The Earnest Era Ends

A few months ago, when I was walking around a mall on a ninety-something-degree day. I made a claim to my wife that I thought profound, but she kind of saw through pretty quickly.

“If you walked through a mall 20 years ago, everyone would basically look the same,” I said, noting that fashion has barely shifted since the mid-2000s. She called bullshit, noting that folks simply wearing T-shirts and jeans and khakis wasn’t enough to say we still dress the same.

But when we caught Nirvanna the Band The Show the Movie recently, I felt some modest vindication. The entire time-travel plot of the movie only really works because of this point I highlighted. If the characters found themselves in 1995, the fashions would be dramatically different; but in 2008, little would change, minus the kinds of phones in their hands.

However, it’s clear that something did in fact change since then, and Glen Hansard’s recent passing highlights the lingering background subtlety. Throughout the 2000s, a crop of extremely earnest singer-songwriters found an audience through various means. Dudes like Damien Rice and Damien Jurado come to mind, as do dudes like Josh Rouse and Josh Ritter. (As well as people who don’t share first names.)

On the indie-leaning end of things, Iron & Wine, Devendra Banhart, Fleet Foxes, José González, and Bon Iver gave this organic, folky sound a sense of ambition. (Some, like Mark Kozelek, leave us with deep senses of regret.) If you were a white guy with a beard and wanted to express your feelings in song, there were many lanes for your acoustic guitar in the mid-2000s.

Hansard, who busked his way to success in his home country of Ireland with The Frames, didn’t look like he’d make it to the mainstream in America. (Like Ritter, he was initially huge in Ireland and basically nowhere else.) But a chance opportunity to revive a latent skill he had picked up in the 1990s, acting, accidentally became a breakout moment. Once, the film he starred in with Markéta Irglová, was a revelation, and one that largely holds up after two decades. And yes, it both won an Oscar and had a memorable acceptance speech.

You think people playing music on their phone while riding the bus was annoying? You clearly haven’t been on a bus where a dude was playing a guitar.

That said, though there are some points of discomfort with the film today. The 18-year age difference between Hansard and Irglová, who became a couple during the film’s production, would likely come off as more scandalous if it came out today, especially given Irglová’s young age. (More recent awards favorite Licorice Pizza faced that kind of controversy.) Also unfortunate is the extended motorcycle scene, which sadly means that the film has a built-in reminder of how Hansard died.

As The Swell Season, Hansard and Irglová had continued their partnership off and on over the past two decades, in between Hansard’s solo career and the occasional Frames reunion. But their romantic partnership ended long ago in a too-much-too-fast rush. The music stayed behind.

Eventually, this acoustic sound expanded into the “stomp-clap-hey” side of indie that infiltrated the 2010s. That sound has gotten some harsh criticism in retrospect. But I think as well, our desires for new musical voices, in more ways than one, began to emerge.

These days, when a dude picks up a guitar, there’s a lot of production behind the playing because it’s easier to access said production. With modern production equipment, it’s easier than ever to get a specific sound from any era in the past 50 years.

But in the mid-2000s, the earthy sound, while not sounding dated to modern ears, was familiar and comforting. Alas, it was too often a thousand shades of the same thing. One of the most important musical trends of the 2010s was that singer-songwritery music expanded beyond the white-male-centric construct that Once exemplifies. Artists like Adrianne Lenker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Waxahatchee have built the kinds of admirable artistic dynasties that Hansard did in the ’90s and 2000s, but arguably with more underlying complexity. (Irglová, who now lives in Iceland, also has a pretty solid solo career of her own.)

The full-band version of “Falling Slowly” could have absolutely dominated in an alternate-universe 2006.

It’s worth noting that our image of Hansard as a king of the buskers is not a complete image, even if it’s the one that’s gonna stick with him. It’s overshadowed now by his post-Once work, but The Frames initially had more in common with the Pixies than Snow Patrol.

Pondering Snow Patrol for a second here: The Cost was mining a very similar sound to what Snow Patrol, a Northern Ireland band and Grey’s Anatomy favorite, was doing in 2006. It was arguably better, but it was Snow Patrol who dominated American radio. The Frames could have bubbled over just as easily as Once eventually did.

Folk never died; its sound just gradually shifted. It hits differently than it did in this mid-2000s era when it seemed like a dude with a guitar and an earnest story about a challenging relationship could change the world.

Now, we seem to expect something different from our acoustic musical icons. The sounds are still tradition-steeped, but the messages are often more tied to our digital era. Dudes like Jesse Welles are soundtracking the news and talking about politics rather than relationship politics; the colors aren’t quite the same.

Going back to my metaphor about malls not changing, I think music production hasn’t changed much since the late ’90s. Or, it doesn’t sound like it has. Cher’s “Believe” is like some dividing line. Every big radio single that came afterward can feasibly hang on radio in 2026. But a clean digital sound is like the jeans and hoodies of music production. We’ve settled on a norm, and odds are, it won’t go out of style.

What has changed is the message and heart in that sound. As a twentysomething music nerd, I was obsessed with musicians like Hansard, and in a way, I still am. But the earnestness that sucked you in? It’s there, but it has a different vibe.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m gonna miss the guy and his earnest music. It’s of a different, arguably better era.