That I Should Rise and You Should Not

Scrolling through social media the past two days, you’ve likely seen Glen Hansard’s face quite a bit. His curly hair in different stages of graying, his beard billowing and retreating, like a time lapse of seasons passing. He was probably holding a guitar, likely singing, and if he wasn’t, he was almost definitely smiling.

If you knew about him before his death, maybe you cried at the news. Thought back to when you saw him live, the special hold he had on a crowd, the way he sang with such love for the music. Maybe you remember the stories he told between songs, long metaphorical explanations of the feeling he was trying to capture, or how the inspiration for this next one was about a couple who spoke to the dead. You may remember who he invited onto the stage with him, or how he brought the audience to sing along. Or maybe when he unplugged his guitar and let just the instrument and his voice carry through the venue, through a crowd holding their breath in wonder.

I went to see Glen as part of The Swell Season in 2009. My sister and I drove from Las Vegas to watch the show in LA, and drove back after the concert to make my 8 a.m class. Except Glen loved playing music so much that the encore was approximately—in my memory and in the repeated story I’ve told of that concert—two hours long (and featured Jason Segel singing out his phone number). We didn’t leave LA until around two in the morning, arriving in Vegas just long enough to take a cat nap in the car before class. There was some spine-tingling story he told about a woman he met on an elevator and the loss she’d encountered, though the details escape me and the lone video I took is sitting somewhere in the purgatory of lost concert footage. Then LA Lakers coach Phil Jackson was in attendance. During Glen’s unplugged rendition of When Your Mind’s Made Up a string on his guitar snapped but he just kept right on going, to rowdy applause. These are details that aren’t very meaningful but which I feel compelled to share for some reason, reminescence as grief processing, I suppose.

Maybe, like me, you’ve been engrossed in the tributes people have posted for Glen. Fellow musicians, but more often than not, just someone who watched him play. I imagine almost everyone who watched him play has felt the urge to pen their own tribute these last two days. Even if you didn’t know about him before Wednesday morning, you might have gotten the sense already that Glen Hansard was a man who lived in a way that inspired tributes.

“You’ve built the chair that will serve people beyond you.” He often revealed this admirable life philosophy of caring about the music itself, and caring about others.

Here he is on becoming a father at 52:

“For 52 years I was the most important person in my own life, and then suddenly I got a complete perspective shift, and I’m absolutely loving it. To be of service to this young mind, to this young life, is just ...” Unusually for such a loquacious person, he is temporarily lost for words. “I can’t believe I didn’t do it before now. Isn’t it true that when the student is ready, the teacher appears?”

I came across all these videos, all these versions of him singing his songs, or other people’s songs, and he’s singing like he still loves every word of it. The sense I am left with after all of this is not as straightforward as grief or sadness. That’s there, yes. I feel the literal loss of this man and his soul. The world feels worse off because he’s gone, noticeably lacking.

But just beyond that sense of loss is awe. It’s an appreciation for how Glen Hansard seemed to approach his art, and his limited time on this earth. More than most, he understood it was limited, often ending concerts with Leonard Cohen’s Only Passing Through. I’m filled with apprecation for the goodness he spread in interviews, in his banter with the audience. I can’t and don’t aspire to the breadth or scope of his life, but I do aspire to the manner in which he viewed and impacted the world. At the heart of every Instagram tribute I saw, there is this often an acknowledgment that we are not just fans of his music, but his world view. At the passsion and selflessness and appreciation he carried with him, on and off the stage.

I’ll leave you with perhaps my favorite Glen Hansard performance. A capella, whiskey glass in hand, singing The Parting Glass, a folk song often sung at Irish funerals.