The Frames – Their own private Ireland
Though Hansard may carry bitter memories of the recording process, many of the tracks on Dance The Devil — which was not released in the U.S. — remained highlights of the band’s live shows for the next few years, including “Star Star”, “Pavement Tune” and “God Bless Mom”. (More than half the album’s songs turned up on the band’s 2004 live disc Set List.)
“When you’re in a situation like that, it’s tough to watch your child beat up and molested by this lunatic you don’t trust,” Hansard says. “What happens is, you get sick. And that is kind of what happened to me. I got sick.”
When Hansard was busking in the streets of Dublin as a young man, he had one directive he hoped his life would follow: “I always wanted to be Bruce.” Springsteen, that is.
The Frames came together physically before they did musically. During Saturday busking sessions on the streets, local kids banded together into what was an informal fraternity of musical hobbyists who shared big dreams and cold afternoons. “It became really, really popular; it was almost like a Saturday afternoon occupation,” says David Odlum, 37, a former Frames guitarist who’s now the band’s official engineer. “[Hansard] seemed to be louder than everyone else. I think he was a born entertainer.”
The son of a former prizefighter and a mother who sold fruit at an outside market, Hansard felt preordained to make it, thanks to his guitar. It was a gift from his uncle Paul, a musician who ended up in an Amsterdam prison after trying to smuggle heroin across Europe. During his uncle’s incarceration, Hansard took possession of the guitar; his mother encouraged him to learn a few songs he could play at the airport terminal the day her brother came home.
When that day arrived, Hansard, then 12, positioned himself in the airport terminal to serenade his uncle and family with Leonard Cohen’s “Bird On A Wire”. His first public performance soured when his uncle walked off the plane, saw his nephew, and went red, shouting, “He’s fucking playing my guitar!”
Time cooled Paul down, and eventually he took Glen on the road with him as a second guitarist. They played American country music in Dublin bars for three years. The payoff came when Hansard was taken to a music store and told to pick out any guitar he wanted. “I still play that same guitar today. Because I earned it,” he said.
Earning what you have was a lesson Hansard would learn a second time halfway around the world. Although he knew the east coast of the United States thanks to a job playing in the Irish cover band the Commitments — he used to play cafes with Jeff Buckley, who was then the Commitments’ guitar tech — Hansard had never been to the midwest. He was lured to Chicago by a fan who got him solo gigs and introduced him to producer Steve Albini (Nirvana, the Pixies).
After their first meeting at Electrical Audio, Albini’s studio, Hansard remembers running across a Chicago River bridge and jumping in the air. “I knew something had just happened in my life,” he says.
The Albini connection extended to other players in Chicago’s independent music scene, including Corey Rusk of Touch & Go Records and Howard Greynolds of Thrill Jockey. They started conferencing with Hansard, exposing him to a way of making music that was a night-and-day difference from what he once knew.
“I’d never in my fucking life had conversations with people that were so straightforward,” he recalls. “Howard said, ‘If we sell 10,000, we are doing really fucking good; if we sell 15,000 we’re on the pig’s back.’ I remember at the time thinking, ‘That’s a very small number.’ I had signed to labels that told me, ‘If we don’t sell 100,000 copies of this, it’s considered a failure.’ Suddenly these guys were talking in a super realistic way. I was realizing that in order to do your music truly, you have to let go of this bullshit concept of becoming Bruce Springsteen.”
Reborn in the U.S.A., worked with Albini on For The Birds, which was issued by Greynolds’ indie label Overcoat and raised the band’s profile in the States. Eventually they signed with Anti-, which released the 2004 live disc and then 2005’s Burn The Maps. After a decade of lineup changes, the Frames had found a new purpose to keep going.
“Realistically, it’s been about four different bands,” says Colm Mac Con Iomaire, 35, the Frames violinist and string arranger who has been in the band since their busking days. “Thankfully I’m in my favorite band at the moment. It’s just been a long apprenticeship, really. We’re in a new land.”