Glen Hansard in the now with us!

For all of my Irish roots, Langan on my father's side, Larkin on my mother's, I did not expect Glen Hansard's death to land where it did. But it found the Irish part of me, the part that keeps a low fire going even an ocean away here in the Finger Lakes, and it hit me square in the chest.

He died on 29 July 2026, at fifty-six, in a road crash at the Strawberry Beds in west Dublin, in the early hours of the morning, hours after he'd been at a trad session at The Wren's Nest pub, doing the thing he always did, which was play music with whoever was in the room. That detail is the whole man, really. He was gone before dawn, and by the time Ireland woke the grief was already everywhere.

The busker who never stopped busking

Glen Hansard was born in Ballymun, Dublin, on 21 April 1970. He left school young and took his guitar to the streets, and though the world would eventually hand him an Academy Award, he never really stopped being the fellow busking on Grafton Street. He co-founded The Frames in 1990, and for a decade and more they were something close to mythic in Ireland — a band you belonged to rather than merely listened to. In 1991 he turned up on screen as Outspan Foster in Alan Parker's *The Commitments*, the soul-rebel guitarist, and then went back to the work of songs.

Polish was never his thing. His voice would crack and he'd let it sit there in the open; he'd chase a note past where it was safe and leave that showing too. He sang to a room the way most of us only sing at home — like the people in front of him were kin, and could be handed the whole of it.

 *Once*, and the song that carried him to the world

In 2007 the small film *Once* changed the shape of his life. John Carney built it around Glen and the Czech musician Markéta Irglová, and around the songs the two of them had been writing together as The Swell Season. "Falling Slowly" — that quiet, rising duet — won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 2008 ceremony. It was about as unlikely an Oscar as the Kodak Theatre had seen: a €180,000 film, two musicians who were mostly playing themselves, a song that sounds like it was written at a kitchen table because more or less it was.

Nearly twenty years on, the song still does its work. When Glen and Markéta sat down at the PETROF piano gallery to play it again, stripped to nothing, the magic hadn't dimmed a degree.

And you don't have to take my word for how it lands on other musicians. Watch a guitar teacher hear it fresh and try to explain, in real time, what these two are actually doing to each other and to the room.

## The generous one

Ask anyone in Irish music and the word that comes back about Glen is *generous*. For sixteen years he ran a Christmas Eve busk outside the Gaiety Theatre for the Simon Community, drawing half of Dublin's musicians into the cold to raise money for the homeless. When Shane MacGowan was buried in 2023, it was Glen who organized the music and led "Fairytale of New York" as the family danced in the aisles. He was the connector, the one who pulled people into the song — often literally.

There is a piece of footage that captures this better than any obituary could. A filmmaker traveling with Glen in Italy to shoot video promos wandered with him into a backstage area in Ferrara and found Jack Johnson and his band warming up. Glen was waved in to play a song, and the whole spontaneous thing was caught on a single camera, with a wide shot filmed from the stage by his friend Seán Kangataran and the audio salvaged on a phone by Andrea Scarso. Nobody planned it. That was simply what happened around Glen Hansard.

Husband, father, son, brother, friend

Behind the Oscar and the anthems was a humble man: a husband to Maire, a father to their young son Christy, a son of James and Catherine, a brother to Gary, Dylan, Richard, David and Martina, and a friend to more people than any cathedral could hold. At his funeral his brother Richard spoke of an evening with Glen as one filled with songs and stories, tea and chips, and above all the feeling of being completely seen. His widow, Maire, thanked him from the altar for a life spent searching for beauty and truth side by side.

## The farewell

The goodbye took two days. On Monday the third they opened the Baroque Chapel at IMMA in Kilmainham, and more than eleven thousand people came — some queueing before daybreak — to pass by his wicker coffin. The funeral was the next afternoon at St Patrick's Cathedral, and they carried him there through the streets on a horse-drawn hearse. Bono, The Edge, Eddie Vedder, Hozier, Imelda May, Damien Dempsey, Damien Rice and much of the cast of *The Commitments* were among the mourners, though the day belonged, as it should have, to family and neighbours. Eddie Vedder and Markéta Irglová sang "The Song of Good Hope"; Lisa O'Neill sang "Old Note"; his brother Gary sang with The Frames. The Very Reverend William Morton said Glen was one of those people remembered not for what he achieved but for the goodness he brought to other lives. At the end, the whole church rose into Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" as they carried him out.

What endures

Losing someone like Glen can feel, from this distance, like a thread back to the old country being quietly cut. But that's not quite right, and I keep reminding myself of it. The thread was never the man alone — it was the thing he carried: music as community, the door held open, the stranger pulled into the chorus. That doesn't die in a crash on a Dublin road. It's in every busker who takes his corner, every Christmas Eve someone sings for the Simon Community, every kitchen where two people work out a song because they can't quite say the thing any other way.

Rest easy, Glen. You were, by every account of every person who knew you, really, really loved.