Glen Hansard

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin, Pushkin. Glen Hansard is best known as the lead in the two thousand and seven movie Once. It's about a hard scrabble busker in Dublin. It's a role he was probably destined to play himself, having dropped out of school at thirteen to busk around Ireland's capital. Prior to that movie role, Hansard had put out a string of great albums with a band called The Frames, but after the film he started working on other projects and also a solo career. His fourth solo album, The Wild Willing, came out on Anti Records last year. He and his band, including keyboardists Rami, met up with Bruce Headlim and Nashville to chat about the unique approach he and the band took to creating the record, improvising nearly every song, and unlike most folk records, it has a lot of electronics on it. Hanser talks and plays through some of the songs off the album and then opens things up with a song that contains a very unintuitive sample. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's the Blood Hansard plane. I'll be you be me See if you can guess the sample. It's very hard to sum up your career because you've done so many different things. And when I was reviewing them, I realized something. And I don't know if this has occurred to you, but you want an Oscar for the song from the movie Once, and I think you want to Grammy as well for that. I know the soundtrack. Wont to Gramm? Does that mean I did? I think it means you did. Oh, maybe it didn't, I think the No? I think yeah I did? Yeah, okay, uh. And then it once became a Broadway show that one slew of Grammy's, Tony's and um. But that means you have an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Tony. If you get an Emmy, you have the egot. Do you know the egot? No, the egot is for people who have won Emmy's, Grammy's Oscars, and Tony's Special Award. There's only been fifteen people in history. No way you would join Richard Rogers, Helen Hayes, Okay, John Legend, but you know Barbara streisand didn't do it. Okay, wew see what you can do? Okay, all right, that's our project. You've given me a new trajectory in life. Okay, all right, we're on it. That's our project. Then um TV people listen up. We're getting this man an egot um you got it. This album, this new album you're leasing is it's described as a departure from what you've been doing the last few albums. So tell me, tell me about the making of this album and how it is different. Well, sometimes we go true periods of our life where we're doing certain things and we're you know, we're writing certain ways. And for me, the last couple of record well, certainly since the beginning of me making Glen Hansard Records, it was it seems to me like the city of New York had a kind of a there was a through line, there was a kind of an American sense throughout the records that I was making over the last few years. And this one it just it's the longest period in the last kind of twenty years that I haven't been in America, which is about a year and a half. And you know, not to say that that really means anything for or against the record, It's just that I spent a lot of time in Paris in the last year and a half and also time with with with Rome and David Odlum over in France recording this record and Joe and making a kind of a decided to make an acoustic record. But I had some time in France and in Paris, and that I think is what made this album a little different, and that when I listened to these songs now, it's the streets of Paris that come back to me, because it was on the streets where I wrote the lyrics, you know, taking long walks and thinking of meditating. When a song comes into your head, you get about four days of absolute focus because you get excited about a lyric, or you get excited about a melody, and it just rolls around your head and around your head and around your head, and you can sit and you can write at your desk, or you can just go for walks because the song isn't going to leave your head. You've got to. Sometimes you've got four days. Sometimes you've got two weeks where the song won't leave your head. You become obsessed. It becomes the only thought you have, and everything else is just surrounding that one thought. And so in Paris, I was walking around with these songs in my head, and I was finding the lines and I was kind of jotting them down quickly, either in my phone or in a notebook. And I'm gonna get home that evening I'd sort of compile what I'd sort of come across during the day, and what's wonderful, I said a couple of parameters around the songs, and that I thought each lyric needs to be an actual experience. I wanted every line in the album and every line in every song to be a particular memory that I couldn't just be all that rhymes with that and that's actually a good line. That wasn't good enough. It had to be. I wanted to anchor every line into something that was actually going on. And the song you just performed, I'll be You. Yeah. I remember walking from the Irish Cultural Center, which was the place I was staying. It was like an old monastery and they gave us a small room and I was spending time in that place and really loving it. In the Latin Quarter, right in the middle of the Latin Quarter and the fifth hour in this morning Paris, and I was walking down the room of tire and turning left, and just as I got to the junction of Lagoblin, which is one of the sort of major streets. This whole thing just sort of hit me, you know. I had kind of hit upon with Joe and Ruth in this studio Your Love's a Bonnie Snare traps me in the Evening, which I thought, what an interesting thing to just sort of pop out of your mouth. And I liked the image of it. You know that that that that that there's a kind of a you know, you know how to you know how to pull me in, you know exactly what it is, you know my buttons, you know, And there's an intimacy in that and admitting to someone that you know exactly what it is. And so I started to think about the song as the lover as a as the spider who devours her lover, and so I started going off on that imagery in my head, and it was like, I'll be you, be me, and I'll be you, and we won't say no more about it, this idea that we'll swap will become each other. And I was really really pleased where the song was going. It kind of there was a kind of a permission to get dark, if you like. There's something about the chord structure that allowed you to to stay between dark and contemplative and even lightness. So for me, when I heard the song, I'm straight back on that street and it's a particular corner, you know. So so I'm very happy with how that that turned out because now when I sing these songs, I can there's a place in them I can place myself somewhere. It's also a song which is technically uses a sample. Which had you ever used a sample before? Oh? Yeah, oh we've used samples through the friends yea a long time. And my friend David was in the studio and I had myself and Ruth and Joe Will start playing around with just like it was just like you're just fooling around. And my friend David Cleary, who who had asked I had asked to come over. There's two really interesting musicians from Dublin, David Cleary and Duncan Murphy, who are kind of experimental electronic musicians, and they would very much inhabit the world that Romi inhabits, which is just all the texture and bending, and the only kind of instruction that they were given coming into the record was like we'd love you to come in because we have a bunch of Persian music is coming in, so we'd love you to come in as a balance. Because there was just Persian musicians playing along with an acoustic record, it's going to sound quite esoteric, maybe world music in a way. So the way to balance that was to bring in these electronic musicians and say, your job is to disrupt the music, just to disrupt anything you hear and come in and just put an elbow into it, a dirty elbow, which is exactly what they did. And David said, I have a beat for that that I think would really work. And the beat was really odd, and it's from a cassette, so it's really noisy, and we kind of fell in love with the texture of the sound because as a beat, it's just a very simple beat, but we fell in love with the texture. And he said, you know, no one will ever know what this is. This is from the David Bowie Queen session for under Pressure, but it's like a song that was never used. Don't worry about it. It's something I found somewhere that no one will ever figure out what it is, right, and you know, and so we got excited by it and the idea that the idea that that that what we're hearing is you know, John Deakin, you know, and there's a touch of Bowie in the in the in the vocal. You know, there's a kind of a very very so just the fact that the spirit of these these people is on the song kind of gave it an extra layer of kind of sensuality, if you like. So we got very excited about it. We we finished the song, we mixed it, we it mastered it, and we put it on a record. And then suddenly, you know, I downloaded Spotify on my computer because I'd been asked to do it so many times just to sort of listen to it and check it out, which I kind of resisted up until that point, And so I did, and within six songs of listening to Spotify, I heard a song called cool Cat by Queen, which it was exactly the same beat, and I realized that we were in real trouble. So so what are the chances Queen would sue us? So, yeah, nobody's heard of them exactly, and we were. We all cursed our friend David for a while, and then we had to and then Howard had the unenviewed job of going and trying to contact Brian May and asking him for permission, which took a couple of months because they had the movie coming out and stuff. So the album ended up getting put back to April. But you know, in the end of the day, we did recreate the beat, which was easy to do because it's a it's not like a super original beat or and it's like you know, it's on every record. But the fact that it was them, the fact that it was had all that hiss, the fact that it was that it came from that session was worth actually pursuing it. It was worth actually asking and going through the front door and asking for permission, and they gave us permission. Maybe you're listening to a premium Lawyers edition of Spotify that just at that's good to track it down. You said this album was built from the ground app Yeah, what does that mean? What it means is that not one song on this record was a song before we went into the studio, and that's untrue. Two songs, the one I'll Come Back to Find or Leave a Light and Brothers Keeper were two songs that existed before, but the rest of the songs came in the studio. They were they were brand new. They were brand new in the studio and like for instance, like albu b Me was played once, we never played it twice. We never it was a little jam that we elaborated on and a song like way to the World that happened once. We've never played it since. You know, we've actually tried to play it sound checks and stuff, but we never managed to figure out what we did in the moment, and that became the exciting part of the birth of this record. Was we were going into record a set of songs, you know, and some of them are covers, even we were going into record a couple of friends of our songs, and then when it came time to listen back to what we had, we realized that there was a whole bunch of jams that were really interesting. And then we just decided to scrap everything that we were working on and then just focus on the jams. And once we focused on them and we elaborated on them, they became their own songs entirely, and they became much more exciting because they were coming out of nowhere. So for instance, I'm singing songs and keys that are not good for my voice. My voice his way down low, but I'm just trying to I'm just trying to jam along with whatever chords we just came up with. So there was a kind of an element of freedom to those songs that was much more attractive to us in that moment than the songs that we went in to try nail. If you like, why don't we hear another one? Yeah? This is called fools game? Now? Was that a song that came out of the same method. Were you in a studio and he came out of a jam? Yeah, Dunk was showing me around his vocoder's something I'd never used before, and he had this delay on it, which is like now you know, you know, you know, wow, wow wow. I was like, it's a fools, fools game. And I was like, it's a fool's game and that's all I had. But the way the delay was picking it up, it kind of had this very interesting thing, and I thought, wow, this kind of sound. It sort of reminded me somehow of like a velvet underground song but with a kind of a vocoder, And I thought, this is a very simple chord. You know, sometimes if you're lucky, you'll hit upon a kind of a song where you go this sound was simple enough to be really good, you know, where you're not kind of overthinking it, and it just sort it's a fool's fools, fools game, lover that we have to have to have to play. And so I just took away the delay and then just saying it, it's a fool's fools game, lover that we have to play. So it's all the threes, which we were watching an interesting documentary about the base recently, and the tree is a it's a very important part. It's the tree over the four. Boom boom boom boom so woe. Oh it's actually it's it's a tree over three right right, yeah, But apparently this the three over the four is like a big thing. I know, Dylan's really wearing Queen again. I just think that example, it tell me with the three over the four. Tell me with that. Oh, I don't know. I think there was something that was like boots he or somebody was talking and it was like, if you're ever in doubt, just give them three. So you just go, you know, so that's the tree that dream. Then you just feel in something else. Okay. But in that case, like that song which is a beautiful song. If I asked, I'm sure a hundred musicians they would say, no, that song was the product of a songwriter sitting and coming up with a very with a kind of very concise, very perfect lyric that goes with this melody. It doesn't sound like the product of jamming. It doesn't sound like an Eric Clapton song. It doesn't. So I'm interested in how that came together, Like, were you playing a certain kind of riff or and then Romeo you jumped in or how did that emerge that? No, there was no guitar involved. It was just a vocode or keyboard and a delay and then and then that became I actually have the recording here on my phone. Maybe maybe look what i'd find. Yeah, yeah, I'll find it. It's going to be it's called vocode or song in my in my let's try this safe safe it works, slow slow right, slue that's me chee. I haven't hit on the fools Game line yet, but I will ye, that would have been nice chord. I moved on to something else there. But at some point, at some point I say fools game and maybe in the next one, but you hear the idea. So then in the studio did you just play that for you know? We we we we don't forgotten to bring his vocoder with him, which was that sound which was kind of a culmination of a bunch of stuff going into a bunch of stuff creating that big sort of phiz of sound and delay. So we went and we ordered some Russian vocoder on eBay, which he claimed would be like the perfect one to do it on, and we think we could got it for like six hundred quid. It was like it was expensive, and someone in Spain had it, and then Heavier had called theavier, our friend in Spain had called to the shop and the guy had given him the anyway we got the vocode or was a Russian vocoder. We couldn't understand anything that was written on it, and it was like because all the instructions are in Russian, all the buttons, and we tried to get it going and it didn't work. And then we ended up using one of those corg the microcorg that has a vocoder setting on it and something that Warren Ellis swears by, he uses it all the time, and so we got this one and it was perfect to him. So but that was that that that that was the one we were trying to recreate. And then how did you how did you make the song from there? Like romy, how did when you heard it you thought, did something occurring about playing it? Or well, I think if I remember correctly, we kind of just like we we set up that microcord, we got the boat, we got a boat carder going, and then like pretty much everything else, we just sort of Glenn started singing, singing those lines and thing, and we all just kind of felt our way around it and got some droning stuff going on. But yeah, it's very very loose. Okay, this is massively putting you on the spot. Could you do that now if Glenn started playing something? Oh, that's the whole session is based on the idea of here's a thought, you know, like let me let me see okay, you know there could be a song in that still no word, still still still still haven't you know, still listening, still waiting, you've not nothing's come back. So suddenly when you start playing that, you get all these thoughts like, okay, so it's still no word, it's the first thing that fell out of your mouth. Then trust that and then follow that and then just use that as a kind of a as a kind of a tent pole to a bunch of thoughts. You know, so, what is this? Why is there still and still no word for to who? Why are you waiting? Do you need to wait? Is? Does your life depend on hearing from whatever? Whoever this is? You know? And then you suddenly your brain just starts coming and then you find your and you you have to be you have to allow yourself to go. Yeah. Yeah, that's the key to writing is to allow mistakes, to allow dreadful like I mean, we were changing I'm changing chords there without informing anybody what's going on. There's definitely going to be mistakes. We're gonna hit, we're going to bang into each other, of course, But that's the that's the basis of that's the basis of music. How long did it take you to be comfortable enough to do that kind of playing when you were a kid? Were you worried about getting it right first and that that inhibited you or were you always able to kind of just open up that way? No, I don't think we're always able to open up that way. You learned to play guitar and of course, everything you know, when you learned to play the guitar and any instrument, you want to get it right. So every time you play a song, you want to get it. You want to play it correctly, you want to execute the song correctly. But it does you do get to a place with musicians where you find intimacy, and that intimacy is that you can completely blow it. I mean, for years Joe has been listening to me go wow, I will be a bad blah blah, but you know, and then and then but when we got when we go on stage, there's a shape to that, and there's there's lyrics to that. But the lyrics don't necessarily come as you as you're beginning. The lyrics can sometimes you sometimes have to find your way into a song and find your way into what it means. So for instance, when we recorded Fools Game, I probably had most of the most of the lyric kind of figured out, but I was probably writing that song the whole way through the session, you know. And again like walking around Paris in between sessions, thinking about the song, listening to the kind of the blah blah blah and the kind of you know me, you know me, trying to find something and kind of going, wow, I really see where I was kind of trying to get it there. But now that I'm outside of that moment where I have the instrument in my hand, I know what I was trying to say. I was trying to say this, and so I write it down. So then I go back and I know exactly what it was I was trying to get. Well, they're trying to hide the vote quorder. That's what I say. Keep going away from the voder. He looks the thing. See anything that anything that takes you out of your comfort, you know. So the vocoder was really was really great because it takes you away from a guy with a guitar in his hand, because that, you know, I'm limited when it comes to me and a guitar because I know the chords. I mean, I know the chords. My brain will automatically go to one of those chords because it knows the safety of what that chord will bring. Whereas when you play with something like a vocoder or even for me in my case, a piano, like I'll hit a chord or I go WHOA, what's that and it might actually be the you know, the fourth to what I was doing. But because it sounds so different than piano, I'm excited by it, whereas I'm a playing on a guitar, I'm not. So you can do you say you can almost know your instrument too well. I think in a way you get you can get into a route with your instrument because you know, once you know how that chord relates to that chord, you know you get locked into because you know, at the end of the day, most music operates, most Western music operates within a very simple you know what is it the three five? But what I always it's a Nashville thing, isn't it the one four? One four five? That that idea that once we once we figure out all of that, then it all becomes second nature. But if you put yourself on an instrument, you don't know, you might be doing the one four or five, but it sounds amazing because you don't know what you're doing, even though you might still be operating very much in a very simple structure. And that's exciting. I mean, musicians are artists are constantly seeking perspective shifts. That's why when you read like you know, Colin's biography or whatever, you know you kind of understand why he was taking man tracks and speed at the same time, because perspective shift is everything in writing. It's all about getting out of your own head and literally getting out of your head, I mean getting out of your own the place that that restricts you to certain ideas. And you know, there's a lot of romance around musicians use of drugs and painters and poets use of drugs to find themselves in a different headspace, because that's exactly that's precisely where where things can can really and you can basically get out of your own way. And that's that's always what you're looking for. And that's what the vocoder can give you, or what the playing an instrument you don't know can give you. It gives you a perspective shift and you can you can find yourself in a different spot. Did you do play another song? Yeah, I'll let you take a breath. Thanks. What was the experience that that led to that song. I was sitting at the piano in the studio and I was trying to record a song called Shelter Me, a song that again didn't make the record. A bunch of the songs that I went into record didn't make the record. So I was sitting at the piano. I was trying to record the song, and I had this stick lid ding Dong dong Dong. I love that dong Dong lid ding dong Dong Dong Dong dong Dong. There's something about the way that was kind of just flowing that bong bom. But it reminded me again like the Stooges or something like the dong dong Dong. You know, those are great velvet of the ground songs. I keep coming back to them. Actually has but it's like congdang dongg do you know when you get that sort of constant piano banging. And because I don't know what I'm doing in terms of the chords, again, I'm feeling quite free and I remember kind of going I remember playing the thing and and and there is a there is a recording of that too. Let me find it. I'm gonna find it for you because it's it's it's it's worth hearing. Yeah, yeah, this is the very first moment. In fact, I've got this for every single song, the first moment, because that's how the whole record came together. Let me just find it. I think we need the we need the iPhone memos version of this. Yeah, it would It would be interesting too, It would be interesting. Let me see. Now, let them know what a free there's no hard at least beat it. There's no world. Maybe you have to meet them as equals one day. Don't set up, don't shuttle m Go tell it from the mountain. Go see we pass this way. Tell them we came you as equals. Let don't know, we weren't friend. Let them see we want together. Let them know what it is. Time to think. Maybe he will do Maybe you would be the way, maybe spattle. So there you go. It's just a you know, you can just hear it. You can hear the bones of an idea emerging out of it. There's a touch of Imagine by John Lennon too, in the in the Diddlin Yeah, and in the I Don't want Yeah, that chord progression that see the yeah, that's the yeah. That sounds like imagine. You're right, Yeah, it's kind of nice. And because I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know. I certainly don't know that I'm referencing John Lennon, but I'm like, oh, that feels like a nice way to get to the next chord. So, and it's only where my fingers can reach, and you've deliterally not learned the piano for that reason, it gives you some I honestly, I honestly have strong feeling that one must learn an instrument only enough to be able to execute a song. That when you get it, when you get into the minutia of music you can it's it stops you creativity. I feel. I feel like I only ever wanted to be a guitar player good enough to play a song. I never wanted to progress and become a really good lead guitar player, or or to get into jazz chords, because once you learned the relationship between all the chords, then you then you've got it mapped. And once you've got it mapped, then then then you start figuring out interesting paths. And once you find interesting paths, it's like you know too much. So I love I love having naivety on an instrument, like I love having instruments that I don't know how to play. It's interesting. We're in Nashville, which is probably the home of the best players anywhere. We were talking about this earlier. We could get fifty guitarists in here who would be the best in any other city, and they're all right here. Yeah, but you like that, you like not knowing things for me. It's for me. It's crucial. Yeah, And it's crucial in the in the in the writing process, because the writing process can't be governed by the tuning or the or the rhythm being right. It has to be you have to be allowed to just you know, like you know, music is not hygiene. It's it's it's dirty. It has to be dirty. When we come back, we'll have more with Glenn Hansard. We're back with Glenn Hansard. Bruce asked him to pick a cover song to play for this taping, and he picked one of my favorites from Joni Mitchell. We've had people do a lot of covers. This strikes me as the most unusual one. How long have you been playing Coyote? Oh? And well, I learned it. I mean I know the song for so long. I only learned it and when I when we when I was invited to play at Joni's seventy fifth or seventieth birthday party, and I learned it formally, but I always knew it, you know, It's it's a song that I would kind of play a verse or two. But then sometimes you formally learn a song as and you sit down and you go, right, I need, I'm gonna learn this. So I've known the song a long time, but I really brushed it up and kind of learned my version. If you like, were you a fan of hers? Oh god, yah, I'm geez yeah, I mean since I was, you know, that was the beginning of my musical My first Johnie record was Hijera. I mean, that was the one that I court and spark there were the records that got me into her. It was only when I was older I discovered Ladies of the Canyon and the earlier stuff, which was amazing, and Blue, of course, but Blue wasn't around when I was a kid. It was more the kind of slightly jazzier stuff. She hadn't she hadn't gone deep into the jazz thing yet. So Hijera is still a kind of a record that's, you know, fairly accessible. But no, that was the stuff that I grew up. But she's a very intimidating person to cover. Though her music is complicated, absolutely, it's deep. I remember having to learn shadows and are getting to learn shadows and like, and every picture has a shadow and it has some form of like blindness, blindness and sad and then it goes to a key change treadned by all things, God of cruelty, true to the whole thing, God delay. You know the way she the way her voice is moving around. I had to figure out how to do that, and that was completely outside of my melodic instinct, and so it was really difficult, and I was so surprised how the notes just wouldn't go into my head. And then one day it's just a bam, and I went into my head and I had them and I and I had it. But it definitely made me a better musician overnight, having to sit down and tackle some of her songs, because she's this song in particular, which has always been a favorite mine. It's a very tough, unsentimental, yeah song with some incredibly memorable Oh my god. Yeah, it's an amazing but it's also very much it's a woman's song, yeah, but it's her song, absolutely written from the point of view of someone who had this relationship. What's it like to sing it? As a man. Oh, it's wonderful. It's wonderful because you know, you're just trying to get in, You're trying to get in the headspace where she was at. And I love there's a there's a, there's a it's a it's a the male and the sort of the masculine and feminine in writing and in music and in life. I find that fascinating to to move between both of them and to try to inhabit both equally. And then you did meet her when you when you performed this, What was that like? Yeah, I met her. We shared a dressing room actually, and it was a wonderful experience. She was incredible, She was such and she gave me such amazing advice. She spent time, she was very present. I mean, it was one of those meetings where I was going, God, I wish I wish I was recording this because she's speaking so fast, and there's so much going on, and her brain is operating at such a high level that I wish I could I wish I could go off and really absorb all this at a later point, but I just had to keep up, and I had an amazing, really amazing Do you remember any advice she gave you. I was telling her a story about about a homeless guy, I know, and I remember her saying, you should rhyme that, you know, and and that was she was like, you should rhyde that song. And I said, that's that's an amazing way to look at it. Well, that's what we do as writers. We just rhyme our lives, you know, just write that story is a good one. And so I just thought, what, I'm amazing, what incredibly you know, the wisdom of just rhyme it. You know, that's that's what we do, you know. She she, you know, and she we spoke a little bit about some of that. You know, we're talking about Leonard and we were talking about Dylan and you know, and she had very interesting perspectives on these people and Neil Young and you know, for me, it was just a very exciting time to not really stuff I can repeat, you know, because it would just be outside of I mean, nothing that she probably hasn't said and depressed anyway. But but but it was fascinating to spend time with her and talk about these greats. But she's the greatest, Yes, she's incredible, and you know, she was very straight about that. She was like, I'm as good as any of those motherfuckers. And she's right, you know, I mean, it's like she's she's absolutely she's giant. And I just really thank I thank whatever good fortune and good you know, alignment of stars or whatever it was that put me in a room with her for for those couple of days, and just to have been around. You know, when you're whenever you're in the presence of mastery, everything changes, the air changes, and so it's a it's a wonderful feeling to be so close to somebody who really has gone deep, so deep. Well, get us a little closer, all right. We haven't played this together before, so we're just gonna weigh it. Did we get that? Was it all right? Was it all right? Yeah? I think we got it? Yeah? Yeah, okay, great, I think it was all okay good. Glenn Hanser's album The Wild Willing is available now, so be sure to go check it out. You can head to broken record podcast dot com to check out a playlist to put together for this episode, including this new album and the Great Queen song that he sampled. Broken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrell. Meoobell and Leah Rose. Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond. Thanks for listening.