Between Two Shores

“It was a total vagary, an odyssey, an epic adventure... but thank God we had our instruments with us,” Glen Hansard recalled to the Irish Times in 2016. He was talking about his month-long participation as an oarsman on the final leg of the “Camino by Sea,” a three-summer voyage from Ireland to northern Spain that concluded that year. The mornings he spent rowing across stretches of the cold, blue sea cemented Hansard’s fondness for sailing, and that in turn helped inspire his latest album, Between Two Shores. The title, he’s explained, refers to that moment when a sailor finds himself halfway between departure and arrival, without a shoreline in sight. It’s a fitting title for an album that’s thematically adrift.

The product of a few weeks spent in France’s Black Box Studios with producer David Odlum, a former member of Hansard’s band the Frames, Between Two Shores was cobbled together out of songs left over from past sessions and home demos. This helps explain the album’s lack of focus. What’s missing is a singular idea for a listener to rest her headphones on. Instead, we get a hodgepodge of sentimental tunes that aren’t quite parallel, perpendicular, or adjacent to each other. Even its best songs, like “Time Will Be the Healer,” sound as though they were plucked from disparate moments of Hansard’s life and washed of their specifics so they could coexist on an album that’s described as “spontaneous” in its press release.

Some songs, like “Wheels on Fire,” give off a call-to-arms attitude (“You can turn and twist but we will overcome”), while many others (“Why Woman,” “Setting Forth”) sink sorrowfully into the predictable melodies and unimaginative words of the underachieving breakup song. “I’m letting go of us completely/I’m getting out,” Hansard offers on “Setting Forth.” The pallid lyrics do little to distinguish themselves from the lyrics of the similarly-titled “Movin’ On,” which puts a minor twist on the same sentiment: ”I’m tired of sitting around and waiting/I’m moving on.”

There’s no sign here of the vividness that defined Hansard’s previous solo effort, 2015’s Grammy-nominated Didn’t He Ramble. Punch-packing phrases like ”Everybody’s looking at you/But I can’t stand to watch,” from that album’s “My Little Ruin,” have no equal on Between Two Shores. Instead, we get half-drawn characters and ruminations on love that lack courage and complexity. Hansard references his “woman,” “my darlin’,” and his “baby” often, but fails to give her dimension. His banal observation of a lover who keeps letting him down on “Your Heart’s Not in It” does little to inspire sympathy for the position she’s put him in. To effectively tell a story about a love gone sour, the narrator must tell complicated truths. Hansard’s contemporary Josh Ritter did this well on 2013’s The Beast in Its Tracks, a divorce album that’s as devastating as it is hopeful. On that album’s “New Lover,” Ritter contemplated his role in the breakup, admitting “I feel like a miser, I feel low and mean/For accusing you of stealin’/What I offered you for free.” Between Two Shores would have benefitted from a similar sense of self-reflection.

The album’s strengths reveal themselves in the production. This is Hansard’s first solo spin in the producer’s chair, and he proves himself capable and even visionary, mixing strings and saxophones to create an orchestral effect or making room for an acoustic track that washes the listener’s ears in strums and thrums. On “Roll On Slow,” deftly deployed, Dap Kings-styled horns escalate and recede across a bed of percussion until they reach their climactic moment in the song’s final gasp. And what “Setting Forth” lacks in lyrical value, it makes up for in instrumentation. Recorded in a single take at New York City’s Avatar Studios, the song maintains its motion with a stable of instruments led by the piano’s tender melody—that is, until Hansard breaks into a warbling coo reminiscent of Springsteen on “I’m on Fire,” taking back the listener’s attention with his stunning falsetto.

Hansard’s emotive delivery is well-known for its arresting effect. Ever since his early days with the Frames, his vocal performances have been turning heads. He’s capable of pulling notes from the bottom of his belly and belting them out until even the most cynical among us get goosebumps. Hansard’s most famous song, “Falling Slowly,” showcased this talent in overdrive, eventually leading to an Academy Award for him and co-writer/duet partner Markéta Irglová after it was featured in 2007’s Once. Ten years later, and Hansard’s haggard vocals are still doing most of the heavy lifting. They often bring much-needed weight to Between Two Shores’ thin ideas. But there’s only so much a single voice can do to keep a sinking album afloat.