The Swell Season at Woodruff Arts Center (Atlanta)
By Pablo Fuente, special guess (Reprint with the author’s consent)
Last night, on a stage that was little more than a curtain and a row of white lights—no arrtifacts, no frills—the first guitar sounded and, as happens when music doesn’t ask permission but enters gently, like someone who knows the house, an old door opened inside me: London, a night of slanted rain, and you, leaning toward the soft hum of a small laptop on the bed where we first learned to conjugate ourselves in the future tense.
Marketa and Glenn were singing and the lyrics, carrying the honesty only lived days can grant, named life’s turning tides: what is gained and lost, what breaks without intention, and what—mysteriously—remains; the weariness of travel, hands that don’t let go, the kind of fear that sits at the table and yet, somehow, does not consume us.
I was listening and seeing you, both yesterday and then, because some songs don’t age: they simply remain, like a quiet lamp in the hallway.
I thought—and it was a calm, almost clinical thought—that music heals not because it fixes anything, but because it brings order. It makes space for pain, offers it a glass of water, it tucks it into bed early.
In a sick world of noise, that modest curtain felt like a prescription: strip away the superfluous, stay with the voice and the pulse, don’t get distracted.
We held hands again (a small gesture, an intimate triumph) and I thought that maybe love is just that: recognizing, in the chords of others, the thread that quietly guides us within. When it ended, the curtain fell without drama. We stepped out into the street like returning home: with the soft and persistent certainty that some songs hold us up and, without a sound, heal us.
Irish musician Glen Hansard and Czech singer, pianist, and actress Markéta Irglová, now based in Iceland, formed the duo The Swell Season in 2006. Listen to the interview in which Irglová and Hansard explain the meaning behind People We Used To Be, the lead single from their latest album Forward (Masterkey Sounds/Plateau, July 11, 2025).
Links: The Swell Season | Pablo Fuente
