The Second Vanquisher

Early Wednesday morning on a Dublin road we lost Glen Hansard.

I won’t claim here to be an expert. I suspect that several of you know the breadth of his material better than I do. What I can say is, he had qualities that indvidually could only get you so far, but together added up to something remarkable: rare observational abilities that could only work because he was so present to observe, and that uncanny ability to convey meaning through song because you understood how good he was at listening.

For those of you less familiar, Glen was a prominent Irish singer-songwriter. His bands the Frames and Swell Season are well-known in a lot of circles, and he acted in multiple films.

I want to write here about the recording of his I’m most familiar with and see if I can explain why it is so deeply moving. It’s not actually his material, but what he was able to do was expand upon and elevate that material… to take something already vital (to me at least) and allow it to grow, to continue to live.

Glen Hansard released It Was Triumph We Once Proposed in March 2015, two years after Jason Molina’s death. The five songs are from across the Songs: Ohia catalog, and the recording includes the other core members of Songs: Ohia.

Molina died at a time when I don’t think I was quite able to absorb it, in March 2013. It was an unusual and heavy time for me and I was out of sync with a lot of things happening in the surrounding world.

It Was Triumph We Once Proposed appeared in Spotify when it came out and somehow Spotify told me about it. I listened to it immediately.

I’ll admit that I thought when I got to this point in the writing that the propulsive energy, the consciousness stream, would allow me to sail through an insightful explanation of what I experienced and why its profundity is worth sharing with you.

This is what I have: I can visualize coming home, walking from the Jefferson Park Blue Line stop, cutting across Jefferson Memorial Park. Or maybe I’m headed the other direction and I’m sneaking over to the Polish bakery to get a pączki on the way to the train stop. And I’m listening to this thing, and I’m stirred, shifted.

“Being in Love”, the original, is a deeply perplexing track, from a perplexing album, The Lioness. What does this fucking mean anyway:

Being in love means you are completely broken
Then put back together the one piece that was yours
Is beating in your lover's breast
She says the same thing about hers

Like, is this a good thing? It sounds really painful. But a cherished pain? Sometimes it comes off hopelessly ambiguously, and sometimes it comes off in a virile, passionate way.

In Glen Hansard’s hands though, the sentiment is made tender. Light sneaks in. Light that was there all along, that Hansard recognized all along. The original is somehow made better through Hansard’s reveal… the rawness of the original felt incredibly laid bare and yet even it was concealing, hiding, protecting.

Hansard then pulls a sequencing trick, putting “Hold On Magnolia” ahead of “Farewell Transmission” - the last song and first song from Magnolia Electric Co., the bookends reversed. The former, no longer a final chapter, reveals a brightness, an optimism that was always there but tempered, an unexpected satisfaction that maybe isn’t so final after all. The latter, which had always seemed like an overly clever joke of its own (who makes a song called “Farewell Transmission” an album opener anyway?), now made to feel like something surprisingly perpetual, persistent, maybe less an announcement than a perennial signal from far away, always accessible, even if it happens to be saying goodbye.

I don’t think most people had spent as much time with Magnolia Electric Co. as I had. It’s one of those records where I feel like I know every note like it’s one my oldest friends. And here Glen Hansard is showing me there’s things I don’t know about one of my oldest friends. Things that matter. Things that make the friendship stronger.

“Vanquisher” is a deeper cut - a more personal one to Hansard perhaps. It was the opener on the first, solo, self-titled Songs: Ohia album from 1997. The original feels like it’s from a remarkably distant place, a hollow somewhere deep within the Hocking Hills in the Appalachian approach. With the full band, it’s something else entirely, almost a hard rock song. There’s nothing about the early Molina material that obviously portends the guy who 10 years later would be kind of a sideways Neil Young, but the band reveals that it had been there all along, that Sparky in the corner at the Oberlin parties with his guitar already had the goddamn rock star in him.

“White Sulfur” then is almost the reverse, also pulled from the first album, coming off as almost bleaker than the original. Hansard saw better than most the multitudes in Molina, certainly as a kindred spirit, but also certainly as someone in touch with something darker, more obscure.

And this makes sense. If Hansard had an unusual gift for observing the details in front of him, then he must have seen astonishing things in Molina, whose gift was very different - the gift of pulling unrecognizable things out of the miasma. The man with perfect vision in awe of the man who could see in infrared. And vice versa.

What Glen Hansard was able to do - and of course it should be stressed that the help he had mattered a lot - was to take just five Jason Molina songs and expand the understanding of the man’s depth in astounding directions.

See, I had long felt like I got Molina - or maybe, Molina got me - on levels others didn’t, couldn’t appreciate. The first album had given me pause. The Lioness did something confusing to me I still struggle to explain, because passion is something I have a very hard time articulating, especially as distinct from enthusiasm. Didn’t It Rain remains one of the most important albums in my life, having gotten me through some of the darkest times. Magnolia Electric Co. was so much the end of that dark journey and the beginning of something else. When he moved on to form the new band and they put out Trials and Errors it felt like another important progression to me. But then at some point all that kind of went astray. I lost the immediacy of it all.

Glen Hansard brought it all back. His gracefulness, his tenderness, his reverence. I had never spoken to anyone else who had felt that way about Jason Molina. But now someone had spoken to me about it.

There were a lot of opportunities to have seen Glen Hansard and for whatever reason I never did. His solo material is great, I suppose coming from a place where my mind usually isn’t anymore. It’s a pensiveness I long for. Actually all of this writing I do has a lot to do with trying to get there. It’s harder and harder to focus anymore. Writing provides that. Music does too. Which explains why, with the end of July approaching, I’ve already been to 17 concerts this year. The only time in my life I more frequently went out to live music was when I was in college and, literally, I was comped tickets to half the shows I went to. (If I didn’t still love baseball as much as I do, that 17 would probably be higher.)

This sendup of “Vanquisher” backed by Songs: Ohia from Salt Shed in 2023 is incredible, and it is hard to fathom how I wasn’t there:

Way back in June 2013 Glen was at Metro and was accompanied by the band for “Hold On Magnolia”. A little more understandable I missed that one, what with a pregnant wife and a beagle on 20mg of Prozac at home…

Glen played “Hold On Magnolia” regularly. This more stripped down version from a KCRW session demonstrates the emotional breadth and power of the song:

There’s so much more out there to explore. I think if you look and see from where the various tributes are coming and are thinking, wow, how did I not know more about this guy, well, you’re here now, and so too is the music. That’s how I feel right now. And through tragedy like this we can make the most unexpected of connections. I dare say someone, somewhere, is going to somehow find what I wrote above and think: wow, somebody else felt that way too?

The thing about Glen and his music, like Jason and his, is: This will survive.