July is coming to its conclusion with a sad note for music fans.

The Irish singer, songwriter and actor Glen Hansard died on Wednesday, July 29, at the age of 56, bringing to an abrupt end a career built far more on artistic honesty than on fame.

To the wider public, Hansard will always be remembered for Once (2007), the small independent film that became a worldwide phenomenon. Alongside Markéta Irglová, he wrote and performed Falling Slowly, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2008. It was an unassuming song, almost shy in its simplicity, but it carried such rare emotional truth that it crossed borders and was later immortalized on stage when Once became an award-winning Broadway musical.

But reducing Glen Hansard to the Oscar would be deeply unfair.

Long before the golden statuette, he was already one of Ireland’s most respected musicians as the frontman of The Frames, a band that helped define a generation of alternative rock. Then came The Swell Season, his artistic and romantic partnership with Irglová, which produced some of the most beautiful songs of the 2000s. After that, he built a strong solo career, marked by albums in which the intensity never felt calculated. Everything sounded lived.

I was lucky enough to see him live when he came to Brazil with The Swell Season. It was one of those concerts that stays with you for years. Hansard sang as though he were speaking directly to every person in the audience. There was no distance between the stage and the crowd, no sense of a performance polished into perfection. There was only complete surrender to the music.

Perhaps that was his greatest quality.

While so many artists try to impress through technique or grandeur, Glen Hansard seemed interested only in moving people. His voice was never perfect by traditional standards, but that was precisely why it carried such rare humanity. Every small imperfection reminded us that those songs came from someone real.

His journey also said a great deal about who he was. Before the packed theaters and the Oscar, he spent years busking on the streets of Dublin. Even after fame arrived, he never lost that essence. Music remained an encounter, never a monument.

Almost twenty years after Once turned a tiny production into a modern classic, Falling Slowly remains much more than an award-winning song. It is one of those songs that survives because it speaks to our most universal human fragilities.

Today, cinema loses an Oscar winner. Music loses an extraordinary songwriter.

And I say goodbye to an artist I followed for many years, from before the statuette, and whom I had the privilege of seeing live. Glen Hansard was never the most famous musician of his generation. But he was, without question, one of the most sincere.