Glen Hansard: the man who made everyone feel like a friend

There are musicians whose careers can be measured in albums, awards and sold-out concerts.
And then there was Glen Hansard, whose life seems almost impossible to fit into a list of achievements. Singer, songwriter, guitarist, actor, frontman, solo artist, activist, busker — and, above all, a friend.
He died in Dublin on July 29 at the age of 56, following a motorcycle crash in the early hours of the morning.
He had spent the previous evening doing what seemed most natural to him: playing music, surrounded by other musicians. His death brought an extraordinary wave of tributes, but the farewell held in Dublin on August 4 perhaps explained better than anything else why his loss felt so personal to so many people.
At St Patrick’s Cathedral, Bono tried to put that feeling into words.
The U2 singer spoke about his extraordinary ability to make almost everyone he met feel like his best friend.
It was not simply a tribute to a famous musician; it was a description of a man who seemed to erase the distance between the stage and the audience.
Outside the cathedral, hundreds of people gathered, while thousands more followed the funeral online.

It was a fitting image for someone who had started his own journey far away from the spotlight.
Glen Hansard began busking on the streets of Dublin as a teenager, eventually founding The Frames and becoming one of Ireland’s most distinctive singer-songwriters. He later formed The Swell Season with Czech musician Markéta Irglová, and together they reached an audience far beyond Ireland through the film Once. Their song “Falling Slowly” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2008.
For many people, however, he had already entered their lives years earlier.
In 1991, he appeared in Alan Parker’s cult film The Commitments, playing Outspan Foster, the guitarist in the fictional Dublin soul band. It was an early encounter with the young Hansard before the Oscar, before the international tours and before the friendships with some of the biggest names in music.

Because Glen Hansard never really separated music from people. His circle included Bono, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith and countless musicians who shared stages, studios and streets with him. Springsteen remembered him as a great musician, a good friend and a generous, gracious man.
Perhaps the most moving of those friendships began in one of the darkest moments of his life.
In 2010, during a Swell Season concert, a young audience member died by suicide after jumping onto the stage.
Glen Hansard later described the experience as profoundly traumatic and said he was unsure whether he could continue touring. Eddie Vedder heard what had happened and called him. He continued calling for several days, simply to make sure he was coping, and that gesture became the beginning of a friendship that lasted for more than 15 years, including tours and musical collaborations.

At Hansard’s funeral, Vedder returned the gesture in the most appropriate language they both knew: music. Alongside Irglová, he performed Hansard’s “The Song of Good Hope”, before joining other musicians for Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young”. Bono and The Edge, meanwhile, transformed U2’s “Beautiful Day” into a special spoken-word tribute, while Patti Smith sent a recorded message for Hansard’s family and friends.
But there was another side to Hansard’s generosity that went far beyond the music industry, as he had been involved with homelessness causes in Dublin since he was a teenager and became one of the leading figures behind the city’s famous Christmas Eve charity busk. Over the years, the event brought together stars and street musicians to raise money for the Dublin Simon Community, generating more than €2 million and helping fund services for people experiencing homelessness.
In 2016, he went even further, becoming involved in the controversial Apollo House occupation, when activists and artists transformed an empty Dublin office building into temporary accommodation for homeless people. Hansard later admitted he had regrets about some aspects of the campaign, but never about trying to make a difference. For him, music was not something that existed separately from real life. It was a way of entering it.

That may ultimately be what makes Glen Hansard’s story so difficult to reduce to an obituary.
He won an Oscar, made acclaimed records, acted in a cult film, toured with some of the greatest musicians of his generation and performed on some of the world’s biggest stages. But the stories emerging after his death are often about phone calls, friendships, charity concerts, unexpected collaborations and people who felt that, somehow, Glen had made time for them.
Eddie Vedder recently returned to Dublin and busked on Grafton Street, the same place where Hansard had started playing as a teenager. It was more than a tribute. It was a musician standing in the place where another musician’s story had begun.
And perhaps Bono found the simplest way to explain the legacy Glen Hansard leaves behind: he was the kind of person who could make everyone feel like a friend.
For a musician, that might be the rarest hit of all.