The only time I’ve been to Vermont I was only passing through on a road trip, cruising through sprawling green landscapes in a rental car with my friend. In the middle of nowhere, we pulled over to enter an abandoned 20th-century three-story manor on the brink of collapse. I’m reminded of this when I prepare to interview Burlington-based musician Greg Freeman, whose twangy, fuzzed-out indie rock epics evoke the same feeling as that experience. His music, like the dilapidated building, feels like residue of a distant era, misplaced and captivating in current time. It’s true of his striking 2022 album I Looked Out, and it’s also true of its follow-up, Burnover, which he’s announcing today.
I Looked Out was a masterpiece of a debut. Originally released on the DIY label Bud Tapes, the LP received a re-release from the Transgressive imprint Canvasback earlier this year after reaching a wider audience. The 27-year-old’s voice earned him more comparisons to the late Jason Molina than he probably wanted, though many singers would kill to be likened to the beloved Songs: Ohia frontman. Reverb covers the guitars like ash, offering an intimate scrappiness similar to the beautifully lo-fi tunes of Sparklehorse. But no one quite does lyricism like Freeman. On I Looked Out’s standout track “Colorado,” almost every line is a vivid, poetic image: a pistol in a glovebox, a gambler with a tattoo of a butterfly, a man smoking while “looking towards heaven as if he knew the joke.” When I stood in front of Freeman as he performed it at the Stereogum SXSW showcase last year, I didn’t want the song to ever end.
It's early April when Freeman and I chat on the phone. He’s subletting a place in a tiny town in New Mexico with tumbleweeds, coyotes, and a population of 115. He’s smoking hand-rolled Norwegian Shag. “They make me feel less shit, really,” he says. He’s out there writing before his next tour. Traveling seems necessary for his survival; before he went to Vermont for college, he took a gap year to drive around the country. “I slept in my little Subaru,” he recalls. “I miss it dearly.”
The Burnover opener “Point And Shoot” serves as the lead single, out now. It kicks off with Freeman singing of cardboard canyons and blood on a cameraman over upbeat guitars. There’s a line — “Yeah, the crime of the century” — that came from a phrase a cop delivered while pulling him over for speeding. “That’s how they get you. They put highways in the middle of nowhere and then give you fast cars,” he says. “And once you go fast, they say you’re not allowed to do that.” When I ask why he didn’t name the record Crime Of The Century, he answers, “Maybe if I were to ever make some kind of noir concept album.” When? “Maybe when I’m like 40,” he concludes. “I can see that being something I would get into.”
Freeman’s songwriting process includes this act of collecting sentences from interactions. “Without giving away too many of my secrets, a lot of the punchlines in my songs are things I hear and they just go in a Notes app folder,” he reveals. He began playing guitar around age 12 and writing songs about “homework and cowboys and stuff.” His mom plays classical piano, and his dad took him to his first concert: Santana. “It was awesome,” he says.
The title Burnover comes from the historic region in Upstate New York known as the burned-over district, where “there was a lot of crazy spiritualism and New Age religion and weird Christian shit going on in the 1800s,” as Freeman puts it. At the University of Vermont, Freeman studied religion and anthropology. For the black-and-white “Point And Shoot” music video, full of gambling and cigars, Freeman recruited longtime collaborator Merce Lemon, who sings on some Burnover tracks, to play the role of the mistress. “She thinks I’m being naughty, but really, I’m just trying to get my money back,” he explains, which leads to a scene where the pair is simultaneously fighting and kissing, until Lemon shoots Freeman with a prop gun purchased from Bass Pro Shop.
Both the track and video have a dreamlike texture, but he’s not often inspired by dreams. “The input I’ve gotten from dreams has been totally useless,” he says. “I dreamt a couple months ago that Johnny Cash was showing me this new song, and in my dream I was aware that I should remember the song and I was looking at the chord shapes that he was playing. Then I actually woke up and tried to play the song with the chords that he showed me and it sounded like total shit. I also had this dream that I was the guitar player in Nirvana and I couldn’t remember any of the songs. I flubbed it.”
Along with Lemon, Burnover has contributions from an array of musicians, including fellow Burlington singer-songwriter Lily Seabird, who just released her third album Trash Mountain. Scott Maynard, Cam Gilmour, Ben Rodgers, Zack James, Benny Yurco, Sam Atallah, and more are on the record playing all different sorts of instruments like pedal steel, wurlitzer, tambourine, trumpet, organ, and so on. There’s a burgeoning scene in Burlington that Freeman and these artists are emerging from, not unlike the community in Asheville out of which Wednesday and MJ Lenderman broke. “I would say Burlington seems a little more low-key than Asheville,” Freeman offers when I bring up the comparison. “Asheville’s got bigger studios and high-key people live there, but definitely a similar vibe.”
Along with playing on the album, Yurco also produced it. On “Curtain,” in the mess of cacophonous instrumentation, there are also the sounds of a rooster crowing and a horse neighing, which Yurco “just threw in,” Freeman says. “I think we got too stoned or something, and then ended up with them. We couldn’t get rid of them.”
On the title track, a ballad that falls halfway through the record, Freeman pulls from the Chicago Firefighter Strike of 1980. “After three weeks with no contract/ That’s three weeks with no pay/ I saw smoke out on the horizon/ But heard no sirens go that way,” he sings over breezy guitar and a tame harmonica, counting three people dead by the evening. It’s a complicated portrait. Freeman narrates from the perspective of a passive witness, catching a glimpse of the chaos on the news; his character comes across as more affected by love and loneliness than he is by the idea of death. When I ask what he thinks happens when we die, he seems unfazed by the question and answers, “I think it’s impossible to know until that happens, but I think a good thing will happen if you’re…” he pauses, and corrects himself. “Well, I think no matter who you are, it will be cool.”
TRACKLIST:
01 "Point And Shoot"
02 "Salesman"
03 "Rome, New York"
04 "Gallic Shrug"
05 "Burnover"
06 "Gulch"
07 "Curtain"
08 "Gone (Can Mean A Lot Of Things)"
09 "Sawmill"
10 "Wolf Pine"
TOUR DATES:
05/05 - Dallas, TX @ Kessler Theater (with Hamilton Leithauser)
05/06 - Houston, TX @ The Heights Theater (with Hamilton Leithauser)
05/08 - Atlanta, GA @ Terminal West (with Hamilton Leithauser)
05/10 - Nashville, TN @ Third Man Records (with Hamilton Leithauser)
05/11 - Saxapahaw, NC @ Haw River Ballroom (with Hamilton Leithauser)
05/13 - Washington, DC @ The Atlantis (with Hamilton Leithauser)
05/14 - Washington, DC @ The Atlantis (with Hamilton Leithauser)
05/16 - Brighton, UK @ The Great Escape
05/17 - Amsterdam, NL @ London Calling
05/20 - Cologne, DE @ Jaki
05/21 - Brussels, BE @ Continental
05/22 - Paris, FR @ La Mecanique Ondulatoire
05/24 - Bristol, UK @ Dot to Dot Festival
05/25 - Nottingham, UK @ Dot to Dot Festival
Burnover is out 8/22 via Canvasback/Transgressive.
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