Greg Freeman: The Best of What’s Next

When I call Greg Freeman on a Saturday afternoon, the Vermonter is hungover but walking up a steep hill somewhere in Los Angeles. The wind beats into the phone speaker, in-between his heavy breaths, but Freeman sounds as joyful as ever in Hollywood. He’s in town recording, working on what I can only assume is his forthcoming sophomore album. Freeman corroborates as much, telling me that LP2 is very much “a continuation of [his] last record.” “Maybe it gets more of a narrow lens,” he says. “There’s more stories, it’s a bit more conceptual.” Sonically, the next chapter is not quieter but less noisy and more refined—“stripped back, at times,” Freeman reckons, holding all the truth but not relinquishing the entire meal. “I made the new record with just as little money as the last one,” he says. “It’d be one thing if I got an advance, or something, before I started writing it, I think that would have changed how I approached it. But I made the second record with the same musicians in Burlington and recorded it in Burlington. It sounds different, but it’s still a product of a similar ethos.”

But the focus on Freeman now is still tailored to his debut record: the feedback-soaked, Isaac Brock-sings-Crazy Horse summoning I Looked Out, a 10-song ballast originally released by Bud Tapes but now getting a long overdue re-release treatment and first-ever vinyl pressing. All of this is to celebrate Freeman’s recent signing with Canvasback Records, the eminent yet newly-minted imprint of Transgressive and a label that, in the past, has worked with cultural forces like The War on Drugs, alt-J and Manchester Orchestra. It’s not very often that I find myself interviewing a musician about a record that is more than two years old, but the momentum of I Looked Out has been nothing short of a (rewarding) slow burn upwards. While the LP was absent from most critical conversations until last year, Freeman has been gaining favor through chronic touring. But has his relationship with I Looked Out changed at all since 2022? “I made that record myself, just for fun,” Freeman says. “It took me a long time to realize what other people heard in that—people who thought it was good. You make something and then it doesn’t really mean anything to you anymore, because you’ve been so intimate with it.”

Freeman took his time finishing I Looked Out, if only because he wasn’t immediately unsure of how he was actually going to record the thing. The Greg Freeman band, which features a rotating cast of Lily Seward (aka Lily Seabird, whose 2024 album Alas, positively rules, by the way), Sam Atallah, Cam Gilmour (a longtime collaborator of Freeman’s), Noah Kesey, Zack James, Scott Maynard (of Wild Leek River) and Ben Rodgers, is a product of “the people that were available” at the time of its formation. “The first tour we did, we had seven people and they were all our best friends,” Freeman says. “That was awesome, but it wasn’t really sustainable for touring—for me, I guess. Now, it’s five people. I like being the only guitar player in the band, it feels more freeing. Nothing gets in the way of each other.”

The line “Vermont is not like Washington, there’s space and cows and big green mountains” in “I’ll See You in My Mind” is not about the Pacific Northwest state, but about the U.S. capital. Freeman grew up in Maryland near D.C., and nobody played music in his town—or, at the very least, the Washington scene is much better now than it was when he was first coming of age in it. “I spent my childhood playing songs by myself and being interested in the things that I’m interested in on my own,” he says. “I never thought about playing a show until I moved to Vermont. I have so much love for Burlington because I became who I am there, and I was kind of suppressed creatively—growing up, just living in my own interior world. In Burlington, you can just play a show any night of the week and people will come. It was a new experience for me.” Before he made I Looked Out, Freeman bounced around odd jobs. While going to school at the University of Vermont in Burlington, he was a baker—which he thought was going to be his career after college—before working in a museum part-time. He worked as a landscaper for the cemeteries in town and as a line cook for a year, too.

In the same year Freeman released I Looked Out, another Vermonter, Noah Kahan, released an album called Stick Season, which he wrote while quarantined an hour-and-a-half southeast of Burlington in Strafford during COVID. The record has gone on to sell more than 2 million units worldwide and not only vaulted Kahan into a superstar, but has ushered the Green Mountain State into the public’s musical consciousness like never before. But Vermont is the sixth-smallest state in the Union by total area, so it begs the question: How does one artist’s success change a place, especially one that is undoubtedly less of a hotbed than Los Angeles, Chicago or New York? Does that kind of national attention trickle down into the more grassroots, DIY spaces in Burlington or Montpelier? “I think, if anything, it can be distracting, or make things weird, or change the energy,” Freeman explains. “When it comes to a small place… Burlington has always thrived off people doing things for fun and because they want to and for the community’s sake.”

Freeman also defines that culture shift as being a “New England thing”—leaving your hometown after living in it for so long and finding marginal amounts of recognition: “Coming back, it can feel a little funny. Everyone knows what you’re doing in a small town, that you’re touring and, for the last six years or whatever, you’ve just been doing it locally. A real music community does it for the love of it and has to figure out what to do with success once it comes and when people move away. It’s a problem, but it’s also good.”

I Looked Out is a very fine and Biblical example of “come for the guitars, stay for the stories,” as Freeman presents us with a treasure trove of Florida men you likely know (and maybe, unfortunately, love), end-times-ridden folklore and a Holy War of the interpersonal twisted into the God-fearing and mysterious. A record like this makes sense, as he was a religion and anthropology student at the University of Vermont, and having such a capsule of knowledge about religion in his back pocket makes lines like “You radioed ‘cross that ancient runway, our love made known and its jeopardy / Clenched fists find God in rough landings, and tonight it’s gonna snow” and “In the grasp of your palm and your pale, craning neck, you looked like some kind of martyr / Is it the down that refines all the bones in your back, or the pierced skin, that makes you harder?” pummel you even more with context.

“A lot of people hate school, but I felt like what I was studying was directly contributing to my inspiration for songs,” Freeman says. “There’s just so much good language and imagery [in religion]. That’s how they wrote about the divine forever, through metaphors and imagery, and that’s what we’re doing as songwriters. Reading the Bible, which is something I’d never done, was pretty eye-opening. That’s the shit that Bob Dylan grew up studying. I do think about my songs as something you should study, or try to go as deep into what it is, when I make it.”

Listening to I Looked Out is, for me, like reading a John Williams novel. The work is challenging but pretty in a gnarly, wounded way—like sun-faded prose beguiled by the tar-hot debauchery of Earth’s “strange kind of grace.” Freeman admits that he tries to avoid being “too literary,” but that he’s also not really afraid of going to that place. You don’t just write a verse like “Come and drink my heartache, draw a knife across that scarlet seal / Take a sip now, break the cup you drank from underneath your heel” without taking a dose of courage first. “I don’t know if it’s such a bad thing to write about something that people don’t understand, or a story that nobody’s ever heard of,” he says.

While composing I Looked Out, Freeman’s bookshelf was brimming with poetry collections from William Emerson, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost—people who, in his eyes, “wrote in a classically poetic way.” “I was reading a lot of poetry regional to the Northeast,” he says. “I like choosing specific places and writing about them and trying to inhabit that world.” “You swooned to the bottom, to the seaweed and bone, and there you found me waiting for you, all wrecked on the stone” may not be a spitting image of “We love the things we love for what they are,” but there’s an overwhelming sense of “otherwhere” in Freeman’s work—a penchant for hiding recognizable affections in the foliage of passé idioms.

On “Colorado,” Freeman sings about an uncle who was a “gambler with a butterfly tattoo somewhere down in Florida,” and a reality that rings “through highways and deserts and cities and parks and broke schools protected by the National Guard,” but the couplet that follows gnaws at the gist of his style: “Most days, I pass with my head in the dark, but today, it seems so clear to me.” “I don’t really like writing about stories just for the sake of writing about the story,” he says. “You’re really just talking about yourself and your own experiences of being alive. I’m not trying to pretend I’m some character that I’m not, but using it to express myself.” In the deluge of the Green Mountain State’s throbbing doldrums, Freeman’s croons become “bones entangled,” a language “holding up the sun,” a current of singalongs and wailing staccato cords displaced beneath the head-splitting riffs vibrating from his black Telecaster.

Writing about I Looked Out two years ago, Garrett Linck recalled the “feeling of driving around Chittenden County in the middle of winter, high beams on, slush on the floor mats” when listening to the album, championing Freeman’s knack for instilling urgency in decrepit, crushing songwriting. “The hair of the sleeping dogs lie down in the shadows of the red sun, searching, searching, searching, searching,” he sings on “Connect to Host” from a distance, words that plummet through a wash of cresting guitars. I think Linck’s assessment was spot on, as Freeman’s music unravels with a kind of restless attitude that comes only from the solitude of living in the harsh, unforgiving cold. “I can hear that image when I listen back to [I Looked Out],” he says. “There’s a lot of tape static and lo-fi elements that conjure up more of an abstract image in your head. When you listen to other music, like Sparklehorse, that has that weird, lo-fi, collage songwriting, it’s evocative and can remind you of a landscape or a feeling just as much as the lyrics.”

To coincide with today’s I Looked Out re-issue announcement, Freeman and Merce Lemon, a Paste Best of What’s Next alum herself, recorded an acoustic version of the album’s centerpiece, “Long Distance Driver”—a rendition that, in its waking moments, sounds like an offspring of Neil Young’s “Helpless” (but the version from The Last Waltz, specifically) thanks to Freeman’s aching harmonica pulls and Justin Long’s violin bowing. It helps that there is a familiar sense of fractured but still present hope when he sings “We can lose the miles somewhere in your bed.” But it’s the way Freeman and Lemon sing “If this is the last year before things really fall apart, leave your name and number and credit card” together that makes “Long Distance Driver” a timeless effort and the one track that’s been on every setlist since the band started more than three years ago. “It’s a bit of a desperate song,” Freeman admits. “I wrote it in a different context in 2020, it was the first song I wrote for [I Looked Out]. I feel the song even more now in the current state of the world.”

Despite drawing comparisons to Songs: Ohia, Neutral Milk Hotel, Pavement, Modest Mouse and any other rock outfit that pairs droning rock textures with quick-witted, elegiac verbiage, Freeman made I Looked Out without any genre or trend in mind, never thinking about the country or shoegaze labels that so often get affixed to his work. [Greg’s note: “I’ve never listened to shoegaze in my life.”] Instead, he wanted the album to sound “raucous and wild,” and for people to connect with how it sounds without him having to sacrifice how proud he is of the lyrics of the playing. I Looked Out builds and builds before collapsing into itself, woven together by threads of woozy, somber absurdity.

Beginning with “In the many stabbing swords of your patience, I saw you spring a leak” and ending with “If it’s not the end of the world, it must be it’s falling into place,” the record gnaws away at you, its ornaments of melody and palaver myths careening into sobering tempests of rock ‘n’ roll artifacts that reveal more about the listener than the man who wrote them. I Looked Out nurtures not just the ways we are torn apart, but how we are patched back together. Throughout, Freeman’s licks sprawl and sharpen into some of the very best Ditch progeny we’ve got. And, in the blackened tint of his own apocalyptic, godly contradictions, he remains shreddingly blessed but equally mysterious and kind.

Pre-order a vinyl copy of I Looked Out here.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.