It’s getting weird out here, isn’t it? “Out here” meaning “in here,” meaning wherever you are, on whatever tech this is reaching you, smeared between the transmissions of our national glory and terror, watered in drying data-center creek beds and hitting like so much blood-drizzled chocolate delivered (via drone) straight into our open mouths. “Apocalypse” means “unveiling,” after all, and the more of America we Americans show ourselves, the more inexorable the call to the floor of the high-vaulting revival tent, to join the danse macabre where we become what we already are.
If any of this has your pineal gland resonating, Cory Hanson has made a record for you. I Love People is a superb pastiche of contemporary Americana, one that could slip between Harry Nilsson and Steely Dan LPs without raising a Laurel Canyon audiophile’s eyebrow. But it’s more surreal and blacker in tone than its Watergate antecedents. In 2025, with stormtroopers in the strawberry fields and bombs falling like curtains over Gaza, Hanson wraps his alienation in a bearhug of agape, crafting songs not so much ripped from the headlines as forged from the paradoxical emotions the headlines rip from us.
The sparkling, country-gold “Bird on a Swing” opens the album at a gallop, its full arrangement courtesy of the brothers-in-arms in Hanson’s main band, Wand. Historically a guitar pyrotechnician, Hanson composed I Love People largely on the piano, lending the album a jaunty saloon sound that strikes a sharp contrast with the buzzing moonscape of Wand’s 2024 Vertigo. With his crisp, unwavering croon, Hanson’s pro forma barstool defiance hides something rotten in plain sight: “I have no blood left in my veins/I gave it all up to the empire.” Our free bird may be a shellshocked casualty of the forever war, the titular swing a noose.
The specter of mission creep only looms more steadily from here. Hanson, conversant in the idioms of the paranoid left, lines his prairies with tripwires to flicker from Chihuahua to Afghanistan and back again. And while the blank, crosshairs-trained grimace on the album’s cover is a gesture of bipartisan misanthropy, I Love People still feels like a scourging of the late Biden regime’s folksy grin. The uncanny ripples that disturb its self-consciously nostalgic yacht rock evoke a return to hegemonic normalcy gone wrong, as on the title track’s glandhanding threepenny sway (“I love people/With incurable disease...”). At length, the album plays like a soundtrack to a movie veering uncontrollably into snuff: no yuletide peace for the returning veteran in “Santa Claus is Coming Back to Town,” while the playboy of closer “On the Rocks” ditches his KKK buddies (if not his heartbreak) for dangerous game on an island that may well be Little St. James.
While Hanson’s previous solo album took an auto-critical tour of hypermasculine rock, I Love People treats maleness as a theme more loosely—its crisis suddenly vivid in a flash of violence amidst the soft-rock counterfeiteur of “Joker” or the haunted fadeout that finds an “Old Policeman” headed for a liaison with an escort of questionable age. All the while, Hanson frames these baroque horrors within resplendent production and Harvest-like orchestral swells.
Irony and easy melody spur I Love People’s best songs beyond tribute or satire towards a lived-in equilibrium. “Bad Miracles,” a ballad of intrusive superstitions, plane crashes, and falling pianos, follows a hypnotic vocal line into a cliff-scraping guitar solo. “Texas Weather” has all the melancholy swagger of vintage Jackson Browne (and a handful of nods to the Eagles), but its striking poetic images are the hallucination of a Mansonesque madman.
Hanson reserves his sincerity for centerpiece “Lou Reed,” a short lyric letter to the poète maudit of New York City, antipode of the sun-soaked FM set. Inveterate showman and SoCal art-jock, Hanson is still drawn instinctively to this sour, fame-eschewing antihero. What this gentle nocturne seems to ask for is the source, at the heart of all the upheavals—Reed’s and Hanson’s and ours too—of a sense of peace. The suggestion, by way of an epitaph from Laurie Anderson, is a rather Californian one: “You were a prince and a fighter/And you were a tai chi master.” Hanson knows we might be on our own, but the teachers are out here too.
