Back in 2008, Beto, another junior from our department and I shared a flat. There was a projector in the living room. We drew the curtains, switched off the lights, and the white wall became a screen. That is how we watched Once—on a pirated DVD bought from a street vendor.
That year the film spread quickly among young Chinese art-house fans. The plot is so simple it barely has one: in Dublin, a man who repairs vacuum cleaners works in his father’s shop by day and stands on the street with his guitar singing at night. A Czech woman who sells flowers stops to listen. The two borrow a piano from a music shop and play a song together.
The song is called “Falling Slowly.”
I saw the news yesterday morning. The man who sang that song is gone.
Glen Hansard, 56. In the early hours of July 29, he was riding west on Lower Road, a street just outside Dublin, when he crashed his motorcycle. The crash site was two or three kilometers from a pub where he had just played. Emergency services received the call close to 4:30 a.m.
Three weeks earlier, he had performed at Trinity College Dublin. He had another tour scheduled for October, across Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia.
A guitar left behind by his uncle
He grew up in Ballymun, north Dublin, one of six children. His father drank, and his childhood was difficult. An uncle went to prison and left behind a guitar. With it, he learned songs by Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison.
He could not stick with school. One teacher gave him an idea: try singing on the street for a year, then come back to school if it did not work.
At thirteen, he left school and went to Grafton Street.
He sang there for years and earned the title “the uncrowned king of Dublin’s street musicians.” There is a very practical piece of evidence for the title: supposedly, when other buskers saw him coming, they packed up and left, knowing there was no point staying on that street that day.
The Frames came together on that street corner. Guitarist Dave Odlum, singer Noreen O’Donnell, violinist Colm Mac Con Iomaire, drummer Paul Brennan and bassist John Carney were all people he met on the street. The band’s name came from the bicycle frames piled up at his home.
In 1991, he acted in Alan Parker’s The Commitments, playing guitarist Outspan. The film is about a group of working-class Dublin kids who form a band to play American soul. He did not need any method-acting tricks; he had grown up in that world.
The hole in his guitar
In 1990, the year The Frames formed, he bought a Takamine NP15 acoustic guitar. He later gave it a name: The Horse.
At some point, a hole appeared in its soundboard.
The hole was worn through. To busk on the street, you have to make yourself heard by people who never planned to listen. So you strum hard, hard enough to cover the sound of traffic and footsteps. His fingernails and pick landed on the same patch of cedar year after year, first wearing through the thin finish, then through the wood itself.
The hole kept growing. By rights, the guitar should have been retired. He had grown attached to it and could not let it go, so he kept playing it. It was repaired in early 2009, with the soundboard reinforced. He was nervous about the repair—there had never been a show he played without bringing that guitar.
Later, someone gave him a new Takamine. That was in 2011. In three years, he played a hole into that one too.
A widow in Chicago once wrote him a letter. She said she felt sorry seeing him with that battered guitar. Her late husband had collected guitars, and she wanted to give him a Martin. She said he reminded her of her husband. He was so moved that he made a special trip to Chicago to meet her.
On Oscar night, he was still holding that Takamine with the hole in it.
He once said something about pawnshops. He bought a D-28 at a pawnshop in Cincinnati: “When you buy something at a pawnshop, you immediately realize someone had to pawn it. So there is always a little sadness mixed in with the excitement.”
One hundred thousand euros and three weeks
John Carney, the director of Once, was the bassist in The Frames back in the day. He had made music videos for his old band, and the screenplay grew out of their relationship.
The lead was originally meant for Cillian Murphy. When he was younger, Murphy nearly signed a record deal as a rock musician and was briefly set to produce the film too. He later dropped out, partly because he could not sing the octave-spanning melodies Hansard had written.
Carney had to turn back to his old bandmate. At that point, Hansard had only acted once before, as Outspan sixteen years earlier.
A budget of €100,000, two digital cameras, and three weeks to shoot.
In 2008, “Falling Slowly” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. The film later became a Broadway musical, which went on to win several Tony Awards.
After that, Carney made Begin Again and Sing Street, both stories about ordinary people picking up a guitar and finding their lives beginning to loosen. He had worked out that formula with his old bandmate on the streets of Dublin, and kept using it afterward.
From twenty pence a day to the Sydney Opera House
After the award, the names he had learned on the guitar his uncle left him gradually became people he shared a stage with.
He performed onstage with Bob Dylan in a stadium, and later they had dinner together. Van Morrison gave him a master class. He joined Bruce Springsteen and Ed Sheeran onstage. He appeared on Eddie Vedder’s solo album Earthling, and opened for Vedder at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre.
From a street musician earning twenty pence a day to selling out the Sydney Opera House.
He kept singing on the street
He did not move to Los Angeles after winning the award.
The Christmas Eve charity sing-along on the streets of Dublin began by accident in 2010. Someone was collecting donations for the Simon Community, and he happened to walk by. He said he did not have time. The person with the collection bucket would not let him go: “Hey, Glen, how are you? Come sing something for us.”
It happened every year after that. Bono came. Hozier came. Imelda May, Dermot Kennedy and Gavin James came too. On Christmas Eve, the street outside the Gaiety Theatre filled with people.
His own explanation was casual: everyone goes back to their hometown at Christmas anyway, so an Irish musician who is in the city might as well stop by and sing a song or two.
The Simon Community works with people experiencing homelessness. There was also an occupation of vacant Apollo House in Dublin, demanding housing for people who had nowhere to live, and he joined it. Reportedly, he spent that period calling everyone he could think of to raise money: philanthropists in Los Angeles, Eddie Vedder, anyone he could reach. He also took to the streets to protest water charges and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Yesterday, a group of street musicians gathered on Grafton Street—the street where he started singing at thirteen.
Bruce Springsteen said, “Here on E Street, we are heartbroken.”
Today I recorded “Falling Slowly” to remember Glen Hansard and the days when we sang happily together.
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