Glen Hansard is gone. The Dublin-born singer-songwriter, frontman of The Frames and the heart of the film Once, was killed in a motorcycle crash in the early hours of Wednesday morning on a stretch of road near Strawberry Beds in Lucan, on the western edge of the city he never really left. He was 56.

His management confirmed the death in a statement released on behalf of the family, which described them as "deeply shocked" and "heartbroken." The statement announced his passing and asked for privacy for those closest to him — among them his partner and their three-year-old son, whose existence had been kept deliberately away from the machinery of public life.

Hansard's story was, by any honest measure, one of the more remarkable in modern Irish culture — and it unfolded almost entirely on his own terms. He dropped out of school at thirteen to busk on Grafton Street, famously spending years on the same patch of Dublin pavement with a guitar that had a hole worn through the front of it. That detail — the hole in the guitar — became shorthand for everything he stood for: the music was being played so hard and so often that the instrument itself was breaking down around it.

The Frames, formed in 1990, never became the stadium act their talent probably warranted. They were too difficult, too committed to the live show, too rooted in the small-venue circuit that Hansard considered the only honest venue for a song. The band built a following the old way — show by show, city by city — and in doing so became one of the most quietly beloved acts in Irish music, the kind of band whose records people treat like private correspondence.

The wider world came for Hansard when John Carney cast him in Once, the 2006 low-budget Dublin film that became an international phenomenon. Hansard and Czech musician Markéta Irglová played two struggling musicians who fall into orbit around each other through song. The film cost roughly €130,000 to make. At the 80th Academy Awards in 2008, it won Best Original Song for "Falling Slowly" — the film's gravitational center, a song Hansard had originally written years earlier and nearly didn't include.

What happened at that podium has been replayed and cited ever since. When the pair initially left the stage without Irglová having had a chance to speak — she had been cut off as the orchestra swelled — the show's producers made the unusual decision to bring her back out during the broadcast to deliver her remarks. Before that, Hansard's own speech had been brief and characteristically direct. He addressed the audience in Irish — "Is féidir linn," he said, we can — in what was, at that moment, an almost unnoticed act of linguistic defiance on the largest entertainment stage in the world. He thanked nobody in the industry. He told the audience to make art.

The years after Once were not spent cashing in. Hansard continued touring relentlessly, releasing solo records and collaborative work, returning repeatedly to the streets and small halls where he felt most himself. His 2012 solo debut Rhythm and Repose, and subsequent albums, received the kind of critical respect that never quite translated to mainstream chart presence — which, by all available evidence, was exactly how he wanted it. He headlined festivals, played secret sets, showed up unannounced at busking spots in cities he happened to be passing through.

The circumstances of Wednesday's crash are under investigation by An Garda Síochána. The road near Strawberry Beds, running alongside the River Liffey on the Lucan side, is a route well known to Dubliners — quiet in the early hours, not a road that announces danger. No further details about the crash have been officially released.

Tributes from across Irish public life arrived through the morning, as news spread the way it does now — fast, then overwhelming. Festivals that had booked Hansard as a headliner issued statements. Musicians who had shared stages with him posted without the usual PR careful-ness. The Irish language community noted, again, that speech in 2008.

What the tributes kept returning to, underneath the grief, was something that is genuinely rare to say about a celebrated artist: that he was exactly who he appeared to be. The busker who made it to the Oscars and then went back to busking. The rock musician who cried openly on stage and considered it a professional obligation. The Dubliner who spoke Irish to a billion people watching and didn't explain himself.

He leaves behind his partner, a young son who will grow up knowing his father only through recordings and the memories of rooms full of people who saw him play, and a catalogue that — in the way of only a few artists — sounds more necessary with every passing year.