Episode 316 - Glen Hansard

Introduction to Glenn Hansard

0:00Hello there, and welcome to Soda Jerker on Songwriting. Brian and Simon here, and joining us for episode 316 is an acclaimed, Oscar-winning Irish singer-songwriter known not only for his fine solo work, but also as frontman of influential rock band The Frames and one-half

0:33of folk duo this well season. The Dubliners' brand-new album, Don't Settle, Volume 1 Transmissions East, recorded live in Berlin in the spring of 2025, sees him revisit songs written under all of those musical guises, from a catalogue spanning well over three decades. We're delighted to welcome the excellent Glenn Hansard to the show. Glenn was born in 1970, the second of four kids, and grew up in Ballymun on the outskirts of Dublin. As a kid, he was exposed to a lot of traditional Irish music and rebel songs, before the life-changing moments he

1:04was bestowed with a cassette copy of More Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits by his girlfriend's brother. He spent the next couple of years shut away in his bedroom, playing Dylan songs on his uncle's guitar, and drawing further inspiration from the likes of Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, and Fairport Convention. A somewhat wayward youth, he quit school at 13 at the encouragement of his headmaster, who'd spotted Glenn's musical potential. By 15, he was already a stalwart of the Grafton Street busking scene, and by the dawn of the 90s, his by then undeniable talent had earned him a recording deal with Ireland, at which point

1:36he assembled the frames. They released their debut album, Another Love Song, in 1991, the same year Glenn made his acting debut as guitarist Outspan Foster in Alan Parker's classic 1991 musical comedy, The Commitments. And that wouldn't be his last appearance on the big screen. In 2007, he starred opposite his swell season partner Marketa Erglova in the indie drama Once, written and directed by original frames bassist John Carney. A tender and impossibly charming love story about a Dublin busker and a Czech immigrant, shot on a minuscule

2:06budget, the film proved a surprise success. Glenn and Marketa earned widespread praise for both their affecting performances and their songs, ultimately winning an Academy Award for Falling Slowly, once was later adapted into a Tony Award-winning stage musical. Glenn and Marketa have also made several records together as The Swell Season, the most recent of which was last year's Forward. With half a dozen Frames albums under his belt, our guest commenced his solo career in earnest with 2012's Rhythm and Repose, while other sterling efforts include 2015's Didn't He

2:36Ramble, 2019's This Wild Willing, and 2023's All That Was East Is West Of Me Now. If you're a first-time listener to the Soda Jerker podcast, we'd love you to follow, rate and review the show at your pod provider of choice, explore our vast archive and support us at sodajerker.com slash donate. Before we move on, our thanks to Steve for his help setting up the interview. Right, we hope you enjoy this conversation with the marvellous Glenn Hansard. Come on, my little ruin, won't you open up and let me in?

3:09Time has not been kind, but you're still standing here.

3:17Leave a light on in your window, won't you let me see a sign? It's gonna take more than smoke and mirrors now for me this time.

Recording live in Berlin

3:29So, don't settle Volume 1, Transmissions East, it'll be out by the time people hear this. Yeah. It could have just been a best-of, that, couldn't it? But you've gone so much further, reinterpreting the songs and adding that live performance element. It's so kind of fresh and energised, we thought. Well, I did a gig, the first time that Brian and Rick came to see my new management, I was playing a show in Holland, in The Hague. And there was about 2,000 people there. And it was in one of these lovely kind of amphitheatres that were built maybe by the government, kind

4:03of a modern amphitheatre, very nice venue. And it began to really lash down about six songs into the set. But I said, why don't you guys just all come onto the stage? Because the stage was huge, you know, there was like lots of space around us. Well, about a thousand people came on the stage and just sat down around the band. And it created the most beautiful atmosphere. And suddenly what was kind of a bit of a weird gig turned into one of those

4:33kind of almost love-ins where everything just felt really intimate and great. And we played out the show. And afterwards, the guys were like, wow, we came to the show thinking that you were going to be like, well, we thought you were going to come see the guy from Once with it. You know, you're going to sing some songs on an acoustic guitar, which we were happy about. But you're a rock band and those songs you played, God, they really landed. They really came across. And then Brian said, I made a playlist of your records from the set list that you played that night. And I went on the plane home, I listened to the playlist

5:07of your records. And he said, they're good. But like, now I know that there was something special going on with the gig. And so you're definitely a live act. And those songs, they deserve to be heard in the context of what you do on stage. So I had a thought, there's a great place in Berlin and it's in the round. And what you did that day was inadvertently in the round and accidentally in the round. Why don't we go into that place? We could do it on your birthday. We could do it on a day that's special to you. And we could record all of these songs and not do a best of, but do a retrospective of your whole career in

5:42front of an audience. So that's where the idea was born. And we did it on my birthday, my 55th birthday. And I had the time of my life. I loved it. Everything just felt really intimate. We had a controlled environment and basically made a studio album, but in front of an audience. Yeah. It's a very immersive record because some live albums don't really succeed in putting the listener in that environment. But this one really does. Maybe it's because of the way it was recorded in the round and stuff, but to listen to it, you really do get a sense of the atmosphere. Yeah, you do. And we recorded it over two shows because, you know, I'm a real believer in the

6:16live thing, meaning that you tie it down to an arrangement. Of course, there's an arrangement and of course the band all know what's coming, but we always reserve the right to just go with the moment. And so sometimes what feels great on the night as a live version of a song doesn't necessarily translate into a recording because you have to have been there. So we gave ourselves two nights and so we got the best of the songs. If you were to go for the version of the song that maybe went over the best on the night, it may not be the best song on the record. It's a funny thing. Like for instance, for a long time, I've done a cover

6:47of Astro Weeks by Van Morrison, just me and a guitar. It's something that hung over from my busking days. I love that song and I would do it on stage, but I've never been able to put it on a record because it's so wild. It's so about the energy of that moment that it ends up sounding quite unmusical when you try to put it on a record. And you did it with no vocal overdubs, no retakes, no editing. Are those constraints kind of the key to getting that intensity of performance? You're sort of laying it all on the line essentially?

7:17Yeah. I mean, you always give yourself the option to, if you get a lyric wrong, to punch a lyric. But generally speaking, the rule that I would stick very much to is if the energy's there and you're singing a little bit out of tune, like it's that Dylan thing of like, you listen to those early records, people playing wrong notes, things are out of tune. And it's just that thing of like, no, we don't go in and fix it because every little fix is a nail in the coffin. You know, it's a bit like you allow yourself four things. You know, you say,

7:47okay, if there's four things on this record that I really can't stand and it'd be so easy to fix, I'm going to let myself do it. There was a lyric in Down on Our Knees that I got wrong and I fixed it. It was literally like it was one word, but I fixed it because it really annoyed me. And there was a verse I was singing in that song that I just kind of didn't feel as connected to. So I cut that verse out. So there are edits, but there's not much, you know, there's really very little. throw your arms to heaven, throw your arms round me, throw your arms to heaven, give

8:36and you will receive.

Building expansive setlists

8:43Your body of work's pretty expansive now, isn't it? So did you have to come up with some rules about how to distill it down, you know, in terms of deciding which songs made the cut on this volume? Expansive, but not expensive. No, do you know what? I didn't. I just wrote a set list based on what I would be doing at that time. I mean, if you look at it, I hardly do anything from the swell season and it's not because I consciously left that off. It's just because that wasn't in my gig at that point. I think the only songs from the swell season are when

9:15your mind's made up and one of us must lose, but that's not a conscious decision. That's just on the night. I just was like, oh, I'll do this song or I'll do this one. And also I do write a set list, but it happens pretty much every concert that I don't stick to that set list. And I'm so lucky with the band I have. I've been playing with these guys for so long that I can go anywhere I want on the stage. And that's the energy you're trying to create is that when people come to see a concert or come into a live event, they're coming to something that's happening in front of them, not something that's been rehearsed within

9:48an inch of its life. And it's the same show every night, everywhere they go. What you would love to think is that every time you go on stage, you've at least got a good show in you. You've at least got something decent, or if there's a mistake, it'll be right there for everyone to see. I'm a big fan of putting your hands up and saying, it's just live music and things happen in live music. Amps break and guitars go out of tune and lyrics get forgotten and the audience have an influence. There's the band, there's the audience, there's the room. All those elements combine another element, which is the night itself,

10:20whatever that is going to be. There's a lot of songs now. I'm almost 56 now. There's a lot of songs. And I just wanted to go out and do a kind of a nice cross section of what I'm enjoying playing because songs don't always last. You have a time with them and then some songs will mean something to you forever. And so they're the ones you end up playing. There's a handful of songs there. Fitzcarraldo, Revelate, songs that I'll always play as long as I can sing because they're always going to mean something to me. Yeah. I was going to ask about Fitzcarraldo actually, because that goes back to kind of early frames albums. And do you find that a lot of that original feeling is kind of still

10:55accessible to you? Do some songs stay exactly in that moment and others maybe evolve into something else? Exactly. Exactly that. I mean, if you go with the notion that the song sings you, then you can always go back to your old songs and inhabit them. Some people say to me, like, how can you sing Falling Slowly? Like, how can you still sing that song over and over and over? And the truth of the matter is you're not singing it. It's singing you. You're inhabiting it. You get into it. You put it on like an outfit. And also you're listening to the song through the audience's ears, not your own ears. So you're not going, oh, I'm so bored singing

11:29this. No, you're showing up and you're being present and you're singing the song and you're experiencing it like everyone's experiencing it. You know, a song like Fitzcarraldo was such a strong feeling. I mean, I was signed to Island Records when I was 18 by Chris Blackwell. It was a huge moment in my life. We made a record. It wasn't a great record. It was fine. I mean, I don't want to diss my first record, but it was a very confused affair. I probably would have made a fairly decent folk record had I not discovered the Pixies halfway through making the record. I took acid and went on the roof of a car park and discovered Surferosa

12:03and it did have an impact on my first record, probably a negative one. Gil Norton did a great job on it. Al Clay did a great job. I had wanted Steve Albini to produce that record, but probably what would have been a better record is if I had just made a country record. But anyway, I made the record I made. Blackwell left and then we got dropped. And I went to New York and it's funny, the record label did a weird thing. They said, we're going to drop you, but we're going to send you to New York to work with a couple of songwriters to see

12:33if maybe that works out. And of course I took their money and I went to New York and I spent a month there and I didn't meet anybody. I met none of the songwriters. I wasn't interested and I had the most amazing time. I wrote all these songs and all the songs were basically fuck you songs like Reveille. Sometimes they need a revelation. Fitzcarraldo, you know, Fitzcarraldo is all about pulling the ship over the mountain. It's like, I'll fucking show you. No one's going to tell me when my fucking time is up, you know? So with that in mind, those songs, I can still really get my teeth into them and I can still really mean them. And I still

13:05remember that kid and I still remember how he felt and his energy. Even the good spots can fall from grace and from truth. Like love song, the true men mystery and her last word, where I see her down in history. It's the unwilling way that we can go. And you've breathed life into your version

13:40of Carrick Fergus as well, haven't you?

Singing traditional standards

13:42And that's a song that's been sung by a lot of people, isn't it? You know, I think even Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris have sung that song. So is that a different kind of challenge? No, I mean, those are the songs I grew up on. I mean, I would have sang that song on the night completely impromptu. I think I did it as an intro to another song of mine called McCormick's Wall, which I don't know if it's on there, actually. Maybe McCormick's Wall didn't make the record and Carrick Fergus did, only because I was like, yeah, it's a standard. And the thing with standards is

14:13if you can sing a standard, well, that's the bar. If you could write a song like Carrick Fergus, you are in the A game. And I'm sure the person who wrote Carrick Fergus, I'm not sure who wrote it, it's disputed whether it's Scottish or Irish. It's an old song. But those are the kind of songs that endure. I remember seeing Prince in Madison Square Garden and for about a half an hour before Prince came on stage, it was just James Brown live footage. Big screen, James Brown at the height of his career,

14:45playing his hits on stage. And then Prince came on. And of course the attitude was, you've just seen the master. I'm better. You know, you could easily take it as it was a tribute to James Brown. No, no. What Prince was saying was, I just played half an hour of James Brown at his best. Now I'm coming on. And so doing a song like Carrick Ferguson on a new year set is a bit ballsy actually, because what you're doing is you're saying, I'm going to sing a bunch of my songs and then I'm going to drop a fucking standard. And it's going to sit comfortably in the middle of all of that. You'd hope. But, you know,

15:16I just have such great respect. And I've also got a very personal connection with that song. But I've just got such great respect for those standard Irish songs. I'd love to make a record of them one day. You've always had this ability to get to the heart of a song though. And something like Didn't He Ramble, which is also on this collection.

Writing about his father

15:32Yeah.

Writing about his father

15:33That's one with a much more personal angle. I think it was written about your dad. Yeah. Didn't He Ramble. Well, my dad's favorite bar, his local bar was the Ramble Inn. And so we used to call it the Ramble Inn, Stumble Out.

15:44He spent a lot of time in the Ramble Inn. And so when he passed, it was like, I wanted to write a tribute song to him that just felt like something he'd like. A drinking song, if you like. But also it's a heavy song because my dad wasn't really around emotionally. He was kind of a broken lad, you know. And so the song is a bit like, it's reaching out to him and just saying, look, all's forgiven. You know, we love you. And my dad loved to sing. He loved two things. He loved to drink and he loved to sing. My dad was a boxer. He was one of those men.

16:15He had been a champion boxer when he was young. He had had a family young. You know, he was angry. He was angry. He was a classic kind of, you know, a bit lost, a bit angry. And I loved him. Do you know, just before he died, I went and got drunk with him. And that was actually the closest I've ever been to him. I met him in his arena, if you like. And we had a lovely hang. And again, Didn't He Ramble is based on that old sort of, you know, the old jazz tune, Didn't He Ramble. I kind of wanted to pay homage to that too because, you know,

16:45I was paying homage to Curtis. Curtis used to play trombone in our band. Unfortunately, he passed away. But Didn't He Ramble is an old jazz standard. I liked using that title and I liked putting my slant on it and bringing Didn't He Ramble into Dublin. That's something of a challenge, isn't it, to capture the truth of that experience and maybe the truth of what a person is like, but also protect them in the song whilst being honest as well. Exactly. It's a big one for me. And when I sing it, I mean it. You know, Didn't He Ramble, Didn't He Roan,

17:16Didn't He Wander so far from home. He would disappear for days and he would arrive home with these other men and these other men would end up living on our couch for two weeks. We had a bit of an open house. People would kind of come and my dad would say, this is Tony, he's going to stay here for a couple of weeks while he gets his head together and we'd get to know Tony and we used to always refer to these men as our drunkles because they weren't exactly family but they were close, you know. And he was kind of a kind man. He was known in the local bar as Jesus Christ

17:47because he'd always buy people points, you know. Let that man a point, you know. He was a good man for the rounds and at the same time, you know, a bit lost and just an angry man and a tough man and we used to visit our family in Birmingham every year and, you know, there was a kind of a toughness around that working class Dublin family that moved to Birmingham that I found really hard and I found really tough. We were from a rough neighborhood ourselves but our summers in Birmingham, God, they really opened my eyes.

18:18Just sort of seeing my dad in that environment, it was something, you know, like I loved him but he was definitely he was a drinking man. Let me ramble And didn't she roam A deadly wonder So far from home And didn't it go down

18:50In desire for too long And don't we look good now Sing this song Your delivery on that song is pretty intense, isn't it? As is Don't Settle as well. Do you ever sing with that intensity during the writing process? Is that part of the writing process or is it something you bring in later when you're performing it? Not at all. If you even listen

19:21to the album version of Don't Settle, I'm just singing a song. The intensity is not something I intend. Like, people often say to me you're a really intense singer I'm not, Jesus Christ, you're always shouting And I go, wow, maybe it's a hangover one from the busking days where you had to always project but I also think it's to do with the emotion of the song calling something up in you and again, as I said, the song sings you. You don't necessarily sing it. You're not in control in that moment. You're trying to give your lyrics the best chance to live.

19:53So yeah, there's an intensity in that song that when I play it on stage I just try to serve it as best I can. Do you still take your songs apart when you're writing and sort of explore every possible avenue? I've heard you say that you sometimes will almost try and break something in a song, like you'll take something out that you like and see if it still holds up and this sort of stuff, would you still do that now or was that more of a kind of early way of experimenting?

Avoiding easy songwriting habits

20:17No, I'd still do it. I mean, of course, there are easy avenues of the brain and the word heart and the word love, they tend to show up a lot in songs and they're very songwriter-y words. So when I find myself singing them, it was actually Damien Reuss who said it to me, he said, you know, you sing heart and love a lot and I said, well, you sing about love and heart a lot but you actually don't mention it a lot. He says, yeah, I do it consciously. I leave those words out because those words are the easy avenues and he said, every time you sing the word, replace it with a word

20:48that is really uncomfortable for you. So like, you know, every time you use the word heart, replace it with a word that's really nasty and you'll see what happens. You start kind of watching yourself for those easy words that keep falling out of you and so I do that. Yeah, I do it because when a lyric feels easy, that can be a great thing and when a lyric feels easy, it can be just laziness. So I am looking at it, you know, and sometimes if the lyric feels easy and it feels lazy but it's the right lyric, if it's the truth, it's going to land because if you're singing the truth,

21:19it'll always land even if it's schmaltzy. One thing I can't stand in songs is when I hear the left brain, when I listen to a great songwriter and I hear that person has spent way too long on that line and it just turns me off, I'm not interested. The great songwriters sit somewhere where it sounds easy and yet the lyric hits you, you know, it lands and that's where someone like Joni Mitchell is a master. I met Joni once and she said, just make your life rhyme. That's it. That's the job. Sing your life and make it rhyme.

21:50Rhyme your truth as a challenge. I know in the past you've built songs out of improvisation and jamming. I think I'll Be You Be Me was one that arrived that way. But how much of your work begins like that these days and how do you know when one of these jams is worth keeping? Less and less actually. Less and less of my work is starting off that way these days because I'm tending to do a lot of my writing, especially since having a kid. I was doing a lot of my songwriting just alone. Whereas I love being with a band,

22:20I love being with a group of people and just letting stuff come and flow and catching stuff, maybe catching on your phone or remembering something after a soundcheck and being like, wow, I want to go back to that. What was that thing? God, that had an energy. With that record in particular, This Wild Willing, I met three Iranian brothers in Paris and they played Iranian traditional music and beautiful musicians. The Koshravesh brothers, beautiful guys. And I invited them to the studio without having any idea what I wanted them to do. And they came to the studio

22:50with me, which was a four-hour drive from Paris. I also booked a couple of electronic musicians, friends of mine that I really loved, Dunk Murphy and Dave Cleary. And so we went into the studio and we just, I just said to one of the lads, build something there, just build a sound. And the Iranian lads were great because they were like, listen, all we want to know is what the lyric is because we don't play to the melody, we play to the lyric. So I was coming up with little bits of song. It was forcing me to come up with ideas quicker. And I was like, so with this one,

23:21I'll be you, be me. And it's funny actually, there's a funny story because in that song, my friend Dave came up with this amazing beat. He was like, and it sounded like it was from a cassette. He said, this is an old cassette beat. This beat is from the session that Bowie did with Queen. And it was an old cassette bootleg of it going around this song with this beat on it. And he said, no one will ever know, like, it's a deep cut from the demo. I know I love the idea that I was singing over

23:53something that had come from a drum machine in the session with Bowie and Queen. I just thought it was like finding something in an antique store. It has energy and you pull it into your world. And so I started just playing this very simple riff over it. You know, anyway, we ended up getting the song and I explained the lyrics to the Kosher West brothers and they played on it. And then for some reason I was listening to the radio about a month after that and I heard my song on the radio. I just said, same sound exactly.

24:24And I went, what the hell is this? And it was a Queen song, but it was like the first song off their biggest selling album of all time. And I said to my mate Dave, oh no, you've landed us in it because the song has been recorded and mixed and then we had to go to Brian May and ask him, could we use it? And I ended up giving him like 50% of the publishing and like 10 grand in cash. It was awful. Next time somebody brings a cassette loop in, I'll be like, oh Jesus. You know, Fair Play to Queen though, they let us use it. I'll be you,

24:54be me and I'll be you and me won't sing no more about it.

25:06How about you be me and I'll be you and I'll be you and I'll just leave where we found you.

Trusting the subconscious

25:21A lot of the songwriters we talk to, they say that they tend to write gibberish. You know, most of the lyrics that they come up with are nonsensical at first. So it's interesting that you were coming up with stuff that had to mean something in that case quite early on. Well, for those guys, I just wanted to give them what I was getting at because they were like, when you climb the hill of vision, what does this mean? And I was like, well, you know, when you've kind of achieved your goals because again, I'm just letting stuff come true sometimes. It's left brain, right brain stuff. I let the right brain, meaning the creative side,

25:51just come up with things and vignettes and feelings and then as I'm hearing myself sing, I go, oh, now I know exactly what I'm actually saying here. It's like trusting the body to speak. I mean, I was a huge fan of early REM where you'd listen to Stipe go into an emotion like Hair Shirt from Green was one of my favourite songs. I used to busk it. I actually got to ask Michael about that song because I always thought it was gibberish that he had somehow pulled into sense and he said to me, oh, no, no, no, no, those lyrics

26:22were absolutely written. They were very specific, you know, and I was like, oh gosh, one must trust the body. If you open your mouth and don't edit, the body will say what your mind is probably afraid to. Yeah, we have heard that as well, the idea that the subconscious is sort of giving you stuff but you have to kind of sift through it for what the truth might be. Exactly, and you've got to get out of your own way because if you stay in your own way, you'll insist everything makes sense and if everything makes sense, the song has no life. There's no blood in it.

26:52The blood is what's important, not the truth, not the great lyric. What's important is does it live? Is this song alive? Does it have a beaten heart? If it has a beaten heart, and there's basically no lyrics, have at it. If it has great lyrics and no beaten heart, which do you prefer? I know which one I prefer. So I don't put too much stock in it sounding smart or intelligent or I'm a big believer in allow yourself to be dumb. I don't think you're much into sort of noodling either, are you? So does that mean when you pick up an instrument, you're very deliberately looking for a song

27:22to happen? I mean, I pick up the guitar at home when I'm in a certain mood. I very rarely play, actually. I generally speak and prefer to play with people, but sometimes I'll pick up the guitar and just noodle away on it. But it's not that I'm always going after a song. Songs just aerial in in some ways. And then a couple of times I've been given a job of writing a song. Like on, you know, some of the once stuff, we were given the job of writing a song for a scene and the scene goes like this and I need a song that does this. But you're still mining from what's there.

27:52You're still mining from what might be kind of hanging in the back of your head or might be an old idea.

Burning forty years of journals

27:58Like I had a moment recently where I burned 40 years of lyrics and photographs. I just burned them because I just thought, you know what? I had so many journals like back from 1983 and I took them all and I went, you know what? I looked at them, I had a quick flick through them all and I put them in the fire and I felt so free because I thought everything that's good in my career, every good line I wrote in this journal is in a song. The rest of it's just nonsense. So I just got rid of it all and it was brilliant

28:28and so freeing and got rid of a lot of old photos and books and it was great and like notes that people had given me, letters that people had sent me and some of it I already regret burning. I've kept the last five years of my journaling but the freedom to just burn all that stuff and get on and be like, wow, okay, now I'm not burdened with that. Now when I pass away my wife doesn't have to deal with all of that shit. It's gone, you know. Wow, that's brave. It's good. I have to say I recommend it

28:59because it leaves you with only what you're thinking now. And I know you're a fan of a nice notebook, aren't you? I hope you didn't burn any of the premium ones. No, I've got a collection of these. There's these ones I found in Germany that have a lovely steel binding but I love stationery. Who doesn't? I'd love to open a stationery shop or an antique shop if I ever because I used to fix bicycles too so that would be another avenue. A bicycle shop that sold exquisite stationery, that'd be a good idea.

29:24And the stuff that's in the notebooks, is it like snippets of poetry or prose or is it mainly song lyrics specifically? No, not at all. It's everything. It's like diary entries, stroke rhymes, stroke phone numbers of people that you said you'd get back in touch with or, you know, it's your brain. It's just your brain for that year. And there's a lot of lyrics in there. I really liked that idea that Leonard Cohen would have. If the song has four verses, write ten and whittle them back down to the four that work for you.

29:56Like I have a song right now called On Diamond Hill. It's a very simple song. It's two verses. But if you go through my journal, there's probably 20 pages of that song. And they probably all start with the same lyric but they all change as I go. And then I open a new page and I start writing the song again until I nail it and then four lines are appearing through every draft and then six lines are appearing through every draft. But the thing is I never have the final draft written in my notebook. For some reason I'm really lazy that way or maybe it's some kind of spooky thing of not wanting

30:28to nail the song. The only time I put the actual proper lyric is when I'm putting the lyrics on for an album cover. I'll type it out and I go, oh, there it is finished. But you'll never find the finished lyric in my notebook. It's always leading right up to the point where I actually finish it. Am I right in thinking that you learned some writing techniques from your wife who's a poet? Yeah, my wife's a poet. You know, because I left school young. I didn't study. I wasn't like, I was pretty good in school but I didn't know about things like alliteration or half rhyme

30:58or emotional rhyme. Sometimes a thing doesn't have to rhyme. You have to feel it. If you feel it, then it rhymes. So she got me into poetry in a different way or would read poetry to me. Her father was a famous poet too in Finland and also she woke me up to the idea that the English-speaking world has its heroes. Yes, it has its Shakespeare's and its Bob Dylan's and whatnot but every language has those characters. So the world's full of great, great artists. The English-speaking world just kind of only wants to see its own but in fact,

31:30there are so many and so it just kind of opens you up. You know, it's not that my wife would criticise but she might say, I really like that. Just stick at it a bit more. Just give it a bit more because you're really close to something great there and I have to say I really appreciate that and sometimes I disagree. Sometimes I say, nope, it's enough. It speaks for me. I like it. Language is so interesting in that way, isn't it? And as you said, what might be technically great might not be emotionally great. One hundred percent. There are a lot of great technical writers

32:00and I know this from songwriters that I've enjoyed but I listen to the lyrics and I just go, nah, too smart. Too clever. Just give me, like give me Hank Williams. That's the middle ground. It's the pay on of pain and a clever lyric. Just be clever enough to be good. Don't try to be great in your rhyming scheme and I fall victim to it too. Sometimes I can't resist wanting to be a little technically smart in a lyric but actually, music isn't hygiene as my great friend said.

32:31It's not hygienic. It's dirty. Music's dirty. It's what happens when you say a certain word against a certain rhythm, against a certain melody. Music's about this weird cojoining of feelings and spirits. Poetry is just the word so it needs to be watertight. You know, whereas music, music is this kind of mess. It's like Super 8 film over a melody and that's why visuals and music work so well together because songs are a very visual thing. They're a very,

33:01actually sometimes I think videos kill music because, you know, you've got your own visual for a song and then the artist or the video maker puts their interpretation on it and ruins it for everybody. You know, if I listen to Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, it's a very particular place I go to that I can't describe but it's a very particular factory I'm in where all those noises and the there are some songs that just put you in a place that is so gorgeous and then you want to just thank that artist

33:31from the bottom of your heart for the rest of your life because they've found a place in you that you invented but they created. Gonna Ride that river To the sea Gonna Try that river Out of me Is it true

34:10that you don't believe in being too fluent on your particular instruments? Well, again, it's for the same reason. It's about avoiding being smart. Like, I mean, I'm such a huge fan of great guitar players. Angus Young was my first hero. Like, Angus is my confirmation name. He was my god. But it's about that thing of being technical. I'm nervous if I get too good on an instrument I'll stop being natural on an instrument. I'd much prefer it to hear someone who's a natural musician than a grey musician. And maybe some people are grey and natural.

34:41Best of looks at them. I don't think I'm one of them. Like Mark Knopfler. Mark Knopfler is grey and natural. Some people we talk to they find that they can take long breaks in their writing. They don't need to kind of write for maintenance if you like or to keep their skills sharp. Where do you sit on that spectrum? I think it's good to keep the hand warm. I think it's good to try to just be writing something. You know it's a bit like if you're drawing and you don't draw all the time you will lose your line. And I think a songwriter also has a line.

35:11And so yeah I'd be in the corner of trying to be writing something at some point. I always find that the scariest part for me is when I just finished a record. I finished an album of new songs. And once that happens I go fallow. There's nothing in me. I've got nothing. I don't pick up an instrument for months. I get to the end of that line and I'm done. I go quiet for a few months and then I start getting ideas again and I trust it. But it does go away. It goes away and comes back. You mentioned before about wants

35:42and maybe having to write specifically to a scene. Does that mean that you can just kind of turn it on if you need to and can just respond to a brief? Yes to an extent. But what I'd be drawing on to do that is something that pre-exists. Like if you put a guitar in my hand and said man walks into a shop dog is left outside dog waits man never returns here's the song of the dog. I probably wouldn't be able to write you that song straight away. But if you said to me that's a scene I'd go into my thoughts and I'd go

36:12I'll wait for you. And I remember a song of mine and then I'll just move the lyrics around and make it about the dog. I could even emotionally make it about the dog and it'll make sense because lyrics are funny things. They're just energy. They can kill you or they can put your lights on. They just exist. It's where you put yourself emotionally in that spot is what makes the song work in that way or not. So songs are funny that way. There's a lot of leeway with music and words. An awful lot of leeway actually that you can allow yourself.

The making of Once

36:43So when John said okay so the two characters in one go to a recording studio the engineer guy's not that impressed with them he thinks they look like a motley crew of characters and he's like oh god I've got to spend the next two days with these then you have to play a song that blows his head. You have to play a song that's really good and that really goes there and shows him that you're a good songwriter. Now there's a brief that's a tough brief because he's telling you to start off a bit shoddy and then get really good you know and so

37:14I was like yeah there's a song I'd worked on with the frames a couple of years ago maybe this down the ground the bone down the bone so it's in 5-4 but it's a bit sloppy at the beginning and so if you ever want something and you call call then I'll come running when your mind's made up when your mind's made up there's no point trying to change it which in itself is a simple little thing where the song kind of becomes something is when you lean into when your mind when your mind

37:45when your mind and then you go and that's the bit maybe where the studio guy goes shit well if anything they're intense as in like he's committed to it he means it anyway and we had basically 24 hours to kind of write the song so the second verse in that song in the film is really rough because we didn't really get a chance to finish it but the energy was there and so the song lands yeah I mean all those songs hold up so well from that film it's incredible you know you could have had that whole Oscar category to yourself that year that's great

38:16thank you that's very sweet of you to say there was a kind of a nice turn of fortune in that film because the songs were kind of meant to be just like a minute of the song or whatever but John realised pretty quickly that because we were non-actors our acting wasn't great I mean it wasn't bad but you know we weren't delivering the dialogue maybe as strongly as he had hoped and he had a bit of an epiphany where he said I'm gonna leave the whole songs in and cut back on the dialogue

38:47in this film so if you look at once there's very little said in it there's a lot of songs a lot of singing and there's a lot of lyrics and there's a lot of meaning in the lyrics but there's very little actual dialogue in the movie and it was kind of an inspired choice by him because it meant that the songs basically did all the heavy lifting which I was really happy about and Mark got it too when your mind's made up when your mind's made up there's no point trying to change it

39:18when your mind's made up when your mind's made up there's no point even talking when your mind's made up when your mind's made up there's no point trying to fight it when your mind's your mind's made up

39:54Did that collaboration with Marketa teach you anything new about the process? Oh, I mean vastly The one thing about Marketa is she is one of these absolute naturals she'll find a harmony to anything I sing and again she's not a super technical piano player she's quite a simple piano player but really good very intuitive has an amazing ear for like a top line melody she can write chorus melody really quickly and lyrically she's like a dog

40:24with a bone she can just go after a lyric and go what if you say this and I remember one of the first questions she said to me when we first started playing music together she's like what's this song about and I was like well it's about this she was like did this happen to you and I was like well I mean metaphorically like what do you mean metaphorically what does that mean and I was like well you know my heart got broken but did this happen to you and I said no she said well why are you singing it and I was like well it's artistic license you're allowed to speak a bit more broadly but Marketa's very direct

40:55she tends to sing very directly and so she's really good in a situation like you've got 24 hours to write this lyric or write this song because she'll follow through on the lyric idea really quickly you've also talked about your childhood as the wealthier writing a source you can sort of keep drawing from does that ever feel like it's running low or does it keep sort of revealing new depths well I mean when does your childhood end that's a good question I had a fairly dramatic upbringing in a lot of ways moving around a lot

41:25and I would say a stormy home if you've ever read Shuggy Bain by Douglas Stewart I recommend it I met Douglas Stewart on the street and I gave him a hug and I just said wow thank you for writing I mean not my life but just thank you for writing that book it was just so so powerful also being a bit of a wild kid myself I was kind of getting into trouble known to services isn't that the term you know actually my uncle was a big inspiration for me there was a bit of prison time and the guitar

41:55got left in my house and I learned how to play and I was fortunate once I discovered the guitar my days of being known to services were over because I disappeared into my room and I learned how to play guitar and I never looked back I suddenly found what it was I really really wanted which was to play music I just picked up this book Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies Man on your recommendation oh wow well done I'm going to recommend two pieces for you there's a The End of My Life in Art that's one piece

42:27I'd recommend you read and then How to Speak Poetry of course which is a wonderful wonderful piece of writing you take a lot from literature don't you and books and it kind of accumulates in you doesn't it and comes out in your songs well you just take it from where you find it you take it from where it hits you you know as a 22 year old it was lost and just dropped by Island Records I saw Fitzcarraldo on the TV it was on Channel 4 and I remember when the end credits were up on the screen writing down as many of the names as I could remember and going to my

42:58Extra Vision the local video store and saying do you have this film because I'd only caught like half of it and they rented it for me and I got Fitzcarraldo and I remember that was one of those films that really spoke to me here's a guy who's so determined so single minded and I really needed that because I was so lost at the time that that film hit me between the eyes so you take it where you can find it I mean Leonard's a great inspiration I mean he's lived a full life and he's written about it that's a particularly great book though what he does is he writes a piece

43:28and then he answers the piece he reviews his own writing so each piece he writes he goes back to it some years later and reviews it and it's all in that book I don't necessarily agree with the man he is in that book but I love the honesty of it it's powerful yeah and wasn't there a line from was it Hemingway that you've used when you've been stuck oh yeah well Hemingway said if you're stuck and you can't write just write one line that's true just write something that's true and everything else

43:59will come out of that line and again songwriting it can be a lot of hocus pocus it can be a lot of rhymey rhymey and then you say one thing in that song that is actually true and suddenly the song has muscle it has protein it has energy that song is now a living thing because you've just opened up and said something and that's the drug that's what we're following is accumulative for you this learning do you feel like it produces better songs or every time you start out is it just as hard as it always was

44:29doesn't necessarily accumulate better songs and again you're never competing with yourself I mean I kind of consider myself having maybe four different kinds of songs that I just keep rewriting and I keep rewriting them and trying to get them better and better because I have chord progressions I go to I've got rhythms that are natural to me I've got grooves and things that I'm attracted to and I do try to break out of it and I do try to break my habits but at the end of the day I'm just trying to write ten good songs that's my life goal I want to write ten good songs and if I write ten good songs

45:00I am done that's it it's like building a piece of furniture you've built a chair that will serve people beyond you that's the craft and it's not about being rich the greatest compliment you'll ever get is if someone plays your song you know I learnt your song because I like it that's it that's your riches right there world and burns up that weather world here I come world may all fall together

45:34world lost has begun I was all busy do this so turn along see the love fires burning at the feast of Saint John see the heroes return oh but one that was

Reflecting on the conversation

46:01Glenn Hansard talking to us about his songwriting process and his new live retrospective Don't Settle Volume 1 Transmissions East he's a songwriting oracle that guy isn't he he is yeah so much wisdom and nuance about how to do the work much as I expected really yeah me too and I loved what he said about choosing Carrick Fergus to sit alongside his songs too almost like a statement about the quality of his work yeah I love the idea that he just thought well yeah of course the standard will work fine in this set and it does as well it's a brilliant strategy

46:32isn't it it really is I hadn't thought about Prince's use of James Brown in that way either really no no me I would have thought doing something like that would be more about just like acknowledging the influence and the admiration rather than setting this standard that he wants to surpass yeah it's really interesting and how about him burning all those old songbooks yeah it must have been like Fahrenheit 451 in Glenn's backyard but yeah that's certainly something contrary to what we've heard from a lot of other guests yeah and we ourselves are forever keeping folders of stuff

47:03and archives of ideas and voice notes aren't we yeah and I guess it demonstrates a hell of a lot of confidence to just go right all the good lines have been mined they're all in songs those songs exist and I don't need the burden of the archive anymore and that's quite freeing I guess yeah brave isn't it and obviously that's not going to work for every songwriter is it well no but it's just so interesting how this art form can encompass these drastically different approaches we love it don't we that it contains all these contradictions yeah Glenn obviously has a sensitive barometer

47:34for not overworking ideas or being too clever as well and that's held him in good stead hasn't it I think and he's taken a lot of guidance and advice from great writers too whether it's Joni Mitchell or Ernest Hemingway or whoever yeah he just exercises great judgment all around really doesn't he and obviously that paid dividends on wants too yeah and those songs had to ring a truth to them didn't they and so did the film yeah it's kind of Glenn's songwriting philosophy in filmic form really that film in a way isn't it you know it gets to

48:04the heart of the matter in an unfussy concise way and it's imperfect but more believable because of those imperfections it's the reason the film's so charming isn't it and probably why it was such a big success people really connect with that kind of authenticity absolutely so thanks to Glenn for that brilliant conversation Don't Settle Volume 1 Transmissions East is out now cheers to Steve for setting that up and we'll be back with you soon take care bye bye bye