Glen Hansard
Between two shores

It's nice when, for once, for someone like me who usually goes searching for good music on the internet, when they feel like it, it's the good music that comes to you to be discovered.

The epiphany of musical discovery.

It often worked that way once upon a time.

The radio or the background music in the record store played a song, you liked it, you asked the shopkeeper for the title and the artist, and you left with the vinyl in hand.

Not anymore; you try to listen, comfortably in front of your computer or with your phone in hand, to everything you can, that you've heard of, until you find something you like.

Days ago I was in Cork (Republic of Ireland).

Called by my daughter, I enter a music store in the center of the (truly beautiful and "musical") Irish city.

The notes of a song resound in the air. Something that reminds me of the Van Morrison I like most, the one with the American aftertaste but the ever-present Irish melancholy.

I continue to browse CDs while I listen.

These are special days, I am happy, I have reunited with my daughter after almost a month apart, I missed her.

In two days we will return to Italy, she will remain here.

Children grow up sooner or later, one must accept it.

The melancholy theme of the song sharpens this last thought.

I open Shazam, find the title of the track: "Setting Forth", by Glen Hansard (never heard, I later discover he is quite famous, even here on Debaser).

I ask the shopkeeper where I can find the album.

I hold it in my hand for a while before deciding, after all, I've only heard one track and part of the next one (the latter reminds me of James Taylor...)

I leave the shop and join my wife and daughter to continue the tour of the city, I will think about it.

After three quarters of an hour, the decision has matured, I go back, enter the shop which is now playing something completely different and leave with the CD in hand.

There was a time when music, some songs in particular, had the power to put the seal on brief time passages of my life, not necessarily special, but made unforgettable by these soundtracks of movies of a few minutes that spun in the air at those moments, to be then projected only for me in my memory forever.

A car trip with my father arriving at our destination among the curves of the Sila mountains with "Abbracciala, abbracciali, abbracciati" by Battisti, at night on a bus around midnight, returning from a school trip in middle school to Campania with "I'll write a song for You" by Earth Wind and Fire.

Now it happens to me more rarely.

The last time was in that shop in Cork.

A small, normal passage of time, a bit happy and a bit sad, made unforgettable also by that song.

Thank you, Glen Hansard.