The rock legend and a group of young Catholics remembered the same qualities in the Oscar-winning Irish musician.
Glen Hansard was never the sort of musician who seemed entirely comfortable with fame. The Dublin-born singer-songwriter first came to international attention with The Frames before winning an Academy Award for "Falling Slowly," the haunting song from the film Once. His unmistakable voice took him to concert halls around the world, yet friends often remarked that he seemed happiest with a guitar on a street corner, playing eye-to-eye with the people gathered around him.
That image runs through the tributes shared since his death in a motorcycle accident at the age of 56. They don't read like polished eulogies or carefully prepared statements. Instead, they are full of memories that, taken together, sketch a portrait of a man who never seemed to lose his curiosity about other people.
Bono's tribute is perhaps the best known. He remembered Hansard as "a smiling rascal" and "this most musical and mischievous archangel of Ballymun," but it was the quieter observations that stayed with him. Hansard, he wrote, could never walk past someone sleeping rough without stopping to check they were alright.
Even after performing on some of the world's biggest stages, he still insisted that the annual Christmas Eve busk belonged on the street because "it's not a busk if we're not on the street." Bono summed him up in a sentence that says as much about character as it does about talent: Hansard had learned "to be utterly yourself by being more interested in others."
Interestingly, those words are echoed in an unexpected place. The young musicians behind Carlo Acutis Youth Ireland remembered someone who never made them feel they were talking to an Oscar-winning songwriter. Instead, they describe a man who encouraged their music, listened with genuine interest when they spoke about their Catholic faith, and happily wandered into conversations about St. Carlo Acutis and the saints.
One memory has the charm of a story you couldn't invent. While praying a novena to St. Anthony for help with their music, the pair received a phone call from Hansard asking if they would record a song called "Anthony" with him. When they explained they had been entrusting exactly that intention to St. Anthony, he was astonished.
They later brought him copies of the novena for him and his team, which they received with delight. After seeing a photograph of the Carlo Acutis shrine the young musicians had created in their home, Hansard said he hoped to visit it one day. It is a hope that, sadly, went unfulfilled.
Placed side by side, Bono's memories and those of the young Irish Catholics don't simply tell us that Glen Hansard was kind. They show us what his kindness looked like. It was expressed in stopping for someone living on the street, in encouraging musicians at the beginning of their journey, in taking conversations about faith seriously, and in remaining genuinely interested in people whose lives were very different from his own.
Nobody's life can be summed up in a handful of tributes, and Hansard himself would probably have been the first to admit that he was a complicated man rather than a flawless one. Yet there is something particularly moving in the harmony between these very different voices. One comes from a global rock icon, the other from young Irish Catholics inspired by St. Carlo Acutis. Neither dwells on awards, record sales or celebrity. Instead, both remember a man who noticed people, made room for them and left them feeling that they had been worth his time.
And perhaps that is why these tributes have had such an impact. In the end, the qualities people cherish most are often the least glamorous. Long after the music fades, what remains are the moments of kindness, curiosity and encouragement that become part of other people's stories.
