If you’ve kept an ear out for new indie rock in the past few years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Burlington, Vermont-based songwriter Greg Freeman. Maybe someone told you to check out his 2022 debut, I Looked Out, with its ragged-edged anthems bearing welcome echoes of Neil Young and Jason Molina. Or maybe you ended up at one of his unforgettable live shows — all-in, passionate performances that have made him a genuine word-of-mouth sensation among indie, classic rock, and Americana fans of all ages.
If you haven’t listened yet, go ahead and get familiar, because Freeman’s new album, Burnover, out Aug. 22, is even better than the last one. Recorded in between tour dates last year, it’s the first album he’s made in a proper studio, something that enhances his electric sound without losing any immediacy. “I taught the players the songs the day we recorded most of them,” Freeman, 26, says. “Which we did out of necessity, but we ended up getting recordings that had energy.”
Freeman is calling from Amsterdam, where he and his band are just wrapping a run of shows in Europe. “Curtain,” the new single he’s releasing today, is a great example of the energy he’s talking about — a free-flowing, brightly-hued rocker that makes his impressionistic lyrics feel like they’re written in the sky.
He’s come a long way from where he was when he first released I Looked Out on a small Oregon-based label called Bud Tapes three years ago. “I mean, I really had no expectations for that record,” Freeman says. He was working at a bakery just outside Burlington at the time, making “sourdough, some yeasted breads, too,” and about six months went by before he realized it might be worth taking the album on the road. “I only decided to tour because people were messaging me about booking shows in other cities and stuff, and I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe we should,’” he says.
A February 2023 show at a Chicago bar called Sleeping Village, where he performed with a seven-piece band he’d brought along from Vermont, drew enthusiastic reviews. “Damn, this is a pretty good crowd for a city 14 hours away,” Freeman recalls thinking.
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A few days later, he played “this tiny show in Philly in a record store” where it felt like his band and their gear took up half of the 75-capacity space: “There were people there singing the lyrics, and that was a first for me.”
When he got back to Burlington after that first tour, Freeman took some time off from work to mull his next move. He tore through pulp crime novels by Jim Thompson, poetry by Emily Dickinson and Louise Glück, and literary fiction by W.G. Sebald, and watched old movies like the acclaimed 2001 melodrama In the Bedroom. “I was just looking for inspiration in as many places as I could,” he says.
One thing he was wrestling with was a sense of place. “I guess I was trying to figure out how to write about New England,” says Freeman, who grew up in Maryland and moved to Burlington at age 18. “What does it mean to have that experience of not having a grounded home that’s tied to where you were born?” Ultimately, he adds, “I feel good about the record conveying that kind of complicated relationship with a complicated place.”
“Curtain” was one of the first songs he wrote, pouring out of him as a guitar riff that “was just really fun to play.” He’d been listening to “a lot of ’70s Dylan,” especially 1978’s Street-Legal, and thinking about writing a love song. He added more color and detail in the studio, building out an arrangement that blossoms with horns, keys, woodwinds, and a jaunty tack-piano part by his friend Sam Atallah.
The song runs on for more than six minutes on the album, including a perfectly gnarly guitar solo from Freeman himself. “If we had practiced the song more, it wouldn’t have been so long,” he says. “And I think in our minds, we were like, ‘Oh, we’ll just fade it out or something.’ But listening back, we didn’t want it to end.”
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He contrasts that song’s easygoing, spontaneous writing process with the one for “Gulch,” a raw, up-tempo album highlight that took much longer to come into focus. “I mean, I wrote ‘Curtain’ in maybe one day, and ‘Gulch’ took me over a month to write,” he says. “I remember not being able to sleep for many days that month, just trying to write that song and tormented by it…. I was super pissed at a certain point, after three-plus weeks of working on this song. And then I finally got it one day. I drank a half-bottle of wine and wrote it all at once.”
Freeman has a busy calendar coming up, including a one-off date in New York opening for This Is Lorelei in July, followed by more U.K./Europe shows in the late summer and fall and a U.S. run opening for Grandaddy in October. It’s shaping up to be a big year for him — don’t be surprised if he ends up on a trajectory that’s similar to MJ Lenderman’s as more and more people hear Burnover and see him in concert. Adds Freeman, “I’m just excited for more music to be out.”
