Second Summer: In Conversation with Cory Hanson

Whether leading his band Wand or in a solo capacity, Cory Hanson has been a reliable source in the alternative music stratum over the past decade.

Trawling through various subreddits and message boards over the years, and Hanson has been heralded as L.A.’s finest modern-day songwriter to even this new world’s answer to Neil Young. Like all outlandish claims, the truth is somewhere in the middle, however there have been defining moments that have led listeners to such claims – Wand’s dream-laden psych-rock epic, Laughing Matter (2019), hands down one of the most under-appreciated albums of this century so far.

While Wand has enabled Hanson to explore psychedelia and alt-rock’s more secluded corners (last year’s excellent Vertigo, another mark in the win column), the songwriter’s solo canon has taken some beautiful dark turns, too. 2021’s Pale Horse Rider and 2023’s Western Cum, possessing some of Hanson’s best work etched to tape, and he dispenses more of it on his latest LP, I Love People. An album filled with songs that flow like a sun-dappled dream.

I Love People sees Hanson at his most direct, with songs that spool from the conveyor belt of prime American songcraft. Opening track and lead single, Bird on Swing, a 24-carat gold hit that floods into the room like a second summer. There are many of these moments, but like all Cory Hanson releases, there are also sharp turns. Led by the title track, which sees his fellow Wanders (Robbie Cody – guitar; Evan Backer – bass; Evan Burrows – drums) echoing a vibe that Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band captured with The Wild, the Innocent & The E Street Shuffle.

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Elsewhere, Hanson gives us a bit of Christmas in July treatment with the swoon of Santa Clause is Coming Back to Town, while there is also homage to the “Prince and fighter” who was, indeed, the “Thai Chi master” (Lou Reed). Continuing beyond his L.A. base, firstly with the piano balladry of I Don‘t Believe You where Hanson remains in New York, Texas Weather sees him travelling even further – a story of a protagonist dodging a murder charge in Hollywood and on the run across various countries and continents. (The reference of a ghost ship perhaps connected to the track of the same name from Western Cum.)

Like Ghost Ship, the folk lament of Final Frontier is hallmark Hanson, as he juxtaposes sonic joy against thematic misery (“They hang you upside down by your dick/And bleed you out just like a stuck pig“). The same dark thread is woven through Bad Miracles – a piano-led number full of cosmic fairy dust, and alongside Final Frontier, both songs are I Love People’s focal point, illuminating the anxieties that underpin many of Hanson’s songs.

Closing with the countrified stomp of On the Rocks – a shambolic tale of a character escaping life’s most unsavoury individuals and causing a sea of destruction in their wake – in many ways it encapsulates the songcraft of Cory Hanson. Elusive and haunting, yet through a sunny lens that always makes for something wildly off-kilter. A subtle A.M. glory for the later hours, but it’s never pastiche. It’s always Cory Hanson.

Towards the end of our discussion via Zoom earlier this month, Hanson professes to not having slept in months since the arrival of his two-month-old son (“there’s nothing like it,” he says). Sleep deprivation aside, Hanson is in good spirits, offering insight into his songs, and much more.

Sun 13: Your song Lou Reed got me thinking about attitudes and sense of humour, and how you’ve always incorporated the latter into your songs. Was Lou Reed one of your early heroes?

Cory Hanson: “Yeah, I think so. When I was in high school and middle school, I was obsessed with the Velvet Underground and got into Lou Reed from them. But I didn’t really get into his records until I was older. They’re more adult in theme and style, I guess.” (laughs)

S13: Listening to Pale Horse Rider and in particular Another Story from the Centre of Earth, and this moment feels like a real focal point to your solo work during this decade…

CH: “Yeah. I think that record in particular – it had been a five-year gap since I’d recorded the first solo record, The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo – I thought, ‘I’ll just make this and I probably won’t make any solo records’. I just set out with one specific idea and then executed it and got it out of my system. With Pale Horse Rider, I think that was the moment when I sort of rediscovered my songwriting DNA, or American songwriting DNA. I don’t know if that makes sense?”

S13: Of course.

CH: “The idea of being a songwriter never really appealed to me. I like playing guitar, and I like playing in bands and writing songs with other people, but the idea of solo songwriting – acoustic guitar in hand – it all seemed self-serious. It seemed to lack a sense of humour to me, and I didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t until Pale Horse Rider, when I sort of put together the pieces of my personal history. Because my parents are both musicians – my mom’s a songwriter; my dad’s a jazz pianist, and putting those pieces together and thinking, ‘Oh, this is actually who I am’. In a lot of ways, I’m an American songwriter, and I write American songs, and I’m interested in writing songs in the history of American songwriting.”

S13: The lyric, “I can count on my friends / Like I count all my debts / On the middle of my right hand” might just be your best line and one of finest written this year. Was Bird on a Swing an obvious opener and single?

CH: “I think records have got to have a great opening lyric. Something that kind of kicks the door down. I think that one’s pretty good. Lou Reed had a lot of really great opening lyrics on his records. The opening lyric on Lulu [Brandenburg Gate] – that’s got a great opening lyric: ‘I would cut my legs and tits off / When I think of Boris Karloff and Kinski / In the dark of the moon’.”

S13: Talking about American songwriting is interesting, because on Bird on a Swing, there’s actually a kind of Elton John Tiny Dancer vibe going on…

CH: “I am a big Elton John fan, so that kind of makes sense. There’s definitely a bit of that and his country record, Tumbleweed Connection. That’s a fantastic record, and a huge inspiration to this bit of music.”

S13: I Love People has the same personnel as Wand’s Vertigo. Was the writing process any different, to the point where there may have been a thought of this being a Wand record?

CH: “The idea of it being a Wand record never occurred to me. These are definitely my songs, and the Wand songs belong to every member of the band equally. The Wand records are a lot more about capturing a spontaneity in our group dynamic and flow, and the kind of musical language that you get from 10-plus years of playing with the same people, where you can just speak fluently in music together and have conversations. Music with the solo stuff, it’s all me; writing, composing, arranging. Everything.

“Evan Backer plays bass and arranged the strings, but I handed him all the stuff, and said, ‘These are the notes I want it to be, can you arrange it for a trio or quartet?’ It’s a place where I can really obsess and perfect songs the way that I want to write them, then come back to Wand and say, ‘I got that out of the way – I’m ready to jump into a group where we can work on something collaboratively’.”

S13: It’s a pretty sharp pivot from Western Cum. This feels like a real L.A. record. There’s a real comfortable sound here, like you’re in a good place at the moment?

CH: “It is an L.A. record. I think my genealogy is rooted in L.A singer-songwriter culture, you know? It’s a factory of sunny music that maybe even a little bit innocuous on the outside, but it has a dark and sinister underbelly.”

S13: Final Frontier is definitely a song that echoes that sentiment.

CH: “Yeah. That to me is the dark heart of the record. It’s like you get all the way into the whole record and it has an inward trajectory. It starts out of the gates of this thing on the outside of the body of the record with Bird on a Swing, and then moves inward and then goes out again.”

S13: On darkness and humour again – Ghost Ship from Western Cum is a good example and obviously Final Frontier, too – are these aspects that have always been at the forefront of your mind?

CH: “I think so. It’s hard for me to imagine having a relationship to music as an outlet for self-expression that doesn’t include humour. Humour is such a huge part of my life, and I think that my music often deals with these themes of a kind of despair, or like a real dark turn. It’s hard to write about those things without twisting it and making it sadistic and funny, almost in a cartoonish way, or maybe vaguely a satirical way. It’s just a way of communicating this, or it’s a way of expressing these darker themes that I feel run through all my work, because it adds a lightness. It allows me to carry that weight of despair and this apocalypse that I’ve been writing through my records for the last 10 or 15 years, and also just witnessing out in the world around me. Humour transcends that and allows it to express, in a way.”

S13: Do you see your music as a response to politics and what’s happening in the United States right now?

CH: “It’s definitely a response to everything going on in my life and the way that I see the world and the way that I experience it, which is unique to how I express it. I think that’s the great thing about being a part of a tradition of songwriting, or a tradition of music players where everybody’s writing songs. The goal is to write the best songs. But also, the way that you write the best songs is by giving your perspective and your lived experience and whatever wisdom or lack thereof, and you put it down in a song and try to make it catchy. A vehicle for communicating an experience of a lived experience, you know?”

S13: For sure. Speaking of experiences, did you have the album title in mind before you wrote the song?

CH: “No. I never really start with an album title. I’ve never done that. I have working titles, usually, that I use as a reference, and then at the end when I’m putting the songs together and trying to figure out what’s going to be on the record, then I figure out the title. I just feel like it was just too good of a title to not have be the thing.”

S13: Bad Miracles is a really interesting song, because most people’s default thinking of a miracle is when something good happens. What was the inspiration behind it?

CH: “It’s funny, and it’s interesting to me that someone can be having the best day of their entire life, or just an average day, and then the person next to them could be having the worst day of their entire life – something horrible and life changing could be happening. We all just live these days together, one after another, thinking, ‘What the hell is going to happen? When is the next thing coming?’

“It’s easy to live in fear of that, and that’s something maybe I’ve struggled with, or someone who has anxiety and depression… that existential dread of what is going to come and get me. Can I fly on an airplane? Can I get on this train? Can I get in my car today? Am I going to get hit by a car? There are a lot of factors in a busy modern world, and a lot of different of very creative ways to die.”

S13: Your output of new material is so constant. Do you work on music every single day and, if so, do have a specific routine or any tools you require to get things done?

CH: “Yeah. Usually, it involves – at some point – a bit of routine. I don’t like to structure my time too heavily when I’m home. I really do believe that I function best in larger pockets of unstructured time that are just, like, life moments. There can be an endless series of interruptions, and there are, but the point is that I just have space to futz around and hang out in my house and go on walks or exercise. While I do those things, I write songs or just let things happen. Or I’ll watch a film and get to hear a line of dialog, or I’ll read and find something that strikes my inspiration and then get an idea for a song.

“But usually, I’m compulsively writing songs out of habit. Not like, ‘I’m going to sit down and write five songs right now’. More like I’m washing the dishes, and I’ll write a song about washing the dishes. I have a two-month-old son, so I sing songs to him constantly, and I have to keep writing new songs to entertain him. I have huge pockets of time where he’s just napping on my chest, because he won’t sleep anywhere else! (Laughs) So I’m always writing, and I keep a book nearby just to write, because I have nothing else that I can do.”

S13: Is literature something that’s been a source of inspiration for you?

CH: “I don’t read very much fiction, but I do read poetry and a lot of non-fiction books or philosophy books… a lot of autobiographies.”

S13: You’re pretty active on social media. How do you find it now, because I’m guessing it wasn’t really an everyday thing when you first started out with Wand?

CH: “It’s just the medium for which for a little, tiny, microsecond fractions of time, you can have somebody’s attention anywhere. But there’s no focus, and it’s increasingly fragmentalised and co- opted and corrupted by ad space and fake news. It’s impossible to really navigate as the algorithms become more unsophisticated.”

S13: Drag City’s has there for the majority of your releases both in Wand and for your solo works. How important is a label like that to be consistently part of your story?

CH: “With Drag City, it’s such a family. Very close relationships that are all really easy, and they don’t need to be managed too much. The way that family is, you just pick up and I come in with a record, and they say, ‘Oh, great. Let’s put it out’, or I come in and say, ‘I’d like to record this record’, and they say, ‘Awesome. Let’s do it’. They just let me do whatever I want, which is amazing and really rare.

“They have a funny reputation in the industry, because they just do whatever they want, and they don’t really adhere to the pressures of what other labels are concerned with, like getting on Tiktok and getting streaming numbers up and all that stuff. They are concerned with the same thing they’ve been concerned with since 1989, which is selling records and getting records into shops and calling shops and getting records to people that order them through the mail or order them online. They’re not antiquated, they’re up to date with everything, but they just don’t play the bullshit games. And for good reason, because they’ve been around long enough to know that that shit just comes and goes.”

I Love People is out Drag City. Purchase from Bandcamp.