Glen Hansard’s one-year-old son, Christy, is burbling away in the singer’s arms, listening to us talk. “His mouth is right next to the receiver, but he’s just very quietly listening.”
It is, the 53-year-old admits, all change for him and his wife, the Finnish poet Maire Saaritsa. The family are in Ireland – “where the heart belongs” – when we speak, but they also live in Helsinki. This helps when he’s touring, although right now, after gigs with The Frames in Ireland, solo shows in Germany and concerts with The Swell Season in the United States, and with an Irish and European tour coming up, he says he sometimes feels like an astronaut. As for making time for commonplace things such as idle chatter, he says he has “become a very unavailable friend”.
He is, however, settled within himself. “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?”
It’s an archetypal Zen-type question that requires no answer, but Hansard deflects any response by saying that he was “always the guy in the band, so I was just busy making my story, making my life, moving forward. I guess opportunities were there, of course, but it just wasn’t really on my list of things to do. Then I met Maire, and it was, like, oh, there’s the mother of my children.”
Hansard is about to release All That Was East Is West of Me Now, which is his first solo album for four years and a gear change or three away from its predecessor, the largely improvisational, impulsive The Wild Willing. As the title implies, there is more behind the songwriter than ahead, yet if you’re searching for lyrics that offer any sense of fatalism or pessimism, you will walk away empty-handed. The new album, he says, “is more just coming to terms with the fact that the flesh is changing. My voice is doing different things, and I have aches in different places than I used to. Getting older is an interesting and wonderful experience. The great thing is you get rid of a bunch of shit and stress that aren’t necessary, and you stop listening to voices that aren’t serving you well.”
When you’re younger, “you can run your body ragged, but as you get older you realise that time is finite and what you spend it on is going to have an impact. Nowadays, if I go out and have a few pints, it’s basically three days of feeling miserable.”
Christy’s arrival has made him more grounded. Of being with his son, he talks about “days and tasks that are so beautifully simple”. If you’re not present in the moment, he adds, “then you’re not doing a good job”. New York songwriter Lou Reed once described having a baby as the beginning of a great voyage. “Yeah, absolutely. It’s wonderful, but also challenging. I mean, we’re both exhausted. I just went down and took the groceries out of the bag, and there’s a pile of work that needs to be done, but I just haven’t got to it because between being with him and being available for Maire, it’s incredible how tiny tasks can go for ages without me.” He returns to the notion of contentment. “Is this the happiest time of my life? I would say it’s probably the most adventurous, the time I feel most engaged of all of my life so far.”
His wife wasn’t pregnant when he wrote the new songs, but she was by the time the album was finished. “You could say that Christy was there, kind of, when I was mastering it, and he was there, kind of, when I did the final touches on the recordings. Basically, the album was born before he was, and so I’ll honour it by putting it out. It’s not always about your art completely reflecting your life, but you’re able to talk about it better when it is.
“So much of my life has changed, and so many of my priorities have changed since the record was finished, so I almost feel years beyond it now, in that I’m writing differently, thinking differently. But I’ll honour it, and tour it, and I’m hoping to bring new life to it, that the songs will change again as I play them.”
Hansard has remained true to the notion of respecting the song and developing the art form right from the start of his career, whether sandblasting sound with The Frames, the band he formed when he was 20; whittling wood with The Swell Season, the Oscar-winning duo he formed with Markéta Irglová; or stirring the stew with his solo work. The end point is the same: creative longevity and integrity.
“Most of my heroes are long-term artists,” he says. “I don’t think when Van Morrison made, for example, A Period of Transition that he was trying to make a bad record – he just makes records. What I set out to do, quite plainly, was to make records, to grow as an artist and to go on this adventure that is the life of a troubadour.
“I love this life, and I get to play to people all over the world who are interested in hearing what I have to say, people who actually pay me to do it. That’s a huge privilege. I’m not a pop star, so I’m not restricted by tunes needing to be 3½ minutes. There’s nobody in my corner telling me to shorten an album, to make it longer or to wear my hair this way, that way or the other. I get to be who I am, and that privilege is not lost on me.”
Sometimes artists settle on writing and delivering songs they know will appeal to the fan base and their expectations, but Hansard is cautious of being trapped by that. “You can throw an eye to it, but you can’t let that inform your choices. You have to just go with your creative instincts. The songs, the art of it, is my contract with [myself], and I need to honour that.
“At the same time, however, you have to ask yourself, ‘Am I happy with this song going out into the world as it is right now?’ If it doesn’t have any kind of elasticity, a push and pull in your spirits, if it’s just a song that goes, ‘dum de dum, dum de dum’, then I’m not interested. I’ve written them! A song that you feel is full of interesting intentions and dynamic sometimes ends up just being, you know, a number. That’s how it goes.”
Of course, living the life of a troubadour is all well and good, but how is Hansard planning to match that with fatherhood, parenting, marriage, and so on?
“Christy turned one very recently, and we took him to the Hill of Tara. We all sat there as a family, and we had exactly this conversation, which is me now heading into a very busy year. I’m going to Los Angeles very soon. I’ll be there for a week, and then I’ll go to Europe for a month-long tour.
“Now that we have the place in Helsinki, Maire and Christy can go there, which means they’re closer to family ... But, yes, to answer the question, how do I square it up? Well, the first thing my wife she said to me after Christy was born was that she was very well aware of the fact that she married a troubadour, and that we’re going to make this work.”
All we need now is another Zen-like aphorism to tide things over, but Hansard is too busy to come up with one. “Sometimes it will be hard for both of us, but this is who we are. It’s also important to note that Christy has come into our lives, and so we will bring him on our adventure. The short answer is we’re finding out.”
All That East Is West to Me Now is released on Friday, October 20th, on Anti- Records. Glen Hansard plays solo shows in Dublin, Galway, Derry, Belfast and Cork between Wednesday, December 13th, and Tuesday, December 19th
