A song written for an independent Dublin film carried Glen Hansard from Grafton Street busking to the Academy Awards. Hansard, the Irish singer-songwriter, actor and leader of The Frames who co-wrote “Falling Slowly” for Once, died in a motorcycle crash in Dublin on July 29, 2026. He was 56.

The scale of that journey was captured in one awards-night credit. At the 2008 ceremony, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named “Falling Slowly,” with music and lyrics by Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the winner for Best Original Song. The song had already served as the emotional center of Once, in which the two musicians played Dublin performers finding a shared language in music. It later moved onto the stage with Once, the musical that won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Musical. Hansard's work had crossed from the street to a rock band, from cinema to Broadway, without losing the sound of two people listening closely to each other.

That arc began in Ballymun, where Glen Hansard was born on April 21, 1970. He left school at 13 and spent roughly five years working as a street musician, an education based on whether passersby stopped, listened or kept walking. By 1990 he had assembled The Frames, which released its debut album, Another Love Song, on Island Records. In 1991, Hansard appeared as guitarist Outspan Foster in Alan Parker's The Commitments.

The film gave him an early international audience, but The Frames remained the durable center of his musical life. Across eight albums, the band developed a devoted following around records including Another Love Song, Fitzcarraldo, For the Birds, Burn the Maps and The Cost. Their music could move from a near-whisper to a full-band surge, and Hansard's performances treated that shift as something shared with the room. President Catherine Connolly later described The Frames as leaders in the wave of Irish bands that came forward in the 1990s and singled out Hansard's ability to gather people through live music.

Once widened that community. Hansard and Irglová had already recorded together as The Swell Season when they wrote the film's music and took its leading roles. “Falling Slowly” became the work most closely associated with them, but the partnership also created a body of records and tours that continued well beyond the film. The Swell Season returned to the Newport Folk Festival in 2025, nearly two decades after Once placed their spare, conversational songs before a global audience.

Hansard also built a substantial solo catalogue. Rhythm and Repose arrived in 2012, followed by Didn't He Ramble in 2015, Between Two Shores in 2018, This Wild Willing in 2019 and All That Was East Is West of Me Now in 2023. The Recording Academy nominated Didn't He Ramble for Best Folk Album, one of four Grammy nominations tied to Hansard's work with The Commitments, Once and his solo career. In the last year of his life, his official site released two live collections, Don+t Settle, Vol. 1: Transmissions East in April 2026 and Vol. 2: Transmissions West in June.

For Hansard, live performance was not simply the delivery system for a finished composition. “A song only becomes what it is through witness,” he told ANTI- Records while describing the five informal pub nights that helped determine the shape of All That Was East Is West of Me Now. He brought Frames bandmates and other musicians into a room with locals, tried dozens of ideas and listened for which ones held. The album emerged from that exchange, a late-career record made through the same basic test the teenage busker had known: play the song in front of people and discover what survives.

His sense of an audience also became civic work. Hansard began an annual Christmas Eve busk in Dublin in 2010 to support people facing homelessness. By 2025, the event had reached its 15th anniversary, and RTÉ reported that Hansard opened the gathering outside the Gaiety Theatre with more than 30 artists waiting to perform. Bono, Imelda May and many other Irish musicians joined across the years, while donations supported Dublin Simon Community. It turned one of Hansard's earliest ways of making music into a recurring act of public solidarity.

Away from touring, his final years brought a quieter center. Hansard split his time between Kildare and Helsinki with his wife, Finnish poet Maire Saaritsa, and their son Christy. In a February 2026 interview with The Irish Times, he spoke about bedtimes, stories and bathing, saying of those ordinary routines, “That's where you meet your kid: in the banal.” The same interview found him planning new work with The Frames and Irglová, still measuring artistic life by the simple discipline of arriving and playing.

Hansard's songs persist in several distinct worlds at once. “Falling Slowly” remains in the film, in the Oscar record and on stages where new casts retell Once. The Frames albums retain the charge of Dublin rooms that grew into an international following. His solo recordings trace the later turns of the same voice, and the Christmas Eve busk converted performance into practical help year after year. Together, those works preserve the route Hansard spent a lifetime traveling: musician to listener, street to stage, one song to a room full of witnesses.