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.”

The sweeping Republican tax and spending bill that cleared the U.S. House Thursday could cause about 45,000 people in Vermont to lose health insurance in the coming years, state officials say. The bill is now heading to President Donald Trump for a sign-off.

In order to pay for key parts of Trump’s domestic agenda included in the legislation, called the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” GOP budget-writers are counting on proposed cuts to Medicaid, the shared federal and state program that funds insurance for people with low incomes.

Meanwhile, the bill has sparked concern among hospital leaders in Vermont over a provision that would limit how much state governments can tax health care providers such as hospitals to, ultimately, access more federal Medicaid funding. Vermont, like most other states, relies on these taxes to fund expanded benefits for Medicaid recipients, which is a practice that helps support providers, too.

“The ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ is deeply concerning. I don’t think it’s beautiful, and I think it’s super harmful to Vermont,” said Mike Del Trecco, the president and CEO of the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, in an interview earlier this week. 

President Donald Trump and his GOP allies in Congress have said the legislation would target waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid funding and have pointed to how the cuts would pay for policies such as breaks on taxes for tips and overtime pay. However, critics point to a Congressional Budget Office analysis showing the bill would boost the incomes of the country’s wealthiest households while costing the country’s poorest households more. 

The legislation would result in about 12 million people across the country losing their health care coverage over the next decade across Medicaid and the commercial insurance marketplace, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan agency that scores the fiscal impacts of federal legislation.  

One key provision in the bill would impose new requirements that certain people on Medicaid demonstrate that they are working in order to receive coverage. States will also be required to determine a participant’s eligibility for Medicaid every six months rather than every year, as they do now.

The fact that more people will have to fill out additional paperwork will lead some to fall off of coverage, according to Ashley Berliner, director of Medicaid policy for the state Agency of Human Services.

Berliner, in an interview, estimated that about 30,000 Vermonters will lose coverage because of that greater administrative burden. That makes up roughly half of the adults in Vermont who currently receive health insurance coverage under the expansion of Medicaid provided by the Affordable Care Act. That act, commonly called Obamacare, has significantly increased the number of people able to access health insurance.  

Federal spending for those 30,000 people would equate to $205 million annually that would, as a result of the bill, no longer be coming into the state, Berliner said. 

Meanwhile, she said, Vermont health officials believe an additional 15,000 people who purchase coverage on the commercial marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act will also lose coverage, at least in part because signing up for it will become more difficult. The budget bill doesn’t allow people to automatically reenroll in their current health care plan and shrinks the sign-up period for coverage by a month. 

Historically, only about half of people respond to the agency when it requests additional information to verify people’s eligibility to be enrolled in Medicaid, Berliner said. 

“When you ask people for additional information, they don’t fill it out and they fall off — the burden becomes too high and coverage is lost,” she said, adding that the picture is similar across the country, and GOP leaders are relying on the dropoff to help facilitate their proposed cuts.

Officials are also concerned about the impacts of a measure in the bill that would whittle down a long-standing mechanism states use to raise additional funds for Medicaid services by taxing health care providers. The rate of Vermont’s so-called provider tax, which is the name for that mechanism, would be reduced by 2.5% between 2028 and 2032. Vermont’s rate is currently set at the highest level allowed under existing law.

Cumulatively, over the period ending in 2032, Vermont is set to lose around $211 million from this change, counting both a loss of state dollars and additional federal Medicaid funding those dollars would allow the state to bring in, according to Berliner.

Hospitals will also feel pain from lost funding under these reductions, Del Trecco said.

Berliner added that she’s concerned by a measure in the bill that would ban state Medicaid payments for at least one year to health care nonprofits that offer abortions. This would include, notably, Planned Parenthood, which has clinics throughout Vermont.

One additional fallout, she said, could be shifting the costs of the reproductive healthcare those nonprofits provide in Vermont onto other providers. 

All three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation have criticized the impacts of the budget bill and voted against it. 

Last week, before the Senate approved a version of the bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., released a report that his office said showed the bill would increase the number of uninsured people in every state in the country. In some states, the rate of uninsured people would nearly double.

The legislation would “devastate rural hospitals, community health centers and nursing homes throughout our country and cause a massive spike in uninsured rates in red states and blue states alike,” Sanders said in a press release last week. 

Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., speaking on the Senate floor earlier this week, derided the potential impacts the bill would have on states with all political leanings.

“I want to repeat here: this is the bipartisan infliction of pain. This is real. This is real. And is the tax cut — largely directed to the very wealthy people — is it worth inflicting that kind of pain on so many, when the tax cut benefits so few?” he said. 

Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., voted against the bill Thursday when it was up for final approval. 

“This Republican budget is far and away the cruelest piece of legislation I’ve seen in my career,” she said in a statement Thursday afternoon. “It’s an utter moral failure.”

This episode is an extended version of a conversation from “What class are you?”, which is a periodic series on Vermont Public that explores everyday lives inside the American class system.

Dan Sedon grew up in Barnegat, New Jersey, in a house with a lot of books and not a lot of money. As a little kid, he and his friends hustled for jobs around the neighborhood — mowing lawns, washing cars, selling clams down on the commercial dock. Eventually Dan got a full scholarship to college, then put himself through law school, and since 1993, Dan Sedon has been working as a criminal defense attorney in Vermont … where he works with poor people and rich people and all the people in between.

Listen for new installments of “What class are you?” this week during Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and find the full series here.

Rumble Strip is a podcast produced by Erica Heilman and distributed on the radio by Vermont Public. Learn more about the show here.