The Frames – Their own private Ireland
The Cost captures what the Frames do best: songs that grind to life slowly but eventually tower in the clouds, raised by symphonic textures, guitar combustion and Hansard’s go-for-broke vocals, the sound of a man pushing himself to find his breaking point. For Odlum, that comes from the magnetism of their live shows, where there is “almost this thing where the band pushes the audience and the audience pushes the band back.
“It really is a dialogue. There’s this buildup of energy. Glen’s a great frontman in that respect. He really gets caught up in the moment and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, almost as if he’s trying to burst the song.”
Lyrically, The Cost sounds like it cost Hansard a considerable amount of late-night introspection. “Try to focus on the good/I’m tired of diving for the pearl,” he sings on “Song For Someone”. Later, on “Sad Song”, he addresses himself directly: “And the price of fame/Is that they love you when you’re gone/But I better stop complaining now/It’s useless because/Too many sad words/Make a sad, sad song.”
The album’s inconsolable edge is rooted in a meltdown Hansard experienced last summer when, after years of constant touring and striving for success, he found himself worrying he was turning into (in his words) “a fat, overweight, bald, selfish prick” with an alcohol problem, abandoned by his best friend who walked away from him in disgust. The cost inferred by the album title is normalcy, something Hansard realized he had nothing of the sort.
“You’re in a rock band, you’re touring the world and everything’s great. But the sacrifices are you’ve got no life,” he says. “I don’t have a wife. I don’t have kids. I’ve become institutionalized. I eat better on the road. I sleep better when I’m on the road. It’s almost like I know that life better now.”
Mac Con Iomaire said the entire band was also having trouble getting over the death of songwriter Mick Christopher, whose song “Heyday” they covered on a recent EP.
“He was just a fellow busker with us. To lose him really put the cat among the pigeons,” Mac Con Iomaire says. “It’s like W.B. Yeats said: ‘Everything has changed, changed utterly.’ I think the joy definitely went out of being in Ireland. Mick and Glen were inseparable for the previous couple of years. They were best friends. The process of grief expressed itself in different ways. For Glen, it took him awhile to figure it out.”
Hansard, who has since come to control his drinking, has a place to stay in Dublin but lives mostly in the Czech Republic capital of Prague. A robust economy and overdevelopment in his home country made living there difficult, he laments. “Everything’s for sale; we turned it into a very ugly place. I can’t stand it. Ireland’s a very beautiful woman, but right now, she has so much makeup on, she looks like a whore.”
Despite the momentum, the newfound purpose, and a trophy borrowed from U2, Hansard says it was his American experience that prepared him for what’s next.
“What I always loved about America is it really responds to hard work,” he says. “If you’re willing to go and work your ass off, you can have the dream. And what is the dream? The dream is to go to any town in America and play to 2,000 people.
“I have no aspiration to be U2, to be Coldplay, to be any of that. What I am interested is to be playing when I’m 60 and filling a room.”