The inspiration for Don+t Settle – Transmissions East and West, Glen Hansard’s sixth and latest, two-volume solo album, came from a memorable night in The Hague in the summer of 2024. Hansard and his band were performing at the outdoor Zuiderparktheater when the heavens opened, and they had to swiftly recalibrate. The singer immediately invited a large number of the 1,200-strong crowd to take shelter on the stage.
“I’ve never shied away from an opportunity to have the audience come up and sit right in among the band,” Hansard acknowledges with a wry laugh. “The most memorable concerts are the ones where nature just does what it does and then you have to adapt.”
Also in the audience that night were Hansard’s now-managers, Brian Message and Ric Salmon of ATC, who were blown away both by the communal experience and the surprisingly raw power of a singer perhaps best known as a balladeer. “Brian was like, ‘You guys are a rock band!’… but I was a rock musician,” the singer points out, referring to his years as the frontman and leader of Dublin’s The Frames. “People who come to see me know that it’s not just me and an acoustic guitar and some love songs. It’s a broad spectrum.”
From this remarkable Dutch gig grew the notion for Don+t Settle – Transmissions East and West, a live-recorded, 22-song deep dive into Glen Hansard’s songbook. The twin albums (to be released individually in 2026) encompass his solo work along with The Frames and with Markéta Irglová as The Swell Season – who, of course, appeared together in the heart-stirring 2007 film musical, Once, for which the pair won a Best Original Song Oscar for “Falling Slowly.” Along the way, as something of an ‘artists’ artist’, he has picked up endorsements and admiration from fellow musicians including Bob Dylan, Eddie Vedder, Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell.
Don+t Settle – Transmissions East and West was recorded over two nights in April 2025, with audiences of Hansard fans in attendance, at Funkhaus Berlin, a former East German radio facility, housed in an imposingly enormous structure. “It is an absolute ghost building,” the singer marvels. “The architecture is phenomenal. It’s just gorgeous inside.”
While the intensity of the tracks recorded at Funkhaus for Don+t Settle – Transmissions East and West is evident from its fiery rockers to its hypnotic ballads, Hansard recognises that the act of harnessing live performance on record is a tricky one. “Especially if what you do is based in spirit and energy,” he stresses. “But honestly, I didn’t even realise we were recording an album. We decided to make a studio record with a live audience.”
To reach this point in his career, Glen Hansard has been on a long and highly eventful journey. From his roots as a tearaway from Northside Dublin’s Ballymun tower blocks, brought up surrounded by traditional Irish music and rebel songs, he was airlifted out of a life of delinquency at the age of 12 when his girlfriend’s brother handed him a cassette copy of 1971 compilation album More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits.
“I was robbing cars, and dabbling in drinking, drugs and stupid behaviour” Hansard admits. “I was in that troubled spot. At the same time, my uncle had gone to prison, and his guitar was left in our house. But I’d discovered Bob Dylan and my uncle’s guitar was in my mother’s wardrobe and so I disappeared into my bedroom until I was 14 and learned Dylan songs.
“Dylan became my north star,” he explains, “and I had that transformational moment where I became a different person. I really believe music saved me.” As time passed, Hansard discovered other artists who were to be key to his development: Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, James Taylor, The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention.
Still, as something of a truant and class clown (albeit a bright one), Hansard’s education was marked by constant disruption. One day, his music-loving headmaster, after asking the lad to play a couple of tunes, made the surprising decision to send him home, advising him to go busking in the centre of Dublin.
“I was so scared,” he remembers. “I took out my guitar in a laneway where no one was passing, and someone threw 20p in my box. I went straight to a cafe, and I bought the first cup of tea I’d ever bought out of my own money. And I’d earned it from music. I was addicted. And I went in every day and I learned my craft.”
From this point, busking daily, Hansard earned an alternative education, connecting with fellow musicians, poets and heads. “The school of the street was so much more interesting than the actual school,” he colourfully recalls. Out of this vibrant scene The Frames were born in 1989, winning the approval of Hansard’s formative hero when Bob Dylan wandered into their Dublin rehearsal room unannounced in 1993, subsequently inviting the band to open for him at London’s Hammersmith Apollo.
By this point, however, Hansard had experienced a bright flash of international fame outside of the band, when he was given the role – after idly attending a casting alongside an actor friend – as guitarist Outspan Foster in Alan Parker’s 1991 comedy drama hit The Commitments. For a time, though, Hansard felt that his sudden celebrity detracted from his real-life group. “I got the role in The Commitments, but it wasn’t something that I’d sought out,” he states. “I loved it. I just didn’t want to be completely consumed by it.”
Hansard’s second film role similarly arrived by chance, when original Frames bassist-turned-filmmaker John Carney began collecting the singer’s busking tales for the project that was to become Once. After helping his friend and collaborator Markéta Irglová nail the lead female role, Hansard was cast as the male lead when Cillian Murphy dropped out. Shot, DIY-style, in three weeks in Dublin, it proved to be an enormous success upon its release, grossing $23 million from a $150,000 budget.
“When we won the Oscar, Dylan called,” Hansard reveals. “It was like, ‘Well done.’ He didn’t say, ‘I like the film.’ But he f****** called (laughs).”
In the meantime, the plot of Once was mirrored in real life, when Hansard and Irglová became a couple while continuing to record and tour as The Swell Season. “Marketa brought a lot of femininity to our songs and music that hadn’t been present up to that point,” says Hansard. “And, of course, we fell in love.”
Ultimately, the pressures of success pulled the two apart. “We’ve been able to look beyond that moment and maintain what was beautiful about the two of us and what we did,” Hansard says of their creative pairing. “We actually make music really well together.”
Hansard embarked upon his solo career almost by chance after recording in New York (with his friend Thomas Bartlett aka Doveman) the album that was to be 2012’s Rhythm and Repose. “I was like, Is this a Frames record? Is it a Markéta record? And then I just said, I’m calling this ‘Glen Hansard’. Suddenly I was on a new trajectory.”
Four subsequent solo albums followed – 2015’s Didn’t He Ramble, 2018’s Between Two Shores, 2019’s This Wild Willing and 2023’s All That Was East Is West of Me Now, all with contributions from members of The Frames and Marketa – paving the way for Don+t Settle – Transmissions East and West. While not precisely a ‘best of’ or ‘greatest hits’ set, it brilliantly showcases the breadth of Hansard’s talents and songwriting. The Frames are represented with storming renditions of “Revelate” and “Fitzcarraldo;” Once with what the singer describes as a “kind of manic, almost gospel” version of “When Your Mind’s Made Up;” and Hansard’s Irish traditional past with a haunting and heartfelt “Carrickfergus.”
One of Hansard’s personal highlights from Transmissions East (Vol. 1) is the hushed live take on The Swell Season’s “Back Broke” (from 2009’s Strict Joy). “For me, the moment is when the audience are singing, ‘Ah ah ah ah’. To me, that song has always had echoes of old Europe. And to hear the audience sing that… and we’re in East Berlin… that gave me tingles.”
Over the years, Glen Hansard has also found himself in a series of unusual or unexpected situations – from being invited by Joni Mitchell to perform at her 70th and 75th birthday celebrations (the legendary singer-songwriter calling his rendition of “Shadows And Light” “transcendent”) to leading the performance of “Fairytale of New York” at Shane MacGowan’s funeral in 2023, to watching his annual Christmas Eve Busk for the Simon Community homeless charity swell to include guests from Imelda May to Bono, and grow to the point where it will be televised in 2026.
A couple of years ago, wandering through Dublin near St. Stephen’s Green, Hansard experienced an epiphany – a sudden, overwhelming realisation that he was “in the middle of a good life”. The feeling stayed with him, and that sense of joy and what he calls “good fortune, goodwill, good energy” runs through the music and performances on Don+t Settle – Transmissions East and West.
“I’m at an age where I either take my foot off the gas or I put my foot on the gas,” laughs the 55-year-old. “I think I need to put my foot on the gas.”
At the beginning of this new journey, with Don+t Settle – Transmissions East and West, he’s clearly putting his foot to the floor. From here, Glen Hansard can go anywhere.