Most of the artists I have interviewed in my life claim some level of discomfort with self-promotion. The reason for this is obvious: Talking about yourself in most contexts is looked upon as generally obnoxious behavior. The self-obsessed dude who spends the night at the party gassing himself up will be mocked as a narcissist in the morning-after text thread. Nevertheless, I never completely believe artists when they express regret over marketing themselves. They are, after all, talking to me, a person in the media. It’s like complaining about the ozone layer to a car salesman.
But when Greg Freeman, a 27-year-old singer-songwriter from Vermont set to release his second album Burnover this week, frets about the downsides of publicity, I believe him.
“It feels like a privilege to have a bigger platform. But at the same time, I’m not a particularly interesting person,” he tells me during a phone call earlier this month. “It can feel silly self-mythologizing and talking about your childhood or background.”
I believe him not because I think he’s not an interesting person. I concur because of how I discovered his music. In 2022, Freeman put out his debut, I Looked Out. The project began right before COVID, and the songs were written and recorded during the isolation of lockdown. As an obscure artist living amid a world-wide health crisis in a far-flung New England hippie college town — Burlington, home of Phish — he had zero professional ambitions for the album. And yet the music he made was big, anthemic, rangy, and wild, an echo of the gigs he wasn’t allowed to play for the time being. Singing in a strained, impassioned tenor, Freeman evoked Jason Molina at his most rocking, while his backing band put a loose-limbed indie-rock spin on his alt-country-leaning tunes.
It was a really good record, though quality, as ever, did not guarantee an audience. But once I Looked Out entered the world, it slowly but surely entered the bloodstream of underground rock blogs and social media accounts. I didn’t hear the album until 2023, but I was so thrilled by it that I put it on my year-end list, calendar logistics be damned. Plenty of others also embraced Freeman around the same time.
“I only realized that people from outside of town were listening to it maybe four months after it came out,” he says, “when people were hitting me to play shows in different places. It felt really pure, I guess.”
Now comes Burnover, which builds on the ramshackle, “live in the studio” feel of I Looked Out with a slightly more refined sensibility. Drawing inspiration from a variety of sources — the history of New England, Nancy Rexroth’s photography book IOWA, the 1978 Bob Dylan record Street-Legal — he’s once again written songs that dwell on American mythology and personal discovery in the form of twangy rock songs that threaten to fall apart at any minute. Even in an increasingly crowded field of Molina-inspired troubadours, Freeman stands out as one of the more exciting practitioners of the form.
Not that he would want me to make a hard sell.
“I would never want my music kind of shoved down someone’s throat,” he says. “With that first record, I did it the way that I wanted to do it, which was just put something out, and whoever likes it can listen to it. And I think it paid off.”
Was knowing that more people would be paying attention change your approach to the new album?
Materially, it was kind of the same. I did record it in a studio, which was a change, but there was no more money spent on it. It was a lot of friends playing on it, and Burlington people. A lot of the same people from the last record. The next one probably will be different, just because of the amount of resources I have now compared to in 2022, when I was working on this new record.
I really like the first song on the record “Point And Shoot.” Apparently, that was inspired by the Alec Baldwin Rust case?
That’s where I got the imagery or idea, but that was only in my mind because right after that happened, he was hanging out in Vermont, so it was a local news story. But more than that, I was really inspired by a few photography books that I was looking at a lot around that time. I had been trying to figure out how to translate that inspiration into music. And when I read about the Alec Baldwin thing, I was like, “Oh, there’s a metaphor.” An actor shooting the person behind the camera and trying to recreate a historical event from the past, the Wild West or something, and then getting too close to the actual violence that you’re trying to recreate.
New England looms large on this record. You’re not from there originally, but you draw inspiration from the region.
I’m not for New England superiority or anything. It was just finding inspiration in the landscape, the cows and stuff. That’s just the reality of living here. Also there’s some historical references on the album that come from seeing names on street signs all over town, like Ethan Allen and Joseph Smith. I used to drive past his birthplace on the way to work all the time.
How did you get into music?
I started playing guitar when I was maybe 12, and I’ve been writing songs ever since. I didn’t have too many people to play with, honestly. I went to open mics and jam sessions when I was a kid, and I was really into blues music, so I’d go to blues jams. That’s where I learned how to finger pick.
It’s unusual for a 12-year-old kid to be playing the blues in the early 2010s.
It was the really old stuff, like Robert Johnson and Charley Patton and Son House. Then I got more into electric stuff, BB King and Magic Sam and Freddie King. I was into classic rock before then and then got into the older stuff that Cream was covering. But really old blues music was my first obsession. That’s how I learned to play guitar. It’s kind of silly because I was just a middle schooler in the DC suburbs.
So, you were this little kid writing blues songs?
Not really. I quickly realized that it was silly to be a 12-year-old writing blues songs.
Or it could have been incredible to be a 12-year-old writing blues songs.
I was pretty self-aware. I was like, “I don’t want to be this bourgeois cringe little white boy.”
You’ve been compared to Jason Molina a lot, particularly because of your vocal similarities. Is he a conscious influence?
He was a huge influence, definitely on the last record. I just made that record for fun. I wasn’t thinking about the way people would interpret it or compare it to this or that. It’s just allowing the influences to come through, I guess.
A lot of songwriters from your generation have connected with Molina’s work, even though he died a little before your time. Why do you think that is?
Well, one, I have the same thing about a lot of songwriters or musicians who sing in my register. There’s a lot of them — Neil Young, Skip James, Dylan. I have always gravitated towards the people that have a higher register voice. It’s like you can see some of yourself in those people.
Songwriting-wise, there’s a mystical quality to it. It makes you feel like you’ve discovered some kind of secret, like he’s talking just to you or something.
Along with the voice, your records have a very “live-sounding” vibe to them. There’s an element of spontaneity or chaos lurking in the mix.
The new record and the last one were like that. It was more of a necessity than intentionality. Just having people in the studio for one day and trying to get the song down. I made both records in Burlington, and we were all between working at our jobs. We didn’t have to be the most well-rehearsed, “get it in one take” kind of band. We just went in and tried to get it.
You’ve talked about the 1978 Dylan album Street-Legal as a reference point for “Curtain,” which I love — your song and Street-Legal.
It’s very free flowing, and the songs are all quite long, with big arrangements but pretty loose. Lyrically, it’s pretty adventurous, as far as Bob albums go. It’s a very emotional album, and a personal one. I wasn’t really trying to recreate the sound or anything. Maybe just the feeling I got from listening to it worked its way in.
The lyrics on that album are very dense, almost impenetrable.
Totally. My favorite is “Where Are You Tonight.” That’s maybe my favorite song ever. There’s an extremely out-of-tune lead guitar on it, which is awesome. But lyrically, it’s like you can visualize the story, you understand it, what he’s talking about emotionally more than you do when you actually think about the story that he is telling you. It’s so abstract and mystical. He just communicates something that’s so much greater than sum of its parts.
Don’t forget the parenthetical part of the title, “(Journey Through Dark Heat).” I have no idea what that means in a literal sense, but at the same time I also completely understand what he’s saying.
[Laughs.] Yeah, totally.
Burnover is out 8/22 via Transgressive/Canvasback Records. Find more information here.
