Yay! I just got tickets to The Swell Season in Chicago! If you haven’t already seen it, I would highly recommend seeing the movie Once, which stars Glen Hansard of the Irish band, The Frames, and Marketa Irglova. The movie is a simple, slice of life film about a struggling musician in Ireland. He comes across a muse in Marketa Irglova’s character, and it spurs him to do things that in his heart he didn’t think he would ever be able to do. It is a love story, though not in the traditional sense. It is also a musical, but again it breaks from convention; it is instead a thoroughly refreshing take on the form.

See it. You’ll be happy you did.

Ah, but back to my story. Glen Hansard and the Frames have been around for quite some time–small news in the US but they’ve been cherished by the Irish for years. I don’t know much about the history of how the movie got started, but Glen and Marketa teamed up and recorded songs as the Swell Season, most of which appear in the movie. Their sound is light at times, serious at others, but always enchanting, so much so that I tried like hell to see them when they toured the states during the summer, but they were playing in a very small venue in Chicago at the time and so tickets were extremely hard to come by. I stumbled across their new tour dates and snapped up a few tickets for myself and Joanne.

Yay! I can’t wait!