On the eve of his sophomore release, Vermont singer-songwriter Greg Freeman’s star is rising higher – 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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.”