This Wild Willing, the new album from Glen Hansard, is indeed a collection of wondrous things.
Those who have followed Hansard's career since his Academy Award winning turn in the film Once will have witnessed one artistic arc: the journey of a Dublin busker who cut his teeth on the greats -- Dylan, Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen -- and followed the path of the troubadour, the singer-songwriter to great effect.
But there is another thread running through Glen Hansard's musicianship. In his decades as lead singer of Irish stalwarts The Frames, rock and folk ambitions coexist with moments of strangeness, intimacy, and stillness: love songs drowning in the last fevers of the Spanish Flu ("Santa Maria"), protagonists who ponder throwing it all away and disappearing in a fugue state ("Keepsake"). And above all, the band, veering from silence to cacophony, ready to underpin soaring emotional and dynamic shifts.
This Wild Willing marks an inflection point in his career, a turning where he marries the sonic inventiveness of the best of his work in The Frames to the discipline he's found as a lyricist in his solo career.
Glen Hansard is proud to partner with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket sold will go towards safegaurding people experiencing homelessness and ending the cycle of homelessness and poverty. (www.plus1.org)