The Swell Season

If there's one thing that The Swell Season's Glen Hansard can be applauded for, it's his willingness to wear his emotions on his sleeve. Watching the Irish songsmith slowly seduce a crowd over a lovely evening using both his hard-luck, tough-love theatrics and witty, heartfelt stage banter was a rare sight to behold.

Hansard has an innate ability to be able to take an entire room and reduce the atmosphere to something akin to a show given at a tiny coffee shop, making every audience member count. His mannerisms and ways of speaking brought both the audience and the performer closer together, telling stories, joking and actually discussing his love of the city of Montreal with concrete examples. None of that bullshit rockstar "YOU ROCK, (insert name of city)!" It was all earnest, all of the time. Though Olympia was filled right up to the top of the balcony upstairs, I've rarely been to more intimate-feeling shows.

The band, now comprising of Hansard and Marketa Irglova as well as members of Hansard's other project the Frames, took to the stage and spent 2 1/2 hours working their way through both bands' catalogues, taking cuts from newly-released gem Strict Joy (including slow-burner 'Low Rising', as well as 'The Rain' and 'High Horse'), their award-winning Once soundtrack and some of the Frames' later albums.

The band configuration would change from song to song, depending on what the structure required. The haunting ballads were stripped down to simply Irglova's piano-playing and Hansard's scratchy, plaintive voice, singing of forlorn love and other lost sentiments. Other songs, such as the aforementioned 'Low Rising', found the stage full of musicians. Those tracks took on a life of their own, alien to the quiet numbers, creating musical peaks and valleys that lasted the entire evening, ensuring that the melancholy mixed well with the sweet sounds of primal rock, bordering on full-band folk music.

Hansard once again managed to obliterate the invisible barrier in-between performer and audience during the encore, where he began to play his acoustic guitar and sing without the aid of amplification. The hushed silence of the audience was a clear signifier of respect for the man at the center of the spectacle, who obviously spent a large part of his teenage years (and beyond) busking and knew how to play to a crowd.

Then the entire band, opening act Doveman (who himself shared his enjoyable brand of piano-driven singer-songwriter with the audience) and members of the audience watching from the wings joined in together for a rousing rendition of Bob Dylan's "You Ain't Going Nowhere", whose refrain was echoed over and over again, a suiting coda to a night of great music.