Tribute
Remembering the street-busking balladeer turned folk-rock star, whose artistic journey never stopped
Glen Hansard stepped away from the mic, stepped to the lip of the stage, and shouted the words “I got a home on high.” Coming out of Ireland’s 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, 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.
Hansard was performing Morrison’s “Astral Weeks” — his musical North Star — 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’s 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. “When you sing from the heart,” Hansard told the crowd mid-song, almost as an aside, “you’re never out of tune.”
