Music News: Rest in Peace to the Irish Troubadour Glen Hansard
The world lost a real, dyed-in-the-wool character of the streets with the unfortunate loss of Glen Hansard. Hansard died in a motorcycle crash outside Dublin on July 29, 2026, at just 56 years old.
Hansard made music for the lost, the broken-hearted, but also the hopeful. Getting his start as a busker playing around Dublin, Hansard gained the kind of wisdom only allowed for those willing to give themselves over to the songs, and through his trials and tribulations, the world got something beautiful in return. Songs like “High Hope” stand as a tribute to his mastery of a life well worn in like an old pair of loafers, comfortable but maybe in need of a little glue.
Hansard was an Irish singer-songwriter, actor and relentless live performer who carried Dublin’s busking tradition onto international stages. He founded the rock band the Frames in 1990 and first reached a wide audience playing guitarist Outspan Foster in the 1991 film The Commitments. (Classic movie. Watch it immediately.) His music was deeply personal, a soft whisper that moved into a dull roar at a moment’s notice. He could play a somber heart killer or a barroom singalong with the best of them, and crowds around the world loved him for his ability to bring the back streets into theaters.
Hansard’s defining breakthrough came with Once, the low-budget 2007 musical in which he starred opposite Czech musician Markéta Irglová. Two people who can’t quite be together, singing to each other about not being able to be together, shot on handheld camcorders for almost no money. Their duet “Falling Slowly” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, beating a cabal of Disney entries, and turned their collaboration, the Swell Season, into a global success. The film works for people who have no patience for musicals, which is not a thing you can plan for or repeat. This writer is included in that group.
Hansard later built a substantial solo career while periodically returning to both the Frames and Irglová, releasing music that moved between folk confession, street-corner soul and full-throated rock. Every Christmas Eve, he led a busk outside Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre in aid of the Dublin Simon Community. The charity said this week it was devastated, and called him a giant in the fight against homelessness.
The Irish Times reports Hansard had spent Tuesday evening at the Wren’s Nest pub on Lower Road, where he regularly turned up for trad sessions with a group of musicians. The crash happened on that same road hours later. He didn’t need to be in that pub. He had an Oscar on a shelf somewhere and no reason left to prove anything to a room of twenty people. He went because the music lived in his bones and there was nowhere else to put it.
When we lose artists like this, it’s a loss for music, for us. We’re only given so many people who can pluck an idea out from the heavens and give it a life that’s somber and beautiful in the same strum, which is a gift. Glen Hansard did a lot of things in his life, but one worth noting came when his friend Shane MacGowan died. Hansard and other Dublin musicians played at St. Mary of the Rosary Church in Nenagh, County Tipperary, on December 8, 2023. Hansard and Lisa O’Neill performed “Fairytale of New York” during the service, and MacGowan’s family and friends started dancing in the aisles of the church. I hope that same beautiful entryway into the afterlife is afforded to Hansard just the same, by someone who loved him too.
Hansard is survived by his wife and their three-year-old son.
Featured photo by Andy Witchger courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
