\n<\/p>\n
\n\tGlen Hansard<\/a> stepped away from the mic, stepped to the lip of the stage, and shouted the words \u201cI got a home on high.\u201d Coming out of Ireland\u2019s busking tradition, Hansard had been singing this way his entire life. So when he was faced with some seeming sound issues mid-way through a spellbinding Carnegie Hall performance in March 2019, where he was appearing at a tribute to his hero<\/a>, Van Morrison, Hansard ripped the cord from his guitar, moved closer to the crowd, and reduced the historic 2,800-person theater to yet another cramped Dublin pub or street corner.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHansard was performing Morrison\u2019s \u201cAstral Weeks\u201d<\/a> \u2014 his musical North Star \u2014 and delivering the type of electrifying solo-acoustic performance for which he was best known and beloved. He strummed his guitar so fast you could hardly see his right hand moving, he screamed and shouted Morrison\u2019s divine ode to the slipstream, turning the meandering song, somehow, into a sing-along with the audience. He preached and prophesized, offering life lessons in the midst of his call-and-response instructions. \u201cWhen you sing from the heart,\u201d Hansard told the crowd mid-song, almost as an aside, \u201cyou\u2019re never out of tune.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHansard, the Irish singer-songwriter whose shocking death<\/a> at 56 from a motorcycle accident earlier this morning is still being processed by fans, friends, and family, was best known as the heartfelt busker-turned-balladeer exemplified that night at Carnegie Hall. But his music was often far darker and more musically unsettled than anyone might\u2019ve assumed if they knew him (much to his chagrin) either as the fresh-faced bassist Outspan Foster in 1991\u2019s The Commitments<\/em> or, more commonly, the down-and-out version of himself he played in Once<\/em>, the 2007 film that became a runaway hit, a Broadway musical, and, ultimately, the project with which he was most closely associated.<\/p>\n \n\tHansard was much more than that. He was a rock star, synthesizer and serenader, a busker and bard, a jazzman and a mystic, a hushed folk whisperer and showbiz soul belter, both a restless innovator bristling against the expectations placed upon him and a crowd-pleasing storyteller whose non-musical narratives could be almost as compelling as the greatest songs he wrote. (Drop everything and listen to his 10-minute story<\/a> of the night he met Morrison if you haven\u2019t heard it.) The songs Hansard wrote were tales of madness and mercy, just as often full of unresolved tension and simmering dissonance as of cathartic release.\u00a0 He was both a post-Dylan singer-songwriter strumming originals that articulated his understanding of the world and a profound, old-fashioned interpreter of others\u2019 material, someone who often showed more of himself in his performances of another\u2019s songs more than his own: See his spellbinding 2012 performance<\/a> of Bruce Springsteen\u2019s \u201cDrive All Night,\u201d which is less a cover and more a musical travelogue of Hansard\u2019s entire musical life.<\/p>\n