2 min readAug 1, 2026 07:17 AM IST First published on: Aug 1, 2026 at 07:17 AM ISTEarlier this week, on Tuesday, Academy Award-winning Irish folk musician Glen Hansard walked into Wren’s Nest, a Dublin pub, with his guitar, and sang a piece about the end of a relationship. “Time is the only thing that’s gonna fix this now,” he crooned. It was a snippet from an unreleased number sung in the kind of room in which Hansard had almost always felt at home. Hours later, he was killed in a motorcycle crash. He was 56.It is a poignant final image, with Hansard spending his last evening doing what he loved best: Singing amid fellow Dubliners in a neighbourhood pub. Born and raised in the Irish capital, he spent his childhood amid hardship in Ballymun in northern Dublin. This city was also his first music school, where Hansard began busking as a teenager after leaving school at 13; it was on these streets that he first learned the unpredictability of a public performance. Years later, in 1990, he would find his artistic identity with the rock band, The Frames.AdvertisementWhat took Hansard from being a popular musician in Dublin to one striding the world stage was John Carney’s intimate, low-budget musical drama, Once (2007), where Hansard starred alongside fellow musician Markéta Irglová as two struggling Dublin musicians falling in love through music. The film’s centrepiece, ‘Falling Slowly’, won Hansard an Academy Award for Best Original Song, which Irglová shared with him. After a lifetime of performing music all over the world, Hansard would return to Grafton Street every Christmas eve without fail to sing for the home crowd. In a Dublin pub, his last outing, he did the same: Connecting people from diverse worlds with music. His tragic loss will linger. Time, after all, may not fix this now.