I Liked The World Better When He Was In It

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Dublin time, something terrible happened. Glen Hansard, Irish singer-songwriter, lead man of The Frames, co-star of the brilliant movie Once, died in a motorcycle crash.

Once was first released in 2006. It was probably a year or so later that we saw it. I know it was back when Netflix still sent DVDs through the mail in those red envelopes. Even after it arrived in our mailbox, it took us a while to get to it. Young kids, busy lives.

But when we finally sat down on a quiet night and watched all eighty-six perfect minutes of the film, we were in love. With the story, with the music, with the whole glorious, tiny-budget, indy-vibe thing. The next Christmas I bought every CD The Frames had ever released as a present for my husband. We listened to them at home, in our cars. We bought the Swell Season recordings, too. But it was always The Frames that we returned to, and that original soundtrack from Once.

Our kids grew up on this music. As soon as they were old enough, we watched the movie with them. By then they already knew all the songs. As they went off to college, they took Once and the music of The Frames with them. They were part of their milieu, their family culture, the things you hold up for all of those new people you meet and say, “This. This is who I am.”

Sometime in the fall of 2021, en route to a college tour with our daughter in a blinding rainstorm, my husband scored four tickets to see Glen with The Swell Season at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston. Months later, on March 15, 2022, masked and a little nervous about our first real concert in pandemic days, we saw him play for the first time. It was beautiful.

Then in September of 2024, he came to the State Theater in our hometown of Portland, Maine. The kids had both left just two weeks before for their colleges, two- and three-hour drives away. But they came home that weekend for the show. We all agreed it was one of the best musical experiences we had ever had. He granted our wishes and played many of the old Frames tunes we love. His epic rendition of “Revelate” had us screaming ourselves hoarse. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

We saw him again a few months ago in Boston, all of us together, including a new addition to our family crew, our son’s girlfriend. We had been indoctrinating her into our Cult of Glen in previous months to prepare her. We all loved sharing this thing that meant so much to us with someone new.

For years we’ve all harbored a not-so-secret fantasy - that one day we’d fly to Dublin together for a Frames reunion concert. Then Wednesday happened.

Our daughter is studying away from home this summer. She saw the news about Glen’s death first and called to tell us, just managing to get the words out before she began to cry. We were all stunned. Still are.

The sea of tributes pouring in from all over the world of music and culture is a testament to the kind of artist, the kind of human, he was. Bono, Billie Eilish, Lin-Manuel, Barack Obama, Bruce Springsteen, so many more. There aren’t enough superlatives to describe his particular brand of passion and compassion. His talent, his generosity as a musician, his storytelling, his honesty about his struggles - he was so gifted, and he shared that gift in the most open-hearted way. This guy, he could break your heart and then fill it right back up again with nary a leak.

I lost a beloved aunt a few months ago, a smart, loving, funny, brilliant woman who was a treasure to everyone who knew her. In a text to my dear cousin whose loss was so much heavier than mine, trying to describe how her absence made me feel, I said, “I just liked the world better when she was in it.”

I didn’t know Glen Hansard personally, and I can’t lay claim to the grief that I know is buffeting those who did. But his absence feels big and empty in the world of music, and in the culture of our little family. His music was something we shared, something we could hold up and say, “This. We love this. All of us together. This is who we are.” There are people whose passing feels momentous because of all the good they did when they were alive, the art and community they created, the way they made other people feel. He was one of those people. We’ll always have his music but I wish we - all of us - still had him. As with my aunt, I just liked the world better when he was in it.

In memory of Glen Hansard, I’m going to share a poem here that was inspired by one of his songs in sort of a funny way. In the tune “The Stars are Underground,” there is a line that, for years, I heard as “Tell the rain that you saw me.” I must have written that line in journals ten times over as many years. Every time I heard the song, that line would bounce around my brain for days. Eventually, a few years ago, I finally wrote a poem based on it. Only then did I think, maybe I should go double check that lyric. When I did, I found that what he was actually singing was “Tell Mairead that you saw me.” Ooops.

Still, even though I misheard the lyric, I’ll always give Glen Hansard credit for the germ of that poem, and for the spirit of it. And today, with its focus on the passage of time, the speed with which things change, the notion that tomorrow is waiting for us, just around the corner, it feels particularly apt.

Tell the Rain That You Saw Me
The car in the barn is still full of yesterday's cold,
the air damp with fog that burned away hours ago
in the early light of a newborn day. The steering wheel cold
under my hand, my breath almost visible in the gloom
made darker by the sun outside, so that I squint into the rearview,
but blink inside the car, my eyes gaping like a fish mouth,
gasping for light. What else is left of yesterday besides this cold
that lingers here? Are the leaves on the ground this morning
still clinging to their boughs in this captive air? And what
will this day's weather leave behind, the promised clouds
so hard to imagine in the bright morning, but even now gathering
to our west. I breathe in yesterday's chill, a reminder that now
is but a moment from then, and exhale a message to tomorrow into
yesterday's ear. Tell the rain that you saw me, that we’ll meet again soon.

Thanks for reading, everyone.

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