Remembering Glen Hansard: Moments that defined a 35-year musical journey

Glen Hansard, the Oscar-winning singer-songwriter and long-time frontman of The Frames, passed away at the age of 56 in a motorbike accident in Lucan, on the outskirts of his hometown. The news spread from Dublin to every part of the music industry on Wednesday morning. From Bruce Springsteen to Bono, tributes quickly flowed in, demonstrating how profoundly his music resonated well beyond Ireland's borders. This is a retrospective of the career that led him to the podium.

Hansard founded The Frames in 1990, naming the band after the tangle of broken bicycle frames he'd find lying around his mother's garden. In a Dublin music scene chasing ironic detachment, The Frames leaned hard into sincerity — surging, cathartic folk-rock that built one of the most devoted followings in Irish music. Over the years the band released six studio albums, including fan favourites like Fitzcarraldo, Dance the Devil..., For the Birds, and Burn the Maps.

Before most of the world knew his name, they knew his face — Hansard played guitarist Outspan Foster in Alan Parker's beloved Dublin soul-band comedy The Commitments. Funnily enough, he later admitted he regretted taking the role, feeling it pulled focus from his music. History, at least, disagreed with him: the film introduced Hansard to an international audience years before Once would do it again.

This is the one people will keep coming back to. Hansard co-starred in the tiny, handheld-camera musical Once, playing a Dublin busker who falls for a young Czech immigrant played by Markéta Irglová. Shot on a shoestring budget, the film became a sleeper sensation — and its centrepiece song, co-written and performed by Hansard and Irglová, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2008. It remains one of the most unlikely, beloved Oscar wins in recent memory: two working musicians, largely unknown to Hollywood, walking away with the industry's biggest prize.

The chemistry between Hansard and Irglová didn't stay on screen. The pair recorded and toured together as The Swell Season through the 2000s, releasing music that carried the same aching intimacy that made Once connect so widely. It was a musical partnership built on real collaboration, not just movie promotion — and it gave Hansard some of the most tender material of his career.

With his first solo album in 2012, Hansard finally ventured out on his own after decades of heading a band and co-leading a partnership. Didn't He Ramble (2015, a Grammy nominee for Best Folk Album), Between Two Shores (2018), This Wild Willing (2019), and All That Was East Is West of Me Now (2023) were his next four solo albums. This signalled the start of a prosperous second phase of his career.

When Shane MacGowan of The Pogues passed away in 2023, Hansard and Irish singer Lisa O'Neill performed at his funeral. Their performance of Fairytale of New York is said to have caused mourners to dance in the aisles. One legend was given an appropriately Irish farewell by another.

Just last year, Hansard and Irglová came back together for Forward, their first album as The Swell Season in 16 years. Their partnership that started with a low-budget film in 2007 never really faded, it just waited for the right moment to pick back up.

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