What happened to Glen Hansard
Glen Hansard was killed in a motorbike crash on the Lower Road in Lucan, west of Dublin, in the early hours of Wednesday 29 July 2026. Emergency services were called shortly before 4:30am. He was 56, and the father of a three-year-old boy.
His management said his family were “deeply shocked and heartbroken” and thanked the emergency services who attended the scene. Tributes followed from across the music world, including Bruce Springsteen and Ed Sheeran. Homelessness charities in Ireland and the UK paid tribute to the annual Christmas Eve busk he started in Dublin in 2010, which drew Bono, Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan over the years.
Hansard first became widely known as Outspan Foster in the 1991 film The Commitments, fronted The Frames for more than three decades, won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Original Song with Markéta Irglová for Falling Slowly from Once, and recorded three albums with her as The Swell Season.
Glen Hansard and Eddie Vedder: how the two are linked
Glen Hansard and Eddie Vedder have circled each other for decades. Vedder, the Pearl Jam frontman, is a long-standing champion of Hansard’s songwriting, and the two have shared stages, covered each other’s material and turned up at each other’s shows on both sides of the Atlantic.
The thread this interview follows is darker than a friendship story. It runs through a crowd, two bands, and a death that the people standing closest to it have never been able to put down. Vedder’s band sits on one side of it, Hansard’s world on the other.
Why this story sits in the Bent Planet archive
Bent Planet is an interview podcast about true, strange, hard-to-place events that happened to real people. Most of our case files are stories nobody can fully explain. This one is the opposite: everybody knows what happened, and nobody has been able to make it sit still.
Watch the full interview above, or open the archive for the rest of the strange but true stories in the collection.
Updated 2026-07-30