glen hansard interview and adelaide festival

Adelaide Festival: it's one of our favourite arts festivals of the year where South Australia's sleepy streets turn into a three-week cacophony of sound, colour and yumminess. This year it's taking place between March 1st and 17th. So that you have time to book your tickets should the lineup take your fancy, here's our little rundown of what we think you might like.

Although this year's musical roll call is supercalifragilisticexpialidociously amazing, the one act we're most looking forward to seeing is Irish folkster, Glen Hansard. The man may have won Oscars for his tunes, but it's his humble words and work with bands like The Frames that have made us life-long make believe friends. We had a brief chat to him before his Australian tour and Adelaide Festival gigs - here's a snippet of an interview that will be running in a frankie near you soon...

On failure:
"I think having grace in failure is a very important thing. If you fail and someone doesn't give you money, or doesn't like you, or doesn't give you the award you want, you've got to work it out. You've got to be cool. You've got to take it on the chin and move on. You have to have a lot of self-belief and quiet self confidence. But what's even harder than that is grace in success. That's a whole other challenge. You do well, everyone's applauding you, but keeping your head together when you're doing well, that's much harder. You've got to remember what you're doing, who you are, where you're from and why you're doing it."

And on success:
"When it's done right, music is like the heart. It's something people can gather around and draw from and take comfort in. If you're at a funeral for one instance, and someone pulls out a violin, often times those people who can't cry somehow can cry when the violin is playing. There's something about music that unlocks your defenses. And I think that can be quite beautiful. Your music should never patronise the listener. It should always ask the same question they're asking. And it shouldn't dare to provide an answer."

Tickets for Glen's Adelaide Festival gig here, and tour tickets here.

Some other musical things we think you may like are a bunch of gigs based around Brassland, the New York indie record label crated by The National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner. These gigs include This Is The Kit, Jherek Bischoff (who also plays in Amanda Palmer's band), Deerhoof and many more, plus an event called The Burgundy Stain Sessions, where Doveman, The Go-Between's Robert Forster, Sam Amidon, Sally Seltmann and Julia Stone will have a jam. Paul Kelly and Neil Finn are playing a free concert together, and of course, our future husband Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds. Tickets for all of these musical events here.

If it's the stage that you want, check out their massive theatre lineup here (we can recommend One Man, Two Guvnors and Beowulf), or you can find the visual arts lineup here, the dance performances here, their film screenings and workshops here, and the full run down for Adelaide Writers Week here.

We hope to see you there!