When Your Mind’s Made Up – Glen Hansard

When I read the news two weeks ago that Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard had tragically passed away in a motorcycle accident, I was confounded and aggrieved. At just 56 years of age, he was still so young, and yet he was one of those amazingly gifted, passionate and creative artists who you always thought had his best years still ahead of him. Also, to leave behind his beautiful wife and three-year-old boy, it would seem that he still had so much more to give.

My almost immediate response was to write a tribute article to this legend of Irish folk music, and I did briefly relay here a clip of a spectacularly bare-bones performance he gave in his typical ‘busker’ mode, with a hefty Celtic flavour, in the company of David Letterman, no less. But I felt I had to do something more significant to honour this man.

I then realised I had my favourite song/scene from his unforgettable indie, Oscar-winning movie Once forthcoming in my alphabetical listing of the Music Library Project, and here we are today. I have written here so much about that movie’s monumental impact. I remember that after just having seen it, I had the most vivid and poignant dreams about it which, to this day, I can’t recall having about any other film or music for that matter.

I had seen Glen Hansard perform in concert at the Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne in 2007, both times opening for Bob Dylan. It’s serendipitous how I see Bob Dylan in Sydney 2001 the night before he received his Academy Award for Things Have Changed from the movie Wonder Boys and then I see Glen Hansard open for Bob in 2007 and soon thereafter he wins the same Academy Award for Falling Slowly in Once. So my personal connection with him and his music and the movie Once is something I will always cherish.

You can also find in the epilogue of his funeral the sending-off of his casket set to the interpretation by family and friends of Bob Dylan’s song Forever Young. It goes without saying how enormous Dylan was in the life of Glen Hansard. He spoke about Dylan’s impact on him in becoming a singer-songwriter. Basically, he locked himself away like a monk, alone with his uncle’s guitar and one of Dylan’s greatest-hits records at 13 years old, and learnt how to play the ‘thang’.

Now onto today’s featured song – When Your Mind’s Made Up. The scene of its recording appears in the film as the apex, ‘Rocky-esque’ shining musical moment in Once, as Glen Hansard’s character begins to see a possible path towards bigger and brighter prospects musically. And it really is, well, to me at least, one of the greatest film captures of a musical recording.

It appears as though you are watching a documentary rather than a fiction film, and in many ways, as we come to learn, it is Glen Hansard’s modest yet unforgettable arrival on the global musical stage in cinema form. The rawness of it, and how through such fundamental and crude yet arresting musicianship, the sum of the seemingly simplistic individual parts where the musicians gradually find each other to achieve this grandiose ‘whole’ in musical accomplishment, is quite something.

If there was ever a time capsule arranged now to encapsulate the greatest musical moments put to screen in the 2000s, then When Your Mind’s Made Up would have to sit high up on that selection list. Not just that, but it upholds what a simple, humble man can achieve through passion, innate talent and teamwork. Just like Glen Hansard himself, it shan’t be forgotten.

[Verse 1]
So, if you ever want something
And you call, call
Then I’ll come running
To fight, and I’ll be at your door
When there’s nothing
Worth running for

[Chorus]
When your mind’s made up
When your mind’s made up
There’s no point trying to change it
When your mind’s made up
When your mind’s made up
There’s no point trying to stop it

[Verse 2]
You see, you’re just like everyone
When the shit falls
All you want to do is run away
And hide all by yourself
When there’s far from
There’s nothing else

[Chorus]
When your mind’s made up
When your mind’s made up
There’s no point trying to change it
When your mind’s made up
When your mind’s made up
There’s no point even talking
When your mind’s made up
When your mind’s made up
There’s no point trying to fight it

[Post-Chorus]
When your mind’s—
Your mind’s—
Oh, woah, woah, ah
Oh, oh
There’s no point trying to change it
When your—
Oh, ah, oh
Hoo-oh, ah, ooh, woah, oh

[Outro]
So, if you ever want something
And you call, call
Then I’ll come running

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand