If you've been paying attention to new indie rock over the past few years, there's a good chance you've heard of Vermont songwriter Greg Freeman. Maybe someone told you to check out his 2022 debut, I'm lookinga dressy song with Neil Young and Jason Molina brings a welcome echo. Or maybe you ended up in one of his unforgettable live shows – a full-out show that gave him a real tone among all ages, classic rock and American fans.
If you haven't heard it yet, keep getting familiar with it because of Freeman's new album, combustionAugust 22, even better than the last one. Between the tour dates recorded last year, this is his first album in the right studio that enhances his electrical sound without losing any immediacy. "The day I recorded most of the songs, I taught the players songs," said Freeman, 26. "We were out of necessity, but we ended up with energy."
Freeman called from Amsterdam and he and his band were just playing a show in Europe. His new single, “The Curtain,” released today, is a great example of the energy he is talking about – a free-flowing, bright-colored rock singer who makes his impressionist lyrics feel like they are written in the sky.
He is a long way from where he was when he first released I'm looking Three years ago, on a small tag called Bud Tapes. “I mean, I really didn’t expect anything from this record,” Freeman said, working at a bakery outside Burlington, making “soup dough, some sourdough bread” for about six months, and realizing that it might be worth taking the album on the way. "I just decided to tour because people were sending me messages on booking shows on other cities and things, and I was like, 'Yes, maybe we should."
A performance at a Chicago bar called Sleeping Village in February 2023, where he brought a seven-player band in Vermont, Drew enthusiastic comments. "Damn it, it's a pretty good crowd," Freeman recalls.
A few days later, he played “That little show in Philadelphia in the record store” and it felt like his band and their gear took up 75 capacity space: “There are people singing there, and this is my first.”
After his first tour, when he returned to Burlington, Freeman took a break to train his next move. He tore up Jim Thompson's pulp crime novel, Emily Dickinson and Louise Glück's poems, and WG Sebald's literary novels, and watched old movies like the famous 2001 Melodrama In the bedroom. “I’m just looking for inspiration in as many places as possible,” he said.
One thing he fought with was a sense of place. "I think I'm trying to figure out how to write New England," Freeman said, who grew up in Maryland and moved to Burlington at the age of 18. “What does it mean to have an experience with a home that has no roots to the place you were born?” Finally, he added: “I am happy with the record of conveying a complex relationship with a complex place.”
"The Curtain" was one of the first songs he wrote, pouring out as a guitar riff, "It's really fun to play." He has been listening to "many Dylans of the 70s," especially in 1978 Street LawAnd consider writing a love song. He added more colors and details to the studio, establishing a layout with corners, keys, woodwinds and his friend Sam Atallah's jaunty tack-piano section.
The song lasted for more than six minutes on the album, including Freeman himself’s perfect guitar solo. “If we practiced this song more, it wouldn’t be that long,” he said. “And I think in our minds we were like, ‘Oh, we’re just going to fade out of it.’ But looking back, we don’t want it to end.”
He contrasts the easy-going, spontaneous writing process with “Gulch” (Gulch), a raw, highly respected album highlight that takes longer to focus. "I mean, I probably wrote 'curtains' one day, 'gulch' took me a month to write," he said. "I remember not being able to sleep for many days that month, just trying to write that song and tormented by it.... I felt very angry at some point in the three weeks I had made this song. Then I finally bought it one day. I drank half a bottle of wine.
Freeman's calendar was busy, including a one-time date in New York that was Lorelei in July, followed by more British/European gigs in late summer and autumn, and an October opening at Grandpa. It's a big year for him - don't be surprised if he ends up on a similar trajectory to MJ Lenderman, as more and more people hear it combustion And meet him at the concert. Freeman added: “I’m just excited for more music to come out.”