more about being – I don’t want to say ‘a good person’ because we’re all good and bad. I don’t think any of us are good 100% – but to be, in a way, a person who is just present, and trying to live a decent life.”
The album was produced by Thomas Bartlett, and recorded in New York, Chicago, Dublin and France. Bartlett – who also helmed his solo debut – proved an inspired choice, but things almost went awry when the straight-talking American producer voiced his concerns midway through the recording.
“A very important thing happened in the middle of the recording,” he recalls. "Thomas pulled me aside. I had always had good results by just booking a few sessions and showing up with a few half-baked ideas. It’s almost like I’ve always trusted in the place between the unfinished and the finished; that space gets filled-in when it needs to get filled-in. It gets filled in almost through performing, if that makes sense.
“So I’d booked a studio with Brian Blade, this amazing jazz musician, and his band, The Fellowship Band. These guys are heavyweights! I’d played with them at the Joni Mitchell gig in Toronto; they were Joni’s band. I booked them, went in and had nothing. I had ideas and the ideas sounded fucking great, but I came out of the session feeling kind of embarrassed. And I was fucked, I’d been touring Rhythm and Repose and I’d just come out of the tour and I was knackered.
“Anyway, Thomas pulled me aside about halfway through the sessions and said, ‘Glen, I love ya. I really think you’re very talented and you’re one of the people I really love working with, but this is no good. These songs, they’re not there. You’re letting yourself off the hook’.”
It wasn’t what Glen wanted to hear. “I almost broke up with him, because I was like, ‘Fuck you!’ It was fine, but it the situation it was said in was a little insensitive. The point I’m trying to make: if you’re honest with a friend – you don’t get to lay this shit on just anyone – but someone who is actually your mate and you lay that shit on them; you risk friendship but you save that person probably three to five years of evolving, that they would have naturally done slowly but you’re just going to go, ‘Right, I’m gonna take you and I’m gonna put you there’.
“Thomas put me there, in that really uncomfortable place where I had to look at the songs and I was like, ‘He’s right – motherfucker!’ The only reason it had hurt me was because I agreed with him.”
It was only after Bartlett’s risky intervention that the songs finally came together. “I looked at the songs hard and I thought, ‘Right, what are they? What do they mean? What am I saying? Do I mean it?’ Then I sat down and rewrote all the lyrics. I still like the ideas, I still like the melodies but I rewrote all the lyrics. And I wrote the songs two or three times, from different perspectives. Like ‘Winning Streak’, for instance, was a song called ‘Losing Streak’. ‘May your losing streak never end…’
“It was kind of a complaining song. I originally tried to write it about Mic Christopher, then it became about someone else, but I was kind of letting the song find its way as opposed to saying, ‘Bull by the horns – what is this about? Sit down, take out your pen, start writing and stop fucking singing into the air hoping a miracle’s going to happen’.
“When you’re younger, miracles do just happen. You throw your head in the air and stuff does just come out and it is oftentimes wonderful,” he continues. “Whether it lasts or not is another question. So I decided to sit down and write these songs until they were watertight. And watertight doesn’t mean that they were clever, or smart, or correct, but that I meant them. Once I meant them, if I could sing the lyric with conviction, then it was right.”
Shortly after the Oscar win, Bruce Springsteen took Glen aside and explained to him that his life of artistic struggle was over: he was now wearing a different suit – and he had better get used to it. So how’s that suit fitting now?
“Well, actually, it’s not so much that it’s more comfortable, it’s more that that particular chapter has calmed,” he says, earnestly. “That was a very loud chapter in my life; it was stormy, like a hurricane. It was a very vulnerable period where I kind of felt like everything I’d ever built up with The Frames, or everything I’d ever built up in my own life, was thrown to the wind and now I was kind of Hello! magazine fodder.
“There was definitely a moment where it was like, ‘Oh Jesus! This is horrible’. It was really uncomfortable. As an artist you’re trying to control your own environment, you’re trying to control the gig: ‘Is everybody listening? Are yiz in? Are you okay?’ But the name ‘Glen Hansard’ suddenly doesn’t belong to you anymore. It becomes this term that is bandied around, probably in circles where you never thought it would be. So you’re kind of looking at something growing out of proportion and sort of going, ‘I don’t know what that is’. It wasn’t like we even set out to have a success with Once – though we were proud of it.
“To come back to what Bruce said, and it was very generous on his behalf – the day Ryhthm and Repose was released, Once was opening on Broadway. It was still going on. Basically people were like, ‘You’re the Once guy!’, which is fine, I’m fine being the Once guy, because I’m proud of it. But even my last solo record was under the shadow of something mammoth that was nothing to do with us. So this record is the first record where it’s like, ‘Ahhh, back to work!”’
He throws up his hands and laughs. “It’s back to hustling and doing gigs and getting people to come to shows. Once was great to work on and, touch wood (taps table) it’s been a wonderful chapter and it’s really helped a lot, but now it’s like I feel that new suit gets replaced with the overalls. It’s back to grafting.”
Much like Pete Shortt and Philippa Bayliss in his early years of struggle, Springsteen has been a great support in his early years of success. Glen has regularly played a charity Christmas gig with Bono on Grafton Street for the last few years. Has the U2 singer also been an ally?
“He’s been helpful in terms of his advice,” he says. “Then again, he lives in a very different world, in terms of the scale at which he operates. He’s been very helpful when I’ve needed him, if I’ve called him or reached out he’s been helpful. When I was younger I would have looked at someone like U2 and thought that they’re so out there in another stratosphere that I couldn’t even conceive where those heads are at. But essentially it’s the same business; essentially it’s the same gig. They’re out selling a record and hustling and trying to get it to work, but there’s also a level at which they operate that I can’t, or that’s not useful to me.”
For his part, the U2 man has landed Glen in some unusual situations.
"Eunice Shriver, one of the Kennedys, died, and Bono was playing Wembley Stadium with U2. The Kennedys were asking him to come to the funeral and he said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna send a friend of mine and he’s going to sing’. Because they wanted music, they wanted to celebrate – they’re Irish.
“He called me and Liam Ó Maonlaí and he said, ‘Will you get on a plane and go to Hyannis Port right now?’ Luckily I was in New York at the time so it was easy for me. And Liam flew over. So basically we show up at the Kennedy house, Schwarzenegger opens the door, ‘Aw, the Irish are here!’ We went in and just sat there and sang songs for two days, which was actually really beautiful. Then Bono came over afterwards and joined in the funeral late.
“But there was an amazing moment at that funeral, when Eunice was being lowered into the ground and I was standing singing ‘Forever Young’. Stevie Wonder was standing next to me and he was going, ‘What key are we in?’. He’s playing along. Amazing.
“She was the head of the Special Olympics and so there was a couple of thousand Special Olympians cordoned off at a distance: it was just family and close relatives at the graveside. But Bobby, her eldest son, said, ‘My mother wouldn’t like this. Come in everybody, come in!’ The Special Olympians all came right up close; they just elbowed their way through, right to the graveside and started taking off their medals and dropped them into the ground. And so Eunice ended up going into the grave with a load of gold medals. It was an amazing thing to witness.”
As we’re speaking, U2 have just had to cancel a show in Stockholm because there was apparently a gunman loose in the audience. Has Glen ever experienced any sense of threat?
“Not really,” he muses. “But a young lad committed suicide at one of our shows – and I think he was aiming for me.”
He’s referring to the 2010 Swell Season show in the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, California, where a man threw himself from the roof of the stage, narrowly missing Glen as he smashed to the floor.
“The back-story was very sad. It turns out that he was going down. He had held a gun to his girlfriend’s head – she was a fan, so he didn’t like us. He came to the show and I think he was basically trying to make a point. It’s very, very sad, heart-breaking actually. It was a very strange situation because it was in an amphitheatre at the top of a mountain so we had to ask everybody to stay in their seats while the emergency services came up because this lad was, you know… gone.”
How did Glen feel to suddenly have a dead body beside him on stage?
“I just dropped my guitar and went to him but I could see he was dead, you know? I’d actually seen the same thing happen in Ballymun when I was a kid, so I knew what it looked like. The towers were kind of a popular destination for suicide seekers back in the day. So I’d actually seen what an impact on the head from a height looked like before and I knew that this boy was dead. A woman came to me later and said, ‘I don’t want to freak you out but I watched him walk to the edge. I didn’t think he was going to jump…’
“So there’s me, down there singing on the stage and I was doing a solo thing at the time, so all the band were gone. I was just there and she said, ‘I saw him walk to the edge and look down, then I saw him walk back and I saw him run’. Then he did this thing, like that parachute thing and basically he just bulleted down head first. It really scares me to think about it, but fuckin’ thank god he missed.”
He shakes his head. “Michael Pickles was his name. I always feel like I have to say his name because it’s such a strange thing to do it in front of 4,000 people. You’ve got to be very angry.”
Did the band need therapy after that experience?
“We ended up having a bit of therapy, yeah. That’s how I met Eddie Vedder, because Eddie rang me out of nowhere the next day: ‘Hello, this is Eddie Vedder’. I was like, ‘Jesus Christ! Hello!’ And he said, ‘I heard what happened, are you okay? What’s going on? Do you have time to talk?’ and I said, ‘Yeah’, and he says, ‘Right, come on’. And he just basically sat on the phone with me for an hour, five days in a row. On the fifth day he said, (laughs), ‘There will be light!’ On the fifth day he was like, ‘If you’re ever in Seattle gimme a shout’ – and that’s how we ended up becoming pals. I met up with him when I was there the next time. What happened was we ended up spending the money from that tour on therapy for the four thousand people because, for whatever legal reasons, the venue couldn’t get involved – it was insurance and blah, blah, blah.
“We ended up paying a company in San Francisco, and I think only about a hundred people used it – maybe more, but we paid them and said, ‘Please give these people some help’, you know?’”
His publicist is waving frantically for us to finish up. But before we go, is Glen in a romantic relationship at the moment?
He shakes his head firmly. “No, no!”
Are they hard to achieve and maintain with his kind of lifestyle?
“They are hard to achieve but it depends on where you are in your relationship. I tend to get into long-term. I tend to be one of those people that when I’m with someone, I’m with them. This record ended up costing me a relationship. In the making of it, I ended up just sort of going, ‘Look I need to focus on this’.
“There’s no way for me to say this, that makes me look good. I just had to go, ‘Look, I need to do this and I can’t look up’. Records are fucking – they take everything, there’s just no space. It’s a big question. Didn’t He Ramble ended up being a good title because, in a way, there’s a bit of self-flagellation there, too. It’s like, fucking hell! You don’t ever want to have this conversation with your girlfriend but this is my work, this is what I’m actually here to do. Everything else is wonderful and happiness and joy and security, and all those things are amazing, but they’re not for me right now.”
Is Glen Hansard happy?
“I’m in a good spot, yeah,” he affirms, smiling. “‘Happy’ is a very interesting word, but definitely I’m in a spot where I feel good about the work I’ve done. Really what happens next is me going out and singing the songs. I’ve been doing that so long that I’m very comfortable with it. It suits my temperament. I get healthier on the road. I eat better, I sleep better and I kind of chill out more.
“When I’m at home and I have nothing to do, it’s either go into town or go on a bender with your mates, because there’s so much catching up to do when you’re home, that it can kind of spiral. Whereas, when you’re on the road, you’re actually minding your body, and you’re taking care of the spirit and soul. You’re doing your work, so you’re actually kind of nourished. But love is a very deep and important thing, and I don’t claim to have any mastery over what it means or how it’s going to work in my life. All I know is that when it’s right, it’s right. When that time comes, that time comes.”
He rises to his feet and extends his hand to shake. “But, right now, I need to do this.”
And off he rambles...