Glen Hansard, Falling Slowly, and My Two Year Old Son

Last year I watched the film Once staring Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. I can sometimes miss the old country while living here in Thailand; so seeing all those clips of Dublin was nice for me. I have also liked The Frames for years so the Glen Hansard music in the film pleased me no end; in fact I liked the songs so much that I got the soundtrack; something I haven't done with a film since my early teens.

I would sometimes play the Once soundtrack at home and in the car. After a few plays it become obvious that my then one year old son loved the song falling slowly. This was the first song that he really took any interest in, and this pleased me because he could do a lot worse than starting his journey into music with Glen Hansard; after all I want him to feel a bit of pride in his Irish heritage. What I didn't realize was that this love of the song falling slowly would turn into a sort of obsession for him and that now one year later I find it hard to even hear the first few bars of that song. It got so bad that at one stage my wife and I were worried that my son might have Asperger's syndrome.

I am not quite sure what it is about Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova, and the song Falling Slowly that has really caught my son's imagination. It was the first tune he ever tried to sing, and it is the first song he ever asked to me to play for him. He is only two so he can't say the name properly; it's the 'dah, daa,da,dah' song to him. We sometimes make long journeys back to my wife's village here in Thailand, and my son can demand the song over and over again; on one journey I ended up playing it twenty-times for him. He is always asking to have the film Once put on our DVD, but he only wants the one scene with that one song. He annoys our Thai neighbors because he insists that they stick the song on for him when he visits; but they haven't got a clue what he is on about. We do sometimes get a few days where he has forgotten all about 'falling slowly', but then some other song will have a part that remind him and he will be off again.

Although the song does cause me to have a mental twitch nowadays, I am still really glad to have introduced it to my son. I don't remember my own childhood through photographs; it is the songs from that time period that will take me right back there and fill me with emotion; In fact all my life has been associated with songs. I do want this for my son as well; I want him to have songs that will bring him back to this special time and hopefully the song falling slowly will take me back with him. For that reason I have no hard felling against Glen Hansard, or indeed Marketa Irglova.