Cory Hanson
I Love People
DRAG CITY
Etched across a huge marble slab at the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial in Boise, where Wand frontman Cory Hanson played a sparkling show last week, is a quote found in Frank’s diary: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” It’s a profound, even controversial conclusion that the LA-based artist has also arrived at after a dozen years as a professional musician. His ability to maintain hopefulness while guarding against naïveté is a clear indication that maturity doesn’t automatically arrive over the course of time, but is a value—even a way of living—that a human being must strive to achieve.
In their early years, Hanson and his psych-rock posse raised eyebrows by releasing their first three records in 13 months. But Hanson proved that his prolificacy wasn’t a lark by putting out even more music apart from the band shortly after: his first solo record, 2016’s The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo, was released just a year after the final Wand album from that three-record run. Perhaps his longtime friend and collaborator Ty Segall is partially responsible for infecting Hanson with the high-productivity bug, or at least encouraging the songwriter to pursue his workaholic tendencies.
There’s an obvious yet accurate trick to identifying musicians who are drowning in so much creativity that they’re compelled to release loads of music as opposed to those whose glut of output is intended to make up for their lack of it: turn to the lyrics. Hanson aces that test, as he always does, with I Love People, his fourth solo outing: “I can count on my friends / Like I count on my debts / On the middle finger of my right hand / Or on my promises I kept,” he confesses on opener “Bird on a Swing.” “I rode on the darkest range / I worked a thousand graveyard hours / I have no blood left in my veins / I gave it all up to the empire.” While lyrics are generally interpreted subjectively, it’s hard not to read that last stanza as a scathing indictment of capitalism.
After all, Hanson is a member of a generation whose parents told them they’d succeed in life so long as they work hard and play by the rules. He all but admits that he worked himself to exhaustion only to see the American empire reap the rewards he was owed. Retirement and homeownership have become almost ludicrously impossible. Promises made, promises kept? What a crock of shit. Two songs later, he seems to suggest that those who still trust in the American dream are suckers who would just as easily get duped into thinking, as the title states, that “Santa Claus is coming back to town” had not someone revealed to them that Santa Claus neither rides on a sleigh nor climbs down chimneys.
The most reliable way to process anger over America’s grift culture is for those facing an increasingly bleak future to know they’re not alone. And Hanson wasn’t, so much so that the word “solo” barely applies to I Love People. A swarm of musicians participated in the creation of the album, including Hanson’s Wand bandmates Evan Backer and Evan Burrows, as well as a seven-member orchestra of sorts. Those additional players may have helped Hanson stay focused and not turn totally inward and catastrophize.
Thomas Merton, the late monk, writer, and advocate for social justice, came to the realization during a long period of solitude that integrating one’s self with society, culture, and human beings is the key to happiness. The mystic would have savored I Love People and championed Hanson to keep up the great work as a “solo” artist and with Wand. Amen to that.
