The Cory Hanson Interview
“They can be played any way. They can rock, or weep, or groove, or shuffle. They will rock, though,” says Hanson about his most recent effort, “I Love People.” Occupied not just with a new album set for release later this month and everything that comes with that tonal territory, the musician has recently become a father. His greatest challenge yet, Hanson speaks of the sleepless nights, the around-the-clock care, and the almighty attention that is expected when bringing new life into the world. Written behind the scenes of previous albums, the musician found himself sifting through over a hundred songs to whittle down to a dozen or so tangleable tunes for another album. It’s just as important to conjure the poetic past as it is to continue moving forward, and Hanson’s atmospheric ability to do both has always set him apart from the rest.
First things first, congratulations to you, your wife, Asal, and your newborn baby boy, Kasra Lou! How have you been adapting to family life and everything that comes with becoming a recent husband and father? Are there any immediate perspective shifts in life, profession, and place in the world that have been interesting to navigate so far?
Thank you. It has been a sleep deprivation endurance contest so far. Parenting is a 24/7 gig. He needs me at all hours, even while he is sleeping. I can't believe I've made time to write this interview. He’s currently sleeping on my chest as I write this.
Photo: Asal S. Hanson
And on top of that, you have a new album in late July entitled “I Love People” on Drag City! I understand that the album came from a culmination of notebooks and various song ideas over the years. Tell me about working alongside Robert James Cody, and what the overall process of bringing these songs to life was like in comparison to past titles such as “Pale Horse Rider” or “Western Cum.”
Robbie and I have worked on several of my records together. He has an incredible ear and a great mind for engineering, but this is the first time I've had him produce a record of mine. I handed him a massive pile of unfinished music and said, "Tell me what is working," and he did exactly that. We share a love for much of the same music, and he's turned me onto some records that have completely changed my world. He also does great crank calls. It's worth having him on record to crank call the Guitar Center vintage room.
Photo: Asal S. Hanson
Laying all eleven tracks down in a raw, organic way with you on piano or guitar, what particular vision, or core emotion, would you say drove the album to its ultimate destination, if that makes sense? You mention that this is “easily your most beautiful SOUNDING record. And the songs are the best of your best,” I’m very curious what makes this so. I’d love to know some of the backstory to songs like “On The Rocks,” “I Don’t Believe You,” the album’s title track, and the single “Bird on a Swing." As your 4th studio album, what was most important for you to achieve both artistically and personally? With a tour to follow just a few days after the album’s release.
Album artwork: J.R.C.G.
The gestation period for this album was much longer than any other record I've worked on. I have a habit of writing songs every day, and often I’ll get halfway through writing a tune and begin working on something else. For this record, I let myself freely write for as long as necessary, without any internal or external pressure to turn any of the music into finished songs. During this period, I wrote a lot of the music, and I didn’t look back. I just kept moving forward, not knowing if anything I was doing was good, bad, or anything at all. I wrote song after song for months and months, and that turned into years. I wrote them in the background of other projects: “Western Cum,” “Spiders in the Rain,” and Wand’s “Vertigo” record. I knew I wanted to make a record that I could say was finished — words and music — before I ever stepped into the studio to record it. To achieve this, I had to sift through over 100 songs to select the 20 best ones, and then narrow those down to the 11 that are featured on the album. So by that logic, they are the best of the best of the songs from this period. "On the Rocks” lived for years as a voice memo called "Bucket of Shoes". I couldn’t figure out what to do with it until one day I received this big old Guild 12-string on the road in Colorado. I played the chords on it, and all of a sudden, the story just came echoing off the walls of the hotel room I was in. I could see the narrator having his "night of the soul"; he jumps into a dark hole where he can't see the bottom. At the bottom of that hole, there is another hole, so he jumps into that one because there's nowhere else to go. At the bottom of that hole, there's another hole... "I Don't Believe You" kinda just came out the second I got that refrain on the chorus down. There's a lot more simple title/lyric relationships on this record, and fewer of the surreal lyrics I've done in the past. I was thinking about Brian Wilson's "Still Believe in Me", Neil Young's "I Believe in You", and "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" by the Darkness. There are so many great songs about belief. And it can be written in many different ways. I became attracted to the idea of denial being a magic armor against the damage of the truth. It's like in Jurassic Park when Sam Neil says to stand perfectly still when the kid is in front of the T-Rex. If you acknowledge the truth, it will destroy you. But if you don't, then you can go about your life, and everything is just fine and dandy till it's not.
“It’s like in Jurassic Park when Sam Neil says to stand perfectly still when the kid is in front of the T-Rex. If you acknowledge the truth, it will destroy you. But if you don’t, then you can go about your life, and everything is just fine and dandy till it’s not.”
As your 4th studio album, what was most important for you to achieve both artistically and personally? With a tour to follow just a few days after the album’s release, what are you most excited about playing these songs on the road for people to hear?
I just wanted to bring these songs into the world. I had to. I couldn't let them live in my head, or these books, voice memos, and demos, forever. Some people can do that, by allowing the writing to be enough, or work for decades and never finish a thing, but I need to get it out because I am obsessive. If I don't finish it, then I can't make room in my head to work on new things. I'm excited to bring this music to the great bars and clubs of America. All my records have distinctly different moods, and I think about them as these larger emotional periods. Whatever I was going through at the time is on these albums. When I work through the feeling of an album and express what I need to express, I often do away with the emotional tone and move on to the next thing that excites me. So when I get to pick songs from all my records and put them together into a setlist, it's always exciting to see how much these songs have in common. Especially when I can often see them all as really drastically different from each other. Fitting these in with the “Western Cum” material and vice versa will be interesting. But they're all just songs. They can be played any way. They can rock, or weep, or groove, or shuffle. They will rock, though.
