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Cory Hanson on Merging Genres and His New Album “Western Cum
Everybody Comes From One thing, Even At a Molecular Degree
Jun 30, 2023
Pictures by Asal Shahindoust
Cory Hanson isn’t precisely stunned after we begin the interview with a query concerning the title for his new album, Western Cum. “Folks like to begin with the title. It’s the elephant within the room,” he shrugs. There’s a sure ballsy-ness—pun not supposed—to naming an album Western Cum. And the music definitely matches the cock-rock perspective—pun supposed—of its title.
The California-native’s third solo album is chock-full of sprawling solos and meaty guitar tones. When asserting Western Cum, he plainly acknowledged: “It’s a rock file.” He’s proper. Western Cum is a rock file in essentially the most primal and basic definition of that time period. On the brand new album he swaps the sparseness of 2021’s Pale Horse Rider with Fender amps and FM radio riffs.
Whereas Western Cum works throughout the confines of “rock,” it by no means tries to duplicate the basic rock canon—an intentional artistic choice on Hanson’s alternative. “I don’t like style train,” he says. “I don’t see that as a way to an finish in music. I feel that if I’m going to be taught ‘Sultans of Swing’ in my spare time…that’s a pastime to me. That shouldn’t cross over into the realm of what’s being introduced as new music. That’s my private style…I prefer it when bands play with style and play with implication, what it implies to place a Southern rock riff right into a factor after which hastily transfer right into a jazz factor. While you’re coping with style, you’re coping with expectation on the performer’s half and the listener’s half. They count on you to ship one thing that they very nicely perceive, like a Led Zeppelin track…. So there’s this expectation that you just’re going to satisfy this factor. However then in the event you make it advanced in any manner, then hastily, individuals need to reassess in a short time.”
Western Cum maintains a effective steadiness between its dedication to being “a rock file” and its subversion of these expectations via Hanson’s songwriting, which was impressed by Western people. As a lot as it is a “cum” file, blasting loud and fulfilling a guitar-rock fantasy, it’s equally a “Western” album. “The songs are all these easy Western people tales with quite simple Western people premises, like revenge or a ghost story or haunting or a roadside killer, this stuff which are all part of 18th and nineteenth and twentieth century American folklore and songwriting,” Hanson explains. “It’s attempting to inform these Western tales in a extra summary manner…. The factor concerning the West that I like is that there’s this sense of freedom and expanse and journey, however then there’s additionally this peril and concern that it’s an unsightly place.”
The album is filled with particulars and items that, in isolation, don’t learn notably Californian. However collectively, they weave the tapestry of Hanson’s twisted Westerns. There’s the “purple sky” of “Ghost Ship,” the sprawling road-trip banger “Driving By Heaven,” the character in “Horsebait Sabotage” “unloading blocks of ice/melting in my van/Watching them slide out on the street/like butter skating within the pan.” These vignettes, characters, and sounds shimmer like a desert mirage.
Hanson’s earlier album Pale Horse Rider was his first foray into these themes. It’s an eerie and haunted album, as arid and open because the Mojave. It felt pure to delve additional into the iconography of his house for Western Cum.
“I feel that I simply discovered my pocket. I feel that I unlocked one thing in my very own songwriting that allowed me—I discovered this factor, after which a complete world simply opened up,” says Hanson. “My dad’s a jazz musician, and my mother was a rustic singer singing in bars and stuff within the Inland Empire and in Orange County. And my dad was doing inns like The Langham. So on one facet, it was like Miles Davis. After which on the opposite facet, it was like George Strait and Religion Hill and Shania Twain. And I liked all that stuff rising up…. By that, I received into Willie Nelson as a result of he takes jazz, customary nation, rock, blues, after which he’s the glue. He places all of them collectively. And that basically made me understand…. That is actually tying collectively all these American influences that I’ve, which are actually part of my DNA.”
When creating Western Cum, Hanson revisited the 1971 basic movie directed by Robert Altman, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. “It’s a style movie. It’s a Western—a snow Western as they advised me on Criterion Assortment,” explains Hanson. “So, it’s an Altman movie that has all of the tropes and the three acts and the large shootout on the finish, but it surely utterly—subtly however utterly—diverts from a traditional Western. And it simply form of falls aside into this Altman movie, very very similar to his movies do. It’s nonetheless a Western, however it’s doing one thing form of psychedelic and attention-grabbing.”
That’s the essence of Hanson’s new album. It comes from the lineage of American music that he grew up on, however, in its personal manner, disperses into one thing summary.
In the end, the title Western Cum is the proper abstract. It tells you the format and the arc of what you’re getting: the “Western” component. However in the end, it’s Hanson’s DNA that provides the album its identification. “And as you possibly can inform by the title, I used to be pondering rather a lot about DNA,” he chuckles.
www.dragcity.com/artists/cory-hanson
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