Glen Hansard

Glen Hansard was born in Dublin in 1973 and started playing music in the early 1990s with his band The Frames. The group put out a few albums and toured regularly, building a steady audience around Ireland and beyond. Hansard's voice had a particular kind of wear to it that felt lived-in, and songs like "Say It To Me Now" showed how he could build tension quietly before letting it break.

Things shifted for him in 2007 when he worked with Markéta Irglová on the soundtrack for the film "Once." They wrote and performed "Falling Slowly" together, a song that won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. That recognition brought Hansard's music to a much wider audience almost overnight.

After that, he kept making records both on his own and with The Frames. He released solo albums like "Rhythm and Repose" in 2006, "Didn't He Ramble" in 2015, and "Between Two Shores" in 2018. The work stayed grounded in the same kind of direct, emotional writing you hear in tracks like "When Your Mind's Made Up," where a simple arrangement leaves plenty of room for the feeling in his delivery.