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Jun 30, 2023 By Andy Steiner Photography by Asal Shahindoust

Cory Hanson isn’t exactly surprised when we start the interview with a question about the title for his new album, Western Cum. “People like to start with the title. It’s the elephant in the room,” he shrugs. There’s a certain ballsy-ness—pun not intended—to naming an album Western Cum. And the music certainly matches the cock-rock attitude—pun intended—of its title.

The California-native’s third solo album is chock-full of sprawling solos and meaty guitar tones. When announcing Western Cum, he plainly stated: “It is a rock record.” He’s right. Western Cum is a rock record in the most primal and classic definition of that term. On the new album he swaps the sparseness of 2021’s Pale Horse Rider with Fender amps and FM radio riffs.

While Western Cum works within the confines of “rock,” it never tries to replicate the classic rock canon—an intentional creative decision on Hanson’s choice. “I don’t like genre exercise,” he says. “I don’t see that as a means to an end in music. I think that if I’m going to learn ‘Sultans of Swing’ in my spare time…that’s a hobby to me. That shouldn’t cross over into the realm of what’s being presented as new music. That’s my personal taste…I like it when bands play with genre and play with implication, what it implies to put a Southern rock riff into a thing and then all of a sudden move into a jazz thing. When you’re dealing with genre, you’re dealing with expectation on the performer’s part and the listener’s part. They expect you to deliver something that they very well understand, like a Led Zeppelin song…. So there’s this expectation that you’re going to fulfill this thing. But then if you make it complex in any way, then all of a sudden, people have to reassess very quickly.”

Western Cum maintains a fine balance between its commitment to being “a rock record” and its subversion of those expectations through Hanson’s songwriting, which was inspired by Western folk. As much as this is a “cum” record, blasting loud and fulfilling a guitar-rock fantasy, it’s equally a “Western” album. “The songs are all these simple Western folk stories with very simple Western folk premises, like revenge or a ghost story or haunting or a roadside killer, these things that are all a part of 18th and 19th and 20th century American folklore and songwriting,” Hanson explains. “It’s trying to tell these Western tales in a more abstract way…. The thing about the West that I love is that there’s this sense of freedom and expanse and adventure, but then there’s also this peril and fear that it’s an ugly place.”

The album is full of details and pieces that, in isolation, don’t read particularly Californian. But together, they weave the tapestry of Hanson’s twisted Westerns. There’s the “red sky” of “Ghost Ship,” the sprawling road-trip banger “Driving Through Heaven,” the character in “Horsebait Sabotage” “unloading blocks of ice/melting in my van/Watching them slide out in the street/like butter skating in the pan.” These vignettes, characters, and sounds shimmer like a desert mirage.
Hanson’s previous album Pale Horse Rider was his first foray into these themes. It’s an eerie and haunted album, as arid and open as the Mojave. It felt natural to delve further into the iconography of his home for Western Cum.

“I think that I just found my pocket. I think that I unlocked something in my own songwriting that allowed me—I found this thing, and then a whole world just opened up,” says Hanson. “My dad’s a jazz musician, and my mom was a country singer singing in bars and stuff in the Inland Empire and in Orange County. And my dad was doing hotels like The Langham. So on one side, it was like Miles Davis. And then on the other side, it was like George Strait and Faith Hill and Shania Twain. And I loved all that stuff growing up…. Through that, I got into Willie Nelson because he takes jazz, standard country, rock, blues, and then he’s the glue. He puts them all together. And that really made me realize…. This is really tying together all these American influences that I have, that are really a part of my DNA.”

When creating Western Cum, Hanson revisited the 1971 classic film directed by Robert Altman, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. “It’s a genre film. It’s a Western—a snow Western as they told me on Criterion Collection,” explains Hanson. “So, it’s an Altman film that has all the tropes and the three acts and the big shootout at the end, but it completely—subtly but completely—diverts from a normal Western. And it just kind of falls apart into this Altman film, very much like his films do. It is still a Western, but it is doing something kind of psychedelic and interesting.”

That’s the essence of Hanson’s new album. It comes from the lineage of American music that he grew up on, but, in its own way, disperses into something abstract.

Ultimately, the title Western Cum is the perfect summary. It tells you the format and the arc of what you’re getting: the “Western” element. But ultimately, it’s Hanson’s DNA that gives the album its identity. “And as you can tell by the title, I was thinking a lot about DNA,” he chuckles.

www.dragcity.com/artists/cory-hanson

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