Musician Greg Freeman at home in Burlington on Monday, June 30. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
It took a little time for Greg Freeman’s debut record to really make its mark.
The Burlington-based singer-songwriter released “I Looked Out” in July 2022 on the tiny Oregon label Bud Tapes to little fanfare and sparse reviews. About five months later, Freeman and his band took the record on tour outside of Vermont.
By then, the album had begun to develop a following, an authentic word-of-mouth success that has gradually picked up steam, making Freeman something of a cult figure among those in the know.
“The reception was pretty slow building, I guess,” Freeman said recently, reclining on the porch of his Burlington home, one of the many faded clapboard houses that line the city’s downtown streets.
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Just a few weeks prior, the Vermont musician had returned from his first extended tour in Europe, where he was pleasantly surprised by the turnout he generated.
“People came to the Paris show,” Freeman said, nodding happily. “The England shows that we did were really great too.”
This past fall, Freeman was signed to Canvasback, an imprint of Transgressive Records, which promptly reissued “I Looked Out” on vinyl.
In August, the label is releasing Freeman’s second LP, “Burnover,” which is poised to be a career defining success, the kind of thing you could hear blasting in dorm rooms and dive bars alike for the rest of the year.
It’s a sprawling, dreamlike collection of elegant indie gems and hard rock epics, anchored by razor sharp guitar riffs and the distinctly airy voice that has earned Freeman comparisons to Neil Young and Jason Molina, of Songs: Ohia fame.
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Freeman said he wrote a good portion of the album in a single sprint, a month long period after his first tour for “I Looked Out”that he spent hunkering down with his guitar back in Vermont.
“I just woke up in this house every day, and everyone was at work, and I played music and watched movies all day long,” Freeman said, looking across his porch. “I think once you do that for long enough, things start flowing better.”
Shortly thereafter, a steady stream of retrospective praise for his debut and raucous live performances began to lay a long runway for the new album’s arrival.
Last spring, he and his band appeared at South by Southwest and were singled out in subsequent coverage of the Texas music festival.
Write ups in Paste, Stereogum and Rolling Stone have since followed, with some heralding Freeman as the next MJ Lenderman — the 26-year old Asheville-based musician and current golden boy of indie rock.
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Freeman has also been getting invitations to share the stage with larger names. Prior to his jaunt in Europe, he supported Walkmen singer Hamilton Leithausser for a stretch of his solo tour, and in the Fall he’ll be opening for the iconic indie band Grandaddy for a series of shows in the Northeast.
Freeman grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, playing guitar in his room while nursing an obsession with traditional blues greats like Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson from an early age.
The White Stripes, with their Son House covers and blues-inflected garage jams, served as a gateway drug from the early masters to the classic rock and contemporary indie records that Freeman began to favor more throughout high school and college. “That was the first, like, contemporary band that I was super into,” he said.
Before attending the University of Vermont, he took a gap year and played alone at open mics across the country, often sleeping in his car as he hopped from town to town.
When Freeman finally arrived in Burlington in 2017, he was bowled over by the vitality of the local music scene. “I came here and everyone was in bands, and there was so much music everywhere,” Freeman said. “That was really a first for me.”
Freeman joined the fray, playing basement shows before moving up to venues like Radio Bean and Artsriot, where he mostly performed as a solo artist backed by many of the musicians that remain in his band today.
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In the years since, Freeman has stayed around the Queen City, becoming a mainstay in the city’s burgeoning indie scene alongside friends and contemporaries like the band Robber Robber and singer-songwriter Lily Seabird, who played with Freeman’s band for several years.
With its tight-knit social scene and sprawling bucolic surroundings, Burlington is, for Freeman, a city of contradictions that has given him much of his material. Scraps of overheard dialogue make it into his work, as do shades of the more complicated social dynamics that come with living in such a small city.
“There’s kind of like a suffocating social environment here sometimes,” he said, grinning. “But then there’s also, you know, so much green, beautiful space.”
The odd contrast is something Freeman said he tried to evoke in Burnover. For all its catchy hooks and colorful guitars, the record is a study in the peculiar feeling of loneliness that you get from never quite being alone.
“My thoughts die out slowly on the blood swept plains / where I see you every night,” Freeman sings on “Curtain,” one of the singles from the record.
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Rejecting the term “concept album,” Freeman said that “Burnover” was more intentionally cohesive than his last, with sonic motifs and language that recur throughout.
“I want you to be able to visualize a certain place when you listen to the whole thing,” he said.
The place isn’t Vermont or New England exactly, he said, but something similar, something green, gothic, weird.
“I’m always kind of trying to write about the places where I live — the spaces around me and the people around me,” he said.
Accordingly, whatever comes after “Burnover” could represent a change of pace for the Vermont musician.
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Before he accompanied Leithauser on tour, he headed to New Mexico, where he spent almost a month alone in the desert, writing the bulk of what will be his third album.
“It was pretty out there,” Freeman said.
He returned home with a batch of new songs, but his sojourn out west hasn’t made him want to leave. For now, he said, he would be in Burlington for the foreseeable future.
“It’s weird, though, how much has happened in this neighborhood,” he said as he peered down the road. “I’ve lived on all these streets.”
U.S. Sen. Peter Welch on Friday said the Pentagon had ordered the deployment of the Vermont Air National Guard’s 158th Fighter Wing to the Caribbean amid heightened tensions with Venezuela.
According to Welch, the deployment is part of Operation Southern Spear, which has been targeting drug trafficking in the region as President Donald Trump’s administration has sought the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
A Pentagon spokesperson on Friday referred questions to the Vermont Guard.
The 158th Fighter Wing, based in South Burlington, includes 20 F-35A Lightning II fighter jets and approximately 1,000 personnel.
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Joseph Brooks, a spokesperson for the Vermont Guard, told the Globe earlier this week that the unit had been ordered by the Department of Defense to mobilize, but he would not disclose the location or details of the deployment.
Brooks declined to comment further Friday night.
In a written statement, Welch thanked Vermont Guard members for their service but criticized the Trump administration for deploying them.
“I strongly oppose President Trump’s mobilization of the Vermont Air National Guard alongside thousands of other U.S. military units in what appears to be a relentless march to war,” Welch said. “An undeclared war against the Venezuelan regime would be illegal under our Constitution. If this president — or any president — wants to start a war with Venezuela, which has not attacked us and is not a source of the fentanyl that is killing Americans, then he needs to seek authorization from Congress, as the authors of the Constitution intended.”
Details of the deployment remained unclear Friday, though Seven Days, a Burlington newspaper, reported that the unit would be stationed at a recently reopened military base in Puerto Rico. The newspaper said some Vermont Guard members had already headed there to prepare for the deployment.
WINOOSKI, Vt. — A small school district in Vermont was hit with racist and threatening calls and messages after a Somali flag was put up a week ago in response to President Donald Trump referring to Minnesota’s Somali community as “ garbage.”
The Winooski School District began to display the flag Dec. 5 to show solidarity with a student body that includes about 9% people of Somali descent.
“We invited our students and community to come together for a little moment of normalcy in a sea of racist rhetoric nationally,” said Winooski School District Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria, himself a Nicaraguan immigrant. “We felt really good about it until the ugliness came knocking Monday morning.”
The Somali flag was flown alongside the Vermont state flag and beneath the United States flag at a building that includes K-12 classrooms and administrative offices. Somali students cheered and clapped, telling administrators the flag flying meant a great deal to them, he said.
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What ensued was a deluge of phone calls, voicemails and social media posts aimed at district workers and students. Some school phone lines were shut down — along with the district website — as a way to shield staff from harassment. Chavarria said videos of the event did not also show the U.S. and Vermont flags were still up and spread through right-wing social media apps, leaving out the important context.
“Our staff members, our administrators and our community are overwhelmed right now, and they are being viciously attacked. The content of those attacks is extremely, extremely deplorable. I don’t know what other word to use,” Chavarria said Tuesday.
Mukhtar Abdullahi, an immigrant who serves as a multilingual liaison for families in the district who speak Somali and a related dialect, said “no one, no human being, regardless of where they come from, is garbage.” Students have asked if their immigrant parents are safe, he said.
“Regardless of what happens, I know we have a strong community,” Abdullahi said. “And I’m very, very, very thankful to be part of it.”
The district is helping law enforcement investigate the continued threats, Chavarria said, and additional police officers have been stationed at school buildings as a precaution. Winooski is near Burlington, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) south of Montreal, Canada.
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White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called the calls and messages the school received “the actions of individuals who have nothing to do with” Trump.
“Aliens who come to our country, complain about how much they hate America, fail to contribute to our economy, and refuse to assimilate into our society should not be here,” Jackson said in an email late Thursday. “And American schools should fly American flags.”
Federal authorities last week began an immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota to focus on Somali immigrants living unlawfully in the U.S. Trump has claimed “they contribute nothing ” and said “I don’t want them in our country.” The Minneapolis mayor has defended the newcomers, saying they have started businesses, created jobs and added to the city’s cultural fabric. Most are U.S. citizens and more than half of all Somali people in Minnesota were born in the U.S.
At the school district in Vermont, Chavarria said his position as superintendent gave him authority to fly the flag for up to a week without the school board’s explicit approval.
The school district also held an event with catered Somali food, and Chavarria plans to continue to find ways to celebrate its diversity.
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“I felt sorrow for the students, the families, the little kids that are my responsibility to keep safe. And it’s my responsibility to make them feel like they belong and that this is their country and this is their school district. This is what we do,” he said.
BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Vermont police officers are working overtime shifts along the Canadian border under a federal program that critics say could violate the state’s anti-bias policing laws.
“Up here, we’re so small we rely on our partner agencies,” said Swanton Village Police Chief Matthew Sullivan.
On a recent frosty Friday, Sullivan was patrolling along the Canadian border as part of Homeland Security’s Operation Stonegarden. The chief and other local officers work overtime shifts for the U.S. Border Patrol.
“It acts as a force multiplier because we’re able to put more officers out in these rural areas in Vermont,” Sullivan said.
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During an exclusive ride-along, Sullivan showed us a field where, as recently as last fall, migrants were smuggled across the border. “These people are really being taken advantage of,” he said.
From 2022 to 2023, U.S. Border Patrol encountered just shy of 7,000 people entering the country illegally in the region, more than the previous 11 years combined.
In several instances, police say cars have tried to crash through a gate in Swanton along the border. Others enter from Canada on foot and get picked up by cars with out-of-state plates.
The chief says the illegal crossings strike fear among local parents. “They didn’t feel safe allowing their kids outside to play, which is extremely unfortunate,” Sullivan said.
Through Operation Stonegarden — which was created in the wake of 9/11 — Sullivan and his officers get overtime pay from the feds. “We’re kind of another set of eyes and ears for border patrol,” Sullivan said. His department also gets equipment and training.
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Six agencies in Vermont participate in Stonegarden: The Vermont State Police, Chittenden County Sheriff’s Department, Essex County Sheriff’s Department, Orleans County Sheriff’s Department, Newport City Police Department, and the Swanton Village Police Department. Some three dozen across New England participate in Stonegarden. These agencies collect relatively small amounts from the feds — $760,000 in Vermont, $190,000 in New Hampshire, and $1 million in Maine.
But amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, Stonegarden is under scrutiny.
“This has become quite relevant to a lot of people once again,” said Paul Heintz, a longtime Vermont journalist who now writes for the Boston Globe. “These three states have dramatically different policies when it comes to local law enforcement working with federal law enforcement.”
Vermont has some of the strictest rules about police assisting federal immigration officials. The Fair and Impartial Policing Policy limits cooperation with the feds and says immigration status, language, and proximity to the border cannot be the basis of an investigation.
“Vermonters have made clear through their elected representatives that they want state and local law enforcement to be focusing on state and local issues,” said Lia Ernst with the ACLU of Vermont. She says Stonegarden is crossing the line. “They don’t want their police to be a cog in the mass deportation machinery of any administration but particularly the Trump administration,” Ernst said.
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The ACLU and other critics are concerned that Stonegarden creates a cozy relationship between local police and immigration officials that can be used to enforce the president’s immigration crackdown.
Heintz says the distinction between civil and criminal immigration enforcement can be fluid. In most civil cases in which the feds seek to deport, Vermont law enforcement can’t play a role because it’s against the law. In criminal cases, which local police can enforce, immigrants can be detained and charged.
“An operation may start out appearing to focus on a federal criminal immigration issue and may turn into a civil one over the course of that investigation,” Heintz said.
“There is a lot of nuance to it,” admitted Sullivan. He insists his department is not the long arm of federal law enforcement and is instead focused on crime, including guns, drugs, and human trafficking. However, if someone is caught in the act of crossing the border illegally, that constitutes a crime, and the chief said he calls for federal backup. Though he said that rarely happens.
“It’s a criminal violation to cross the border outside of a port of entry, and technically, we could take action on that. But again, we’re not here to enforce civil immigration while working Stonegarden,” Sullivan said.
