Great live moments come in all shapes and colours, but when the great Irish singer/songwriter Luka Bloom joined his countrymen, The Frames, onstage at the Metro Theatre in Sydney for a version of the Elvis Presley classic, Fools Rush In, it was five minutes of sheer heaven. The predominantly Irish crowd sang along in fine voice – as they had to every Frames song that night – and the band discussed chord changes with each other as they navigated the music. Out front Luka shut his eyes and just sang, sang the way that song should be sung with an reserved passion and pathos.

The roar at the end echoed long a round the club. Luka sprinted offstage and back up the stairs to his seat in the reserved section. ‘They’re something special,” he said, a glint in his eyes.

Yes, they are, and on their sixth album, The Cost, the band that already has critics worldwide writing purple prose about predecessors such Burn The Maps, For The Birds and the staggering live Set List, go one step further. The Cost will be one of the five best albums of 2007. It may well be the album of the year. It is just bloody awesome. A beautiful sonic ebb and flow buoyed by pure emotion and a sense of honesty and truth that is so rare in this world of shallow fixations. And in the song, People Get Ready, this wonderful band has delivered the anthem of the year. Build on an almost military drumbeat with a insouciant Glen Hansard vocal it explodes in a forest of chorded guitar and thunderous percussion; it is about you and me and them; it is why we as people can make a difference; it is about hope; it’s about saving this world. And then the violin breaks in and you want to dance and weep, because we do “have all the time in the world to get it right, because we have all the love in the world to set alight”. And then there is True – but that’s for you to experience alone.
Hansard is on a tour bus that’s just entering Munich. He has literally jumped on a plane to Germany after returning from the Sundance Film Festival where the film, Once, in which he stars with sometime Swell Season conspirator, Marketa Irglova, and directed by one-time Frames bass-player John Carney, won the World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic. The Chicago Tribune film critic described it as “the best musical of a generation” while comparing it with the classic Talking Heads film, Stop Making Sense.

“The Sundance thing was amazing. I still haven’t absorbed it,” he says. “We went there with a small film and the response was amazing. I’m surprised, freaked out, wondering what it all means. Once was made in three weeks for $75,000. It was super low budget; the story line is simple as it gets. It’s kind of a visual album that was either going to work or just flop badly. There was never going to be any in between with it.”

It also draws people back to the glorious Swell Season album that arrived just a few months ago; a genuinely elegant simple beauty of a record, on which Hansard and and Czech multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and actor, Irglova, create a mostly spartan and often poignant music that has lived and breathed on the road during their tours together (during his downtime from The Frames) as much as in the studio.

“That record is a like a breathe of fresh air,” he says. “I took a little time out of normal life – just four days – and we just did songs that we knew from touring or had ready at home. We got in Marja Tuhkanen from Finland on violin and Bertrand Galen from France on cello, both of whom live Cork in Ireland and play with the great Irish band Interfearence, and we just jammed out for those days. It was lovely little moment in time.”

As it turns out, it was the perfect lead up to The Cost and it’s songs that breathe a life well-lived and loved yet still to be enjoyed and explored further. People Get Ready was written after watching the AL Gore film about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. On Live Earth Day (07/07/07), it should be played loud and sung proud. This time in, The Frames didn’t mess around. They gave themselves a limited number of days in the studio because “It’s what we used to do. And because we can play about and given a whole heap of time we tend to over think things. We just need to go in and play not pontificate,” Hansard says. “This record was our attempt to just play the songs without messing around and I think we just about got it right. Some of the mixes may be just a little slick for me but, honestly, I can’t really criticize.”

As for the process of songwriting, Glen says it never changes: “It’s self-medicating. Once a song is finished you have no more use for it personally; it just goes on a record. Once you record it, it’s over.

“For me, what draws me to songs, to keep writing as much as I can, is the very personal aspect of finding a line which makes you go ‘That’s it. That says what I want to say’. Most songs are about one or two lines; the rest of the song is dressing for the melody. But those couple of lines … … “

Some 17 years down the track since its formation in Dublin’s buoyant rock scene of the early 1990s, The Frames retain an aura of unresolving commitment to something that’s may still be just over the horizon, at the end of the rainbow they’ve been crossing for all these years. “Our history has been what its been,” Hansard says. “I feel we’re shifting somewhere interesting now. The band’s just getting stronger. When you are younger you want to be the fastest, loudest, kid on the block. Now you want to make records for yourself.” And ambition changes. It becomes? “To live on a farm, have a girl, a couple of friends … that would be nice.”
It would indeed.