On the Rise
Greg Freeman

After releasing I Looked Out, his 2022 EP, with virtually no PR campaign to its name, Freeman managed to amass a groundswell following on tour and in his community that has translated into considerable buzz in the scenes that matter. Now, working with beloved UK indie label Transgressive Records, he’s gearing up to release Burnover, a portrait of heartland life and love and loss and grief that makes for a compelling second LP.

Freeman grew up in Bethesda, a suburb outside of Washington D.C. that he says was something of a cultural wasteland. Music, he explains, was a rare outpost of creativity. “Playing music was very much a solitary thing for me and kind of a refuge growing up,” Freeman says. “It felt particularly personal because it wasn’t all around me.”

To find spaces to hone his craft, Freeman ventured into whatever semblances of a music scene he could find on his own. There was a jam held in a barbershop he hung around at in the city. There, he took cues from old guard players and learned how to finger pick and keep up in a live ensemble. From those same sessions, he also studied – in the osmosis sense of the word – the art of songwriting and the art of singing confidently in front of a crowd. While he doesn’t necessarily speak of his hometown scene with great adoration, he does seem to suggest that these early encounters were both formative and necessary, helping cement him on the path he now travels.

“The first time I sang in public was at one of these community jams,” Freeman explains. “They would go in a circle and each person would take turns singing the song. And then it got to me, and I’d never sang in public before, but at that point you can’t really say no. I was kind of put on the spot, but then I think I broke through that discomfort of singing in public early on.”

But all throughout his early years, Freeman knew he wanted out. “It’s a really complicated and interesting city,” he explains. The pace of the center of America’s political life isn’t for everyone – understandably. “I moved away for a reason, wanting to never come back. It’s definitely a journey figuring out what it means to grow up in a place like that.”

He ended up in Burlington, after the University of Vermont offered him a generous scholarship. Moving there, he says, was one of those happy accidents that blew the perspectives and proportions of his world wide open.

“I moved there and everyone was in a band and there were endless shows that you could play any night of the week,” Freeman says. “Until that point, music was just something I did by myself.” While Freeman’s work benefits from those early years of solitary practice – much of his writing leans towards the deeply and fascinatingly introspective – finding likeminded community in his art was life changing.

His first few years in Vermont were times of exploration – as the early years of university are. He bounced between studying religion and anthropology and English and even biology while he tried to figure out what he gravitated to and what he liked. And he started, eventually, to feel truly at home, making his way through the eclectic and scrappy scenes of the jam band city.

“There’s so much that goes on there,” Freeman says of his adopted hometown. “I remember a few years ago I was at this New Year’s Eve festival that happens every year called Highlight Burlington. My friends help book it and it was just all of our bands playing, and then it was just, like, Bernie Sanders was there! It was a crazy vibe. It was like in an aquarium on the waterfront and we were on acid or something and it was pure Burlington chaos.” Indeed, Freeman confirms that no Burlington-hopeful can be anointed a local without some kind of quotidian run-in with the famed politician. Just last year, in fact, Freeman found Sanders practicing free throws across the street from his house. Such is life up there in New England.

Through college, Freeman kept playing in groups around the city. He also took up work at a bakery, a job he loved for its solitary and peaceful nature. Once he graduated and after COVID happened, he took up work at the bakery full time to support himself. “That’s what I was really good at professionally, and music wasn’t so much an option for me financially,” Freeman explains.

But around that time, he also started to consider what his life might look like if he took a different path. Up until that point, he’d written plenty of his own music but never thought about releasing it. He’d played in the touring bands of friends and other musicians, even playing in his own bands at times. As those tours went on, he eventually realised that life was something he wanted for himself.

“I can be pretty self-depreciating, I would say. There’s always a part of you that just assumes that you have to do things for yourself and that other people don’t care about them. When you find out that they do care about something, then you can take it more seriously,” he says.

It turns out, after releasing I Looked Out, people did care. Freeman turned that into formidable touring and streaming success, building an audience that was dedicated to his craft and wanted to learn more. His sound, of course, is fit for the moment. It’s a blend of that MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee twang that’s addictive to have on repeat. Freeman might be next in line to this lineage.

With Burnover, Freeman has honed and matured that sound. Inspired by D.C.-born photographer Nancy Rextroth’s book IOWA, Freeman became interested in the idea of moving through concepts anchored to a place. The photos in Rexroth’s book – which actually come from all over the U.S., not just Iowa – have this dreamlike quality that blends the line of reality and fiction. Almost like little mythic vignettes. Freeman wondered if he could replicate this feeling in an album centred around unpacking his time in Vermont so far.

“I wanted to write songs that made me understand Vermont and living where I did in the Northeast, but without having some kind of framework or lens that was only myself,” Freeman explains. He wasn’t necessarily looking for a hard and fast throughline, but rather he left himself open to experience and picked up topics and stories along the way that he might use for the record. He did research on the folklore of Upstate and Western New York to try and figure out how the traditional modes of storytelling could inform his own. The album’s own title refers to a term called “The Burned-Over District," an old moniker that used to describe parts of New York state that became hotbeds of religious revival in the early 19th century.

“I was conscious of the fact that I wasn’t trying to pretend like I was from somewhere that I’m not,” Freeman says. “It’s hard to write about a place that you’re not from. That creates a kind of tension in myself and maybe in the music, too.”

On the record’s closer “Wolf Pine,” for example, Freeman opines about an old tree in Burlington that’s now been deformed and warped by parasite infections. It’s 500 years of history that have been washed away, and yet in that observation, Freeman concocts a chaotic beauty mimicking the natural wonder in front of him. Conversely, on opener “Point and Shoot,” Freeman tells the sensational tale of the infamous shooting on the set of Alec Baldwin’s “Rust,” which was on his radar because Baldwin fled to Vermont to escape all the press.

The album is, really, a complicated, kitschy love letter to his adopted home state. And it’s an exciting next frontier from an incredible new talent.