Glen Hansard Doesn’t Come To Town
Update: 18 months later, April 2008, and you can see Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova in Kansas City - following on from the successful run last summer in KC of the Irish musical film Once
Tomorrow Glen Hansard begins a tour of the US with The Swell Season - the collaborative thing he did with the Czech pianist Marketa Irglova, and if you’re reading this in Kansas City you’ll have to travel.
I saw Glen in The Frames in a tremendous gig in Lawrence, KS a couple of years back - god was it four now? But no such luck this time. East coast, West coast, and Chicago is as near as his crew are scheduled - on October 23 and 24.
In Irish terms driving from Kansas City to Chicago would be akin to driving from Dublin to Cork, back to Dublin, and on to Cork again - which of course is a serious waste of petrol, and something only Damien Mulley might do. And then there’s the coming home after the gig.
Hansard, songwriter and performer extraordinaire, has fronted Dublin band The Frames for about sixteen years, and just before that, he was a major star in a major Irish film - that we don’t talk about any more.
The Frames just launched their brand new album, The Cost, in Ireland two weeks back, but you’ll have to wait until next year for the US release - though with international mailing and the ould internet, who knows what you might get up to.
If you’re unfamiliar with the music of The Frames, visit their website and play a couple of tracks: Choose Music - FramesPlayer - Records - Set List - Lay Me Down. Then play Star Star.
Now if those two live tracks are too girly for you play Revelate - it’s gutsy and male. If you happen to actually be a girl, ignore the previous sentence - that’s just how us guys talk to each other when there are no women around. After all that if you don’t like The Frames, well then I don’t like you. Or your mother.
If you are familiar with Glen here’s a great interview I read countless months back and somehow just found again. Austin City Limits, Australia, Books, Damien Rice, Arcade Fire - and why you don’t want to play to a bunch of Irish people when you’ve travelled halfway around the world to do a gig.
Unrelated Posts, When You think About It:
• Irish Press Banned as Irish Independence Revoked
• Irish Place Names and Illegals
• No Irish in Top 20 Greatest Rock Heroes
• Voxer & Christie: A Love Story
• Irish Immigrants & Bad Birds
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
[…] we first spoke of Glen and Marketa performing music together - as the Swell Season - back in 2006, and just watching their journey has been […]
[…] time Hansard was touring in the Midwest it was with Irglova, but it’s now three or four years since the Frames came to town (more or less) when they […]