Glen Hansard, Irish songwriter and ‘Once’ star, dies at 56

VPM | By Stephen Thompson and Isabella Gomez Sarmiento

Published July 29, 2026 at 1:35 PM EDT

Glen Hansard, seen here performing in Washington, D.C. in 2016, led the Irish band The Frames and won an Oscar for the song "Falling Slowly" from the film Once. — Glen Hansard, seen here performing in Washington, D.C. in 2016, led the Irish band The Frames and won an Oscar for the song "Falling Slowly" from the film *Once*.

Glen Hansard, the Irish singer who won an Oscar for the musical movie Once and led the bands The Frames and The Swell Season, died on Wednesday. He was 56 years old. Hansard’s management shared a statement with NPR, and confirmed that he died following a motorcycle crash in Dublin.

“With broken hearts we announce the passing of Glen Hansard in the early hours of this morning,” the statement reads. “We are still dealing with the shock of it all, so we kindly ask that the privacy of Glen’s family, colleagues and friends is respected at this difficult time.”

Hansard dropped out of school at 13 to focus on music, performing frequently as a busker in Ireland. Not long after forming his band The Frames in 1990, he landed a part in the movie The Commitments — about a tempestuous Irish band that couldn’t overcome conflicts among its members.

Hansard’s own career proved more stable and long-lasting: The Frames, named for Hansard’s affinity for bicycles, became a hit in Ireland, though it struggled for years to find the same level of fame in the U.S. The band married alt-rock bombast — stormy guitars, weeping strings — with the intimacy of a seasoned busker. Hansard’s own showmanship, honed through years of street performances, made him a natural frontman.

After short stints on several major U.S. labels, The Frames nurtured a grassroots following in America, as 2001’s independently released For the Birds attracted some of Hansard’s best early reviews.

Hansard’s biggest career move came when he was cast as the unnamed male lead in the 2007 film Once. Hansard and the Czech-born singer Markéta Irglová starred as a pair of struggling musicians in Dublin, and the pair won the 2008 Academy Award for best original song for their romantic duet, “Falling Slowly.” The song quickly became a standard and the film’s soundtrack sold hundreds of thousands of copies; later, after Once spawned a hit Broadway musical of the same name, Hansard won a Grammy Award for best musical theater album.

Hansard and Irglová became romantically involved during Once‘s run of success, and continued to collaborate over the years. In the wake of Once‘s success, they formed a band together called The Swell Season, which contained several members of The Frames. The group released a post-Once album, 2009’s Strict Joy, before Hansard and Irglová embarked on solo careers; the pair reunited 16 years later to put out another album, Forward, in 2025.

Hansard also released a string of solo albums which often showcased a more subdued and reflective side of the artist; 2015’s Didn’t He Ramble was nominated for a Grammy for best folk album. Though the music often veered from the bombastic passion of Hansard’s work with The Frames and The Swell Season, it also found him growing more musically expansive, as he worked with large bands that often included supporting players he’d worked with for years.

Earlier this year, Hansard released a pair of albums called Don’t Settle. The albums, recorded over two nights in 2025, features live performances of songs that span Hansard’s career.

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Stephen Thompson

Stephen Thompson is a host, writer and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist and guest host on All Songs Considered. Thompson also co-hosts the daily NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created with NPR's Linda Holmes in 2010. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)

In 1993, Thompson founded The Onion's entertainment section, The A.V. Club, which he edited — alongside duties as The Onion's copy editor — until December 2004. In the years since, he has provided music- and pop-culture-themed commentaries for NPR programs such as Weekend Edition, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, on which he earned the distinction of becoming the first member of the NPR Music staff ever to sing on an NPR newsmagazine. (Later, the magic of AutoTune transformed him from a 12th-rate David Archuleta into a fourth-rate Cher.) Thompson's entertainment writing has also run in Paste magazine, The Washington Post and The London Guardian.

During his tenure at The Onion, Thompson edited the 2002 book The Tenacity Of The Cockroach: Conversations With Entertainment's Most Enduring Outsiders (Crown) and copy-edited six best-selling comedy books. While there, he also coached The Onion's softball team to a sizzling 21-42 record, and was once outscored 72-0 in a span of 10 innings. Later in life, Thompson redeemed himself by teaming up with the small gaggle of fleet-footed twentysomethings who won the 2008 NPR Relay Race, a triumph he documents in a hard-hitting essay for the book This Is NPR: The First Forty Years (Chronicle).

A 1994 graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Thompson now lives in Silver Spring, Md., with his girlfriend, their three cats and a room full of vintage arcade machines. (He also has two adult children who've headed off to college but still call once in a while.) Thompson's hobbies include watching reality television without shame, eating Pringles until his hand has involuntarily twisted itself into a gnarled claw, using the size of his Twitter following to assess his self-worth, touting the immutable moral superiority of the Green Bay Packers (who returned the favor by making a 22-minute documentary about his life) and maintaining a fierce rivalry with all Midwestern states other than Wisconsin.

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