When Glen Hansard asked Markéta Irglová if she wanted to do “some gigs” in 2022, it had been 14 years since the duo released their second Swell Season album, Strict Joy, and went their separate ways, romantically, but not musically.
Formed in 2005, the duo’s self-titled debut in 2006 transitioned into the film Once, which they starred in and earned both an Oscar for Best Original Song in 2007 for “Falling Slowly” and led to a Tony Award-winning musical. Following their second release and hiatus, Irglová released three solo albums from Anar in 2011, through Lila in 2022, while Hansard released five solo albums, along with a seventh with his band, the Frames, Longitude, in 2015.
Though briefly a couple for three years after forming Swell Season, Hansard now has a son with his wife, Finnish poet Maire Saaritsa, and Irglová is a mother of three with her husband and producer Sturla Míó Þórisson. By 2022, both reunited “as the new people we’ve become,” says Irglová, and after their run shows expanded in 2023, along with a new Swell Season single, “The Answer is Yes,” they both found themselves recording what would become their third album, Forward.
Using some songs that both started working on independently, the two fleshed them out and completed the eight on Forward at Irglová’s Masterkey Studios, located above her home outside of Reykjavik, Iceland, along with original Swell Season band bassist Joseph Doyle, Marja Gaynor, and Bertrand Galen on strings and new drummer Piero Perelli.
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During their recording, Irglová also took on the role of documentarian, chronicling the making of each track with a film accompanying the album. “I enjoy having the visuals just for personal reasons,” says Irglová. “It’s capturing the memories in a way that feels like it’s going to grow more and more precious with every year that passes … to have this little thing that captures a moment in time.
Forward was not about looking backward by any means, from the opening “Factory Street Bells,” Hansard’s ode to his son—Your dad’s a fortunate man / And he’ll be back to hold you / Just as soon as he can—to “People We Used to Be,” a perfect anthem of their reunion, marking their past, present, and everything forward.
The gently sweeping “I Leave Everything to You” is one of the more poignant moments Irglová captures midway through Forward. A cinematic missive on mortality and all the things, good and bad, one passes on to her children: Everything I ever knew / I passed it onto you / The good and the bad / I hope you don’t resent / Anything I represent / In your life.
Hansard remembers Irglová casually presenting the ballad to him one morning during one of their sessions. “She came down the stairs one morning and said, ‘I just wrote this thing,’ and she played it, and it was the one song from this recording where I was moved to the point of complete stillness,” recalls Hansard. “I remember saying, ‘What is that?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know. I just wrote it right now.’ That was the moment when I knew, ‘Okay, now we have a centerpiece.’ When a record has a centerpiece, then you can build out from there.”
From a melody, Irglová pieced together the rest of the song at the piano. “The song just rolled out, almost finished,” says Irglová, who didn’t want to include it as part of the final eight tracks on Forward, at first. “It’s just me and the piano, not us together, so I thought it didn’t make sense,” she says, “but Glen believed that it needed to be there, and I think his instinct was right.”
She continues, “It’s so much a part of that time, and it wanted to be born in the context of this project. And people do connect to it live. While I’m playing, I hear people sobbing in the audience. It’s a beautiful thing.”
The bluesier march of “Great Weight” was a track the duo initially recorded with some local musicians during an earlier session, before they were aware that they were headed toward a full album, which created a “slightly carnival feel,” says Hansard.
For Hansard, making Forward felt more like the duo’s 2006 debut, The Swell Season, which was used for the film Once. By the time they released Strict Joy in 2009, they’d been extensively touring, won an Academy Award, and were in a liminal place, says Hansard. Musically, he says he felt like he was moving back towards making music for the Frames.
“Markéta was writing songs that were better than she’d ever written, and she was becoming more confident as a songwriter,” says Hansard. “She was beginning to move into her own. You could feel that she needed to make an album rather than collaborate on one. And there was a kind of an atmosphere around that album that when I listen back to it, it feels a bit like a Frames record.”
Thinking back to where the Swell Season left off in 2009, Irglová says some things resurfaced while making Forward. “When we’re working together, certain things resurfaced for me in a way that felt unexpected, that I found sneaking into the songs here and there,” she shares. “And even though they didn’t reflect where we are now, they still came to the forefront of consciousness, so there are certain things that feel almost like a completion of something that never really got finished.”
The idea of Forward is moving on, something that became transparent on Hansard’s “Stuck in Reverse.” My love, can we go backward? / Back to the days before the wheels came off, Hansard sings on the Forward-contrary track, a song Irglová helped level out.
“Markéta was like ‘Well, why don’t you just say ‘So go … Get off your ass and do something better, We can’t go backwards, so leave,’” says Hansard. So go, there’s a world of changes / So many bridges still to get over, were some of the lyrics added. “So then we hit that resolve chord,” he adds, “and then suddenly we had a chorus.”
That moment was captured on film, but not everything was documented. “If it happens very quickly, the creative spark is something that almost happens invisibly,” says Hansard. “It’s incredible that there were some moments caught on camera, but generally speaking, those quiet decisions that get made—which mean a song becomes the song it is—are often not filmable. They’re more of an internal flick.”
Moving forward, the two will continue working together following their 2025 tour, on the score for the upcoming musical Waking New Devine, based on the 1998 film of the same name. “We’re in each other’s lives,” says Hansard. “We’re making music, and there’s a creative commitment.”
With that, both embody the message of Forward, to keep moving, to go on. “I’m a big believer that time is an illusion, and everything is happening at the same time, in every moment,” says Irglová. “Time, space, continuum folds, and the past and present merge, and I feel like you can access different things as if they were happening now, even though they’re in the past.”
She adds, “Living in the past isn’t necessarily good. You have to live in the present, and you have to embrace the moment. Everything that happened shapes who you are. It’s brought you where you are now, so just to be able to honor that while also recognizing that it’s a forward motion.
Life is about putting one foot in front of the other and not getting stuck in reverse.”
Photos: David Turecky
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