  Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová are The Swell Season. The duo’s third album, Strict Joy, was released last week. |
Lightning has already stuck Once for The Swell Season — and that’s more than enough for now.
“It’s been a huge couple of years,” says singer-songwriter Glen Hansard, chatting over his cellphone while he sips tea on the patio of the swanky Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood.
“My life has completely changed.”
And it’s all due to one song. Two years ago, the Irish musician was frontman of the critically acclaimed but commercially obscure band The Frames.
Then, in February of 2008, he was catapulted into the spotlight when he and Markéta Irglová — his musical partner and co-star in the busker romance Once — won the 2008 Best Original Song Oscar for Falling Slowly. You might remember Irglová being cut off in mid-acceptance speech and being brought back onstage by host Jon Stewart so she could finish.
For Hansard, the indie-folk duo’s overnight success ended 18 years of struggle.
But even as it put an end to many of his financial and professional worries, it created a whole new set of personal problems that left him feeling decidedlly less than swell for a season.
“Success came at such a rate and such a speed that I couldn’t adjust to it,” he admits. “All of these great things had happened — I had just won an Oscar and we were playing these rooms for thousands of people who were listening and interested and had paid money to come see our band — and I was so sad. I couldn’t understand why.
“And then I realized: The person I had been for 18 years had just died. The guy who struggled and wanted success and who was ambitious and chasing every opportunity was gone, and now I was being introduced to this new character — the guy who is successful — and I didn’t know how to deal with him. There was a brief but intense grieving period.”
Equally brief but intense, he admits, was a romance that sprung up between Hansard and Irglová — who is 18 years his junior.
“That was a chapter that was really great and fine,” he admits, “but we quickly found that we get on much better as mates than we do as boyfriend and girlfriend.”
Some 18 months later, the 39-year-old Hansard’s mood has finally improved along with his fortunes. And his expanded horizons are reflected in the sound of the duo’s third album Strict Joy, released Oct. 27 on Anti-Epitaph.
While it’s hardly as rigourously optimistic as its title — Hansard and Irglová still specialize in heartfelt tales of romantic yearning and regret — it does move their sound several steps onward and upward by fleshing out their acoustic guitars, pianos and voices with the richly layered textures of Hansard’s longtime band.
Fittingly, Hansard says he felt no pressure to make a record that would have the same impact as Once.
“For me to sit around and think that I could match that success would be insane. Of course, you want to make stuff that lives up to your standard. But in terms of what it did and how it did in the world ... Let’s say that soundtrack was heard by a million people. I would hope that maybe a third of those people would hear this one.
“Which is a f---ing huge amount of people. But you’re not going to reach a million people again. Once had such a good amount of energy and was such a good thing in my life. To want to repeat that would be greedy.”
Instead, he’s learned to embrace his new life, which has taken him everywhere from The Simpsons (“That’s almost bigger than the Oscars”) to the funeral of Eunice Kennedy Shriver (“Bono called me and asked if I could sing at her wake because he was playing Wembley that week”).
“It’s been an amazing ride, but it’s time to get back to work and to get back to doing what we do,” he says of The Swell Season’s upcoming tour, which stops at Massey Hall tomorrow, Montreal’s Olympia on Wednesday and Vancouver next month.
“Hopefully, along the way I’ll have other successes that are just as profound.”
After all, who says lightning can’t strike twice?
