Glen Hansard: Once and always a street musician

▶ Watch Video: From the archives: “Once” songwriter Glen Hansard

(CBS News) The 2007 movie “Once” is now a Broadway musical . . . giving fans a whole new chance to hear its Oscar-winning song once again. It was co-written by Glen Hansard who talked to Anthony Mason . . .

Glen Hansard has been a street musician since he was 13. He started playing Dublin street corners . . . just him and his guitar.

“New York’s a funny city to busk in because, you know, there so much noise,” he told Mason. “It’s everywhere. It’s a really noisy town!”

“You’ve played right through it, literally,” Mason said.

“But, yeah, that’s busking,” Hansard said. “That’s the shape of your strum.”

He learned how to project his voice and draw a crowd. But it was nothing like the attention he would get from “Once.” The low-budget Irish film, in which Hansard starred as a busker, became an unexpected international hit in 2007.

And “Falling Slowly,” the song Hansard wrote with his co-star Markita Irglova, won them an Oscar.

“It took us three weeks to make, we made it for a hundred grand,” Hansard effused in his acceptance speech. “We never thought we’d come into a room like this and be in front of you people.”

He told Mason, “When we won that award, it was just, like, the most amazing thing. And then my thing was like, “Okay, thanks, Now let’s get on with our lives. And then when there was talk of it going to Broadway, I remember being very nervous, and honestly I was against it.”

“You didn’t want a Broadway musical?” Mason asked.

“No,” he said. “For me, Broadway meant sort of hamming it up. ‘Course, you’re tempted by the idea of people saying, whispering in your ear, going, ‘Do you know if this does well, like, you’re gonna be seriously rich?’ And going like, ‘That was never why we did this.'”

Hansard relented. And the musical “Once” last year won 8 Tony Awards.

“They did treat it with grace,” he said. “They did treat it with respect. They did get the right people.”

Hansard lives in a rented cottage on an estate outside Dublin. He took Mason to a Dublin pub to share a pint with Frankie Byrne, Hansard’s former grade school principal, who told him it was okay to quit school at 13 to pursue music.

“So for me, that was just, you know, the wings I needed,” Hansard said. “So I went home, and basically announced to ma, ‘Listen, it’s okay. Frankie told me it’s okay!'”

“Yeah, he got permission,” Byrne laughed. “One of my proudest moments in my dereliction of duty, you know.”

Hansard still knows most of the street musicians in the city.

“Mary’s here every single day, and she’s a great busker,” he said of one.

The singer who used to play on Grafton Street showed Mason his spot, where he’d busk during the day, then come back after the pubs closed at night:

“Are people more generous when they’re drunk?” asked Mason.

“That’s the thing — it’s a tougher gig, but you make more money,” said Hansard. “Everyone’s drunk!”

He added, “It’s a lot more dangerous.”

Web Exclusive video: To watch Glen Hansard busking on Manhattan streets and in a Bleecker Street record shop, click on the video player below, as he performs “Love Don’t Keep Me Waiting.”

At 18 he formed a band called The Frames. One video, made on a post office security camera for less than $5, was picked by up MTV. Then one of his former band mates asked him to help with a small film he was making.

During filming Hansard fell in love with Marketa Irglova, his friend and costar who was 18 years younger.

Of the sleeper success of “Once,” which put him — and his romance with Irglova — in the spotlight in a way he’d never been before,” Hansard said, “It didn’t help us all.

“I think part of what made ‘Once’ on the screen kind of work was that there was always this energy between us,” he said. “You’d be a fool to deny it.”

They would form a band, The Swell Season, and tour together. They continued to tour even after breaking up.

“That must have been hard,” said Mason.

“It was hard, and it was something we addressed all the time,” Hansard said. “It was like, ‘Are you still enjoying this?’

“If you said to me, you could have all this success or you could just have a great relationship with Mar, I’d have took the relationship,” he continued, “because it was the most profound and beautiful thing I had been through.”

Hansard’s first solo album, “Rhythm and Repose,” is about putting that behind him — and about his family. “It’s all there. It’s all on the record,” he said.

He grew with an alcoholic father who physically abused his mother.

“At a very early age, I kind of learned this pattern — whenever something good happens, something bad follows immediately,'” he said. “And we spent a lot of our childhood in aunts’ houses, in battered wives’ homes, in long periods of, like, living in a dorm, away from him.”

Hansard says he wrote the song “Bird of Sorrow” about his mother:

You been kneelin’ in the dark for far too long
You’ve been waitin’ for that spark, but it hasn’t come
Well I’m callin’ to you, please, get off the floor
A good heart will find you again
A good heart will find you, just be ready then.

Tethered to a bird of sorrow
A voice that’s buried in the hollow
You’ve given over to self-deceivin’
Your prostrate bowed would not be leavin’
You’ve squandered more than you could borrow
You’ve bet your joys on all tomorrows
For the hope of some returnin’
While everything around just burnin’.

“‘Tethered to a bird of sorrow’ means a few things in my head when I sing it,” Hansard explained. “It’s us, me and my brother. . . . It was just one of those situations where growing up, it’s a funny thing to feel more like an adult than your parents when you’re a kid.”

Glen Hansard’s first solo studio album, “Rhythm and Repose.”

He took his mother to the Academy Awards and gave her his Oscar. She keeps it at her bedside. Glen Hansard is one of Ireland’s most highly-regarded musicians now. And the past few years, over Christmas, he’s returned to Dublin to busk for charity with other Irish artists, like Sinead O’Connor and Bono.

Mason said, “I get the sense just in walking around with you in New York and in Ireland, that you’ll always be at home playing a guitar on the street.”

“Yeah, you’re never more than a step away from it,” Hansard said.

“You can climb all the levels of success and of celebrity or fame. But you’re never more than a step away from the guy who’s just making his money for the day.”

For more info:

• glenhansardmusic.com
• The Frames (Official site)
• The Swell Season (Official site)
• “The Swell Season” – Documentary (Seventh Art Releasing)
• “Once” – The film (Fox Searchlight)
• “Once” – The musical (Official site)
• Photographer Conor Masterson
• Photographer Piper Ferguson
• Order in the Sound (Fan site)
• “In the Deep Shade” (Documentary)
• Rebel Rebel Records, New York City (New York Magazine)