Sometimes as melancholy as a Czech winter, yet not entirely without hope, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová's CD, The Swell Season, was premiered and released May 28 to an enthusiastic standing-room-only audience at Prague's Archa Theatre. This is the first CD project for the Irish guitar-slinging pop star Hansard and the classically trained pianist Irglová, who have been playing informally together for four years.

The Monday after the Archa premiere, Sinéad Gleeson of The Irish Times gave the CD a four-star rating. Gleeson opined that the Czech-grown collaboration perhaps "eclipses Hansard's collaborative work with the band and might just be the album of his career."

"The band" Hansard fronts is a multi-platinum group called The Frames that consistently fills arenas with 30,000 people singing along to every song. In 2003, The Frames' single "The Fake" rode the Irish top-10 charts for three months. Elsewhere on the globe, the band has toured actively for 16 years, building and maintaining a solid international fan base.

'Very authentic'

With his sandy hair, sideburns, blue jeans, tan work boots and work shirt frayed at the collar, Hansard looks like he would be as comfortable at a bicycle shop bench as he is on an arena stage. In fact, his band was named after his teenage passion for bicycle repair, which often led to his backyard being littered with bike parts.

During a sound check at Archa, in a bare, fluorescent-lit backstage dressing room, Hansard discusses why he has spent the better part of the past four years in the Czech Republic.

"There is a great social thing with the Czechs," he says. "I love the Czech bars, and I love to go to those literární kavárnas where people are just sitting and talking about books. There's something about the culture here that is very authentic."

Nostagia is also part of the Czech allure for Hansard.

"When I went to Valašské Meziříčí, I saw this typical-looking Central European town, not very beautiful but it had some great architecture," he says. "Yet most of the town was made up of blocks of flats that looked very communist, or cold. The irony was that I was very drawn to this atmosphere, because it reminded me of my own childhood. I grew up in a block of flats that looked pretty much the same.

"It gave me something, because Ireland has gone through huge changes. It's gone through a period where it is absolutely disgustingly ugly, because everyone is just gorging [building] bigger and bigger houses and there's too many cars on the road. It seems like people are eating and eating and Ireland is getting really fat, puking and then eating again.

"But in the Czech Republic, it feels like the country has gone through change but is still very much of another time, a more humble time. So for me, I really like the atmosphere. There is a great sense of cultural appreciation; people like music, they take art seriously. At home [in Ireland], people are taking art less seriously and money more seriously."

Bootleg bounty

After months staying with a Czech friend in Valašské Meziříčí, Hansard bought a small flat in the Nusle neighborhood of Prague, where he now spends a good part of his time. His concerts with Irglová have been widely bootlegged, but the musicians' tolerance of MP3s worked in their favor when one of the bootleg recordings caught the attention of filmmaker Jan Hřebejk.

Hansard and Irglová had no immediate plans to record, but Hřebejk was so convinced that their sound fit the feeling of his film Beauty in Trouble (slated for release in September) that he financed four days of studio time in Prague for the duo to work with some handpicked musicians. The results were 14 songs, four to be used in Hřebejk's film and 10 excellent choices culled for the CD.

Indicative of The Swell Season's cinematic power, other songs from the session will be used by former Frames bassist John Chancy in a low-budget film entitled Once, which will feature Hansard and Irglová as struggling street musicians in modern Dublin.

The Frames don't completely take a backburner to Hansard's other projects. The morning after The Swell Season debuted at Archa, he flew to New York to put the final touches on the new Frames CD. But he was slated to be back in the Czech Republic within a few days to continue touring The Swell Season with Irglová in small clubs and theaters throughout the country.

On a roll

Asked how long he's likely to continue living in the Czech Republic, Hansard seems in no hurry to move back to Ireland. Only New York City competes at the moment with Nusle on his current list of residences. With his warm feelings about this country and the reception his work has received here, that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

In fact, Hansard seems to be on a Czech-inspired creative roll when he says, "It's been a great few years because you can come to a place where you can write and record a bunch of tunes and you can go to small pub with your guitar. We have been fortunate in that we have a bit of an audience, a quiet listening audience, and we can play the tunes. And people tell you, 'We like this; we don't like that.'