The high cost of loving

At the Town Hall Theatre in Galway, I feel slightly sick as I raise my hand to knock on the backstage door. This breaking-the-ice part of an ‘on-the-road-with-a-band’ job never gets any easier.
No worries. The Frames and their entourage are smiley, welcoming folk. They’re sitting round chilling with cups of tea after a particularly brilliant seated Galway gig in The Town Hall, exuberantly received by a standing ovation.
At the gig, frontman Glen Hansard got some good-humoured heckling going with the Galway punters with his ironic, self-deprecating wit. When he told us that he was reading the Bible’s Book of Revelations and described a current theory that George Bush and other Christian fundamentalists are consciously pushing an anti-environmental policy so as to deliberately hasten Armageddon, a piss-taker roared, “Go on ye mad cunt!” “Thank you, that’s exactly what I needed to hear,” the singer declared, before dedicating the next song, ‘People Get Ready’, to him.
Backstage after the gig, I note the lack of post-match analysis amongst the band. No vultures arrive to pick over the scene; instead everyone is basking wordlessly in the satisfying aftermath of a brilliant performance. A longstanding fan offers Hansard a shoulder massage, which he declines, saying that massages tend to make him tense. The same guy gives myself and Hansard a run-down on our personalities by interpreting our dates of birth, and a lively discussion on the merits of numerology, astrology and, bizarrely, hand-ball alleys, ensues.
On the table there’s a copy of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which, by a pleasant synchronicity, I’m currently reading to my six-year-old son...

Next day we’re having breakfast in the hotel. While Glen retired earlier than most, many of the Frames crew – band, roadies, sound guys, manager – had stayed up socialising until the early hours, downing a few drinks in the residents’ bar. There is that distinct atmosphere of a morning after the night before – though in fact it’s lunchtime already. As the conversation unwinds, it’s clear that Glen, drummer Johnny, violinist Colm, bass player Joe and guitarist Rob are open, smart, funny people with a taste for the surreal and fanciful.
When appetites have been suitably satiated, the tour manager Fiachra herds the whole team out of the hotel into a couple of tour buses, displaying the patient discipline of an ever-responsible father. We’re off to the studios of Galway Bay FM, where The Frames are due to record some songs live, and talk to broadcaster Nathan Murphy.
On the book and magazine-strewn tour bus, Hansard reads aloud from Revelations, a text full of tempestuous, apocalyptic imagery straight out of a horrorcore heavy metal album. I notice that Rob is reading a novel in a foreign language.
“I’m brushing up on my Polish,” he says, in a laid back Chicago accent. “My dad was born in Poland. When World War 2 broke out, he and his family were sent to Siberia as punishment by the Russians, because his father used to fight in the Polish army in 1920. Actually Stalin was one of the commissars in that war, so he kind of made it a personal issue to send a lot of these veterans to Siberia.
“Eventually the Polish government in exile in England organised to have these folks in Siberia brought back. And so they made their journey from Siberia, through the Middle East, Africa, Iran, Iraq and finally to England. My dad was a little boy through this whole experience. That was his childhood…”
The family emigrated to Chicago when Rob’s dad met his mother, also Polish, in the 1960s. Rob himself met The Frames when they were recording in Steve Albini’s famous Chicago studio, Electric Audio. Thus do we find ourselves in strange and unexpected places.
At Galway Bay FM, there’s a big gang of us – the band, their crew, a photographer, a film-maker, the broadcaster and me – squeezed into the cosy studio where The Frames are getting ready to record a couple of numbers.
Referring to their new record, The Cost, Hansard says, “I just heard we’ve sold 666 albums in HMV so far – interesting number, isn’t it?”
“Where’s a numerologist when you need one?” pipes up the photographer, before a hush descends, a quick discussion about what to play and how to play it takes place, instruments are tuned. Once the music starts, there’s an amazing tightness to the band.
At the radio station, The Frames take turns answering their interviewers’ questions. As it happens, they’re particularly pleased with the way the gig turned out last night – which isn’t always the case.
“The worst thing in the world,” says Glen, “is coming offstage feeling like you’ve just given people what they want and you haven’t had any satisfaction from it. You just feel like you’ve whored yourself. We’re like, fuck it, we have to get something from it. We can play a kind of a mad party type thing, and we can play a really subtle gig, and for us it’s always really frustrating if we can only do one side.”
“I think when you’re touring,” Colm adds, “you’re just so tired from travelling that you don’t actually have time to be anybody other than yourself. You don’t have the extra energy that takes to put up the front…”
“Your skin is thin,” says Glen. “You can only be where you are. People aren’t so much demanding, as they just want to have a good time, and you want to have a good time too… but on your terms. And that’s something that’s run us into a lot of trouble, actually. We’re not a showband, and that’s really the bottom line. And I think you’ve a choice at certain points – you can become the Everyman’s Band, where everybody who comes to see us will have a good time, we guarantee it. It’s always a balance between doing what everyone will enjoy, because people have paid their hard-earned money in to see you, and trying to keep it creative for yourself. It’s a tough balance.”
The Frames have headlined Marley Park and played The Point, but for this tour they seem to be getting back to smaller venues where people simply listen.
“With the new songs,” says Colm, “it’s nice to be able to go and play them in front of a small audience and not feel you have to entertain them and put on a big show.”
“Playing The Point or Electric Picnic, playing the big stages is absolutely brilliant,” says Glen, “but it seems to work best when everybody knows the songs you’re gonna play, or when it’s a celebration atmosphere. So, with this our new record, what we wanted to do was to take it out and play it intimately, give it a gentle release, play it quietly to people for the first tour, and maybe down the line we’ll play the bigger gigs again…
“I guess really this tour is about going out and being able to see the faces of the people in your audience, rather than just the first row and then the tops of heads. It’s really important for us to interact in some way. We’ve had a relationship with our audience for a long time where, in the middle of a gig, someone will just say something and take the whole conversation of the gig in a different direction. And I think we’ve missed that over the last couple of years, and it’s really nice to get back to it.”
I mention how The Frames interspersed the old songs with the new, and how they didn’t attempt to flog their new album at all, to the point where they didn’t even mention it.
“Oh yeah,” says Glen, “we’re always really careful about that. People are always saying, ‘Tell them about the tee-shirts!’ and it’s like, ‘No.’ I really believe that we live in a society where we’re being knocked over the head constantly with advertising, and the last thing I want to do is partake in that. Even at promotional events, if it’s only about selling records and signing, I’m totally not interested in being there. For me, there’s real lack of value in someone’s signature. I don’t want to meet Bono if I’m just gonna get his signature. I want to talk to the people and hang out with them if I’m gonna have some sense of connection, not this facile shaking of someone’s hand while they’re in work mode.
“We heard about a female vocalist doing promotional stuff in Dublin recently, and her management said she’d only sign her new album. Which just exposed them for saying the only reason we’re coming is to sell records. It’s got nothing to do with the musician as a person; it’s a completely cold transaction. Which is basically whoring yourself, isn’t it? You want to come, I know how to make you come, here’s what we’re doing. That’s the kind of thing that I hope we’ll never turn into.”
At the gig the previous night, before taking a slug of water between songs, Glen had made the audience laugh when he said, “Hi! My name’s Glen Hansard. I’m in a moderately successful Irish rock band and I drink Galway Still.” Herein lies the paradox of The Frames: they eschew the hard sell because they genuinely can’t stomach it, yet in refusing to sell their souls they’re pretty much ditching their chances, in our age of rampant consumerism, of becoming massively successful in commercial terms.
Integrity over cultivating celebrity status… is it a fair trade off?
“It’s something that just suits us, really,” says Colm. “I don’t thing we subscribe to the nature of celebrity. All of us are way too private as people to be interested in anybody hanging around the gates outside. That would really be a nightmare! We’re satisfied with doing the equivalent of Vicar Street in all the major cities around the world, and topping that with the occasional big festival.”
“Breeding pit bulls and guard dogs,” quips the droll Rob, “it’s pretty expensive…”
“Certainly I wouldn’t be very good at all that,” agrees Glen. “I’ve always hated the idea of selling anything really hard. It’s attraction over promotion, that’s really the philosophy of the band. Our audience is built with people who made tapes for each other. We’re hugely bootlegged, and that has a huge circulation, much more so than our records. The Frames were never top shelf super-recommended listening post, pushed, cover-of-a-magazine type band. We’ve had a taste of it in Ireland and that’s been enough.”

The Frames recorded the songs on The Cost entirely live, with no post-coital technological twiddling. As a result, the record has a warmth and directness that immediately pulls you in. It’s what gives the album its special character.
Says Glen: “The first day in studio after we recorded one of the songs, I went off, and when I came back I listened to the song and knew there was something wrong. It turned out the drumming had been changed, which meant that Joe had to fix something in his bass, which meant that Rob had to put his guitar over again … and it had completely collapsed the whole song. The song had gone from this live take into something more like we would normally do, which is to play something, fix it, and then the whole thing just collapses in on itself, and basically the heartbeat that sits within the middle of a live take is just gone.
“We had a big debate on the first night about this process and whether we’d do it in the future and we said no, absolutely not, we’ll play until we get it right, and then we won’t overdub on it. Because we’d rehearsed the songs so much, and we knew what we were all going for, it was really nice to be able to walk into the studio, pick up your guitar – ‘Are we recording now?’... ‘Yeah, we’re recording’ – play the song, sing it, feel pretty good about it, and not feel that when you left the studio your song was going to be torn to pieces by engineers, so when you come back in and there’s blood everywhere and a dead song.
“Also the songs on the record are quite traditional. On Burn The Maps a lot of the songs are the rock band format, and what you can end up with is these abstract song structures – whereas with this record it was all folk songs to begin with, so you ended up with a record where it was pretty obvious what to do with them. And also we had made the decision – I remember it very clearly, it was in Germany – to make a super plain record, because we wanted to make a record that didn’t stick to any particular calendar in history, a record of songs that wouldn’t date, something timeless.”
For me, the most beautiful track, on what is a thoroughly beautiful album, is ‘True’ – a song that transmutes a very deeply felt pain into something the light can shine through. Hansard’s voice here suggests that he’s pushing the envelope in terms of rawness and vulnerability. Suffused with guilt, ‘True’ is essentially about how difficult it is to be faithful in a relationship. Introducing the song from the stage of Galway’s Town Hall, Hansard says, with characteristic irony, “This is a song about when something bad happens to you and you say I’ll never do that to anyone, then you find yourself doing the exact same thing. It’s a nice relaxed mellow song with no moral message whatsoever.” Ha!
“I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to put this song on our record,” admits Glen, “because it doesn’t sell me very well. It makes my stomach feel a bit weird when I sing those lines, because it’s kind of like exposing yourself and saying, ‘I’m a liar, I’m a cheater’. So it’s a bit uncomfortable, the song, and was quite a difficult song to let go ahead on the album, to not want to change the lyrics or disguise it.”
As with most Frames’ songs, the theme of the album The Cost is basically love and relationships.
“A friend of ours made a comment that The Frames make songs for people who are having secret relationships and for people breaking up,” laughs Glen. “It’s an interesting criticism. The love song has always been my thing. I suppose I’ve touched off spiritual subjects a little bit here and there, but never religion or politics. What’s changed is that I’ve probably gotten wiser in love, so maybe that reflects somewhat in the songs.
“For me it’s all informed by Leonard Cohen. He deals specifically with the darker side of relationships, with what happens when you take a relationship and you stretch its boundaries, and that’s what I’ve always loved about his songs. He’s very open and he’s very willing to present himself as the loser. Which is quite difficult for a lot of people, and I can understand why, because you want to present yourself as a hero.”
“Especially being Irish,” notes Colm, “because I think Irish people are very self-aware, there are so many taboo subjects, and it takes a certain bravery to actually be that candid and exposed. Everybody knows and experiences this stuff themselves, but not many have the courage to say it.”
“I love when I hear people sing about sex,” says Glen, “but not in a funky, ‘I’m gonna do it to you baby’ way with a nice beat. I love when I hear people singing about sex in a very broken down way, and again Leonard Cohen is very good at that; a lot of his lyrics are very erotic. He sings about basically very explicit stuff in an incredibly poetic way, where he could be singing about something else.”
“You were naked on the balcony/I was laying in your bed/You said I pleased you only partially/But I knew my hunger would be fed,” Glen sings in ‘True’ – and there’s Cohen-ish aspect to the way he expresses a sentiment that no one would be particularly proud of.
“That’s the selfish male aspect,” observes Glen, laughing. “Like I’ll get mine, and I’m sorry. In a way it’s a shameful thing: I apologise for letting you down on that level, but I’m somewhere else.”
“Ten seconds of the best loving you ever had,” chuckles Rob.
The Frames’ lyrics are written entirely by Hansard. Do the rest of the band ever find themselves quibbling with his words?
“No, not at all,” says Colm. “I think the reason nobody else writes lyrics is because there’s no need for anybody else to write lyrics.”
“The one lyric on this record that Colm had a quandary over,” says Glen, “was, ’I played the saint and a saint I ain’t’, which is also from ‘True’. I agreed that it sounded a bit lazy in the beginning, but I actually found it very difficult – emotionally – to sing that line, so for me it was important that I sang it, because I know I’m not a saint. I know I’m not what I claim to be. Again it’s that thing, there’s so much in me where I love the idea of people thinking I’m a really good guy. I love it, I love the idea of people thinking, ‘Ah Glen’s brilliant, he’s a really nice fella’. Whereas actually I can be a real cunt, you know? So it’s liberating to put that in.”
“And it grew on me too,” says Colm.
I ask Glen whether there’s any mechanism that he uses to consciously inspire himself. I meant walks in the countryside, that kind of thing, so I was surprised by his answer.
“As in, do I get into damaging relationships in order to write songs? Probably!” he laughs. “As Egon Schiele said, ‘For my friends and my art I will gladly suffer’. I don’t know if I agree with that philosophy any more, the idea that you have to be miserable in order to be creative. I probably did buy into it when I was younger, only ‘cos I thought it was cool. But I think there’s enough darkness in your everyday life to draw on forever. I don’t think you need to deliberately make yourself unhappy in order to be creative.
“The songs aren’t always necessarily personal. It’s not a diary, not at all. It’s more theory than anything else. And there’s a lot of songs I’ve written where The Frames are the person in the relationship with the world. You’re singing about your tribe, if you like. So it’s not always about my relationships with women, because then it would be so boring. I mean, who wants to hear about Glen Hansard’s relationship with women?”
More than a few people, I’ll hazard, but we let that pass...

We’re pitching across the beautiful, green-grey-brown Galway landscape on the bus again, heading for the last stop of the day. The Frames have been talking about getting back to intimate shows, and the ‘venue’ they’re headed for now takes intimacy to the nth degree – because they’re doing a gig in one of their most ardent fan’s sitting-rooms.
On his radio show Pet Sounds, Tom Dunne had run a competition to find the most devoted Frames fan. Alan, a 22-year-old from Galway, won (closely followed by a fan who sent in a photo of a piece of buttered toast in which she claimed could be seen Glen Hansard’s face). When the tour buses pull in to the driveway of Alan’s large modern home (mercifully well away from other houses, so there shouldn’t be a problem with the massive PA), aunts, uncles, cousins and friends are already gathering in their hordes. Alan looks nervously ecstatic. I ask him what he did to win the competition.
“The Frames were due to do a gig in Melbourne three weeks after I’d got kicked out my apartment over there,” he says. “So I slept in my car to stay to see them.”
Wow! That’s commitment. What was it like sleeping in a car for three weeks?
“Like sleeping in a car for three weeks.”
The gig in Alan’s house is surreal and brilliant. Towards the end of the show, Hansard shouts out, “Alan, I want to thank you, and to thank your mother for making me tea, and happy birthday to your grandmother. I noticed you have a guitar. Can you play?”
Alan is invited onstage to play guitar with The Frames. The joy and goodwill in this sitting-room is palpable. And Glen Hansard says, “It’s all yours, Alan. The whole chocolate factory.”
Amen.