Glen Hansard brings soul-stirring songs to Dallas’ Majestic Theatre

Glen Hansard hadn’t been on the Majestic Theatre stage long Saturday night when he made an observation that echoed through the remainder of his performance.

The Irish troubadour was speaking about the nature of friendship — “In friendship, you’re permitted to speak frankly — you’re required,” he noted — before he offered a casual aside that deftly framed everything: “We spend our lives going off our path, and finding it again.”

Destinations deterred by distractions; intentions interrupted by incidents.

It’s a simple statement, but one that easily captured the full spectrum of feeling Hansard depicts in his muscular, moving songs, which he spent 135 minutes sharing with what the singer-songwriter described as “the best behaved Saturday night audience we’ve had anywhere.”

Joined by six other musicians, including a trio of string players, Hansard worked through material from his latest record, Didn’t He Ramble, and plucked other selections from various phases and stages of his career, touching on his time in the beloved Irish rock band The Frames, as well as his collaborations with one-time romantic and artistic partner Marketa Irglova.

A smattering of smart covers — The Doors, Van Morrison, Woody Guthrie and Willie Nelson all made cameos Saturday — rounded out the generous set, largely conducted in low light, although the stage was often embracing and retreating from illumination and fog.

In another life, Hansard was a busker, a starving young artist working the streets of Dublin with nothing more than a battered acoustic guitar, a stout, beautiful voice and the gut-level instincts of a storyteller.

That mentality has never left the now 46-year-old musician — the notion that, through force and skill, the music must cut through the daily clatter of street life and touch someone’s soul — which is arresting when transposed from a street corner to the stage, where no distractions are evident.

Hansard is capable of the lightest touch and the heaviest push, caressing the faintly bitter lyrics of When Your Mind’s Made Up or the sweet, easy, wistful Renata, just as he can provide moments of breathtaking ferocity: Howling the question “How long?” at the climax of Bird of Sorrow, bent double as his hand becomes a blur on the guitar strings, the cords standing out on his neck as he succumbs to the song.

But if the songs themselves were often stormy, the banter between them was as light as the morning after.

Hansard is a natural raconteur, and spent ample time discussing everything from the current political season in America — “It’s definitely a most interesting election” — to the power of touring the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, and being shown lyric sheets and the folk icon’s guitar: “I got to look at his tools. You want to get to know a man, go in the shed and look at his tools.”

Even the spellbinding McCormack’s Wall prompted a lovely vignette about an evening when Hansard and fellow musician Lisa O’Neill swiped a bottle of wine from Damien Rice’s dressing room and took off, into the night, breaking into the late, legendary Irish tenor John McCormack’s long-disused home — “It was empty; nothing but walls,” Hansard said — and spent hours talking, drinking and baring their souls. “This was written in that beautiful, magical state: the hangover,” Hansard joked.

It was another of Hansard’s many insightful moments, a seemingly mundane observation that understated the power of his songs, odes to the ways we are bent or bruised or broken, and how the joy and meaning of life lies in the way we help one another find a way to mend ourselves and muddle through.

To be inside the Majestic Theatre Saturday night was to witness a generous, if fragile, spirit, exhorting us all to be open to anything, and closed to nothing.

For a night, anyway, we found our paths again.

This story was originally published September 25, 2016 at 12:09 PM with the headline "Glen Hansard brings soul-stirring songs to Dallas’ Majestic Theatre."