Halfway through a very tall pilsner at Farrell’s, a 93-year-old bar in Brooklyn, the indie musician Greg Freeman made a bold pronouncement: “Rock music should be played in a room that is, like, ideally, 250 capacity.”
Freeman wore a long-sleeve striped shirt beneath an army-green tee, to which he had clipped a pen. He took another sip. “Just put me in a room,” he said. “Those are the best shows, always. I don’t want a barricade between me and the audience.”
It’s a noble thought, but Freeman’s tremendous new album, “All Set the Bone,” seems poised to put him in front of much larger crowds. Panoramic, squalling and razor-witted, “Bone” is an impressive step up from last year’s excellent breakout LP “Burnover” and furthers the argument that Freeman is one of the best lyricists in indie rock right now.
“Every fifth line is kind of a zinger,” said Jim Fairchild, guitarist of the band Grandaddy, for whom Freeman opened on a tour last year. “There’s some sensitivity and whimsy, but there’s also this really visceral rock thing that I dig and that I was drawn to it the first time I heard Greg’s music.”
“He’s in lock step with himself,” said John Congleton, the Grammy-winning producer who has worked with St. Vincent and Modest Mouse, among others. “All Set the Bone” was Congleton’s first time working with the 28-year-old Freeman, whose ethos and musical style, he said, reminded him “a lot more of someone from Generation X.”
Still, Freeman’s music is in touch with what it feels like to be alive in this moment of digitized numbness and consumer-culture monotony. On the daily indignities of modern life, Freeman can be dryly funny (on “Totaled,” a track with a car-wreck metaphor: “I couldn’t pick my Toyota out of a lineup,”) and tenderly observant (“in a town of bent necks,” he sings on the affectionate lead single “Indu,” “she lifts her chin”).
“Is your life just appetites or a menu with no way to order?” he asks in his creaky-door voice on “Cahokia,” the driving opening track that takes its name from an abandoned pre-Columbian city near modern-day St. Louis. Like so many songs on the album, it is at once world-weary and galvanizing — a righteously angry howl into an echoing void.
Freeman wrote most of “All Set the Bone” last summer, while living alone for two months in a desolate part of New Mexico in a rented shack he found on Craigslist. The lack of neighbors was liberating: “It was the first time in my life where I could play as loud as I want, at any hour of the day.”
“Burnover” was not yet out when Freeman began working on its follow-up, a creative pace that Congleton said is rare. “The common thing to do would be to sit around and play video games or do bong hits or whatever for three months,” he said, “while you idly wait for the record to come out so you can tour.”
But Freeman didn’t see why he should squander valuable time. “I realized how much touring I had coming up,” he said. “I had two months off before all that started, so I figured it was either start writing now or wait for six months to be in a room alone.”
He shrugged. “Might as well try and make use of whatever time I have while I don’t have to have another job.”
Freeman can be arrestingly candid in conversation. In 2022, he sent his confidently realized debut album “I Looked Out” to about 15 labels. None bit, and he ended up putting it out first on a friend’s cassette imprint. Years later, after “Burnover” got buzz, a few of the labels he had originally queried replied, “like, ‘just seeing this!’”
“Cowards!” Freeman said.
At Farrell’s, he ping-ponged from jukebox etiquette to religion, which he studied at the University of Vermont, to the English novelist Graham Greene. (Earlier, I’d found Freeman reading a used paperback copy of his 1958 spy satire “Our Man in Havana.”) But talk always seemed to come back to Fugazi. In the moral murk of the music business, Freeman holds the rigorously indie Washington, D.C., rock band, whose members rejected major labels and preached the importance of low ticket prices, as a kind of ethical north star.
“No one’s that principled anymore,” he said. “Everyone now is trying to get a little scrap of something, but they really had a worldview that was beautiful.”
Freeman is trying to navigate the industry by his own principles, but his rising profile has already posed a challenge to his small-rooms-only credo: On Nov. 20, he will play his biggest show yet, headlining New York’s Webster Hall, a venue with a capacity that exceeds 1,000.
“I think that’s truly the limit,” Freeman laughed. “I’m going to have to talk to someone about that.”
FREEMAN’S VOICE, and his larger perspective on life, come from what could be called an inherent Greg-ness. He grew up in the suburbs of Bethesda, Md., feeling incredibly average. “I’m 5’8,” he mused. “I was born not in a city and not in the country. And my name’s … Greg.” He paused, letting that sink in. “So I feel like that made me an observer of the extremities of life.”
Moving to Burlington, Vt. for college gave him his first sense of belonging, “and that’s because of the music scene,” he said. Freeman and a community of musicians played and attended shows just about every night. He describes the scene as pure; no one he knew was signed to a record label. “Maybe we were drinking too much beer or something,” he laughed. They were just making songs, “and playing shows for fun.”
Things changed in late 2022, after he released “I Looked Out” independently. Within a few months, Freeman recalled, “people in other places, like New York and Chicago, started messaging me that they heard it.” He put together a small tour, and the word of mouth started growing.
Freeman eventually signed with the indie label Transgressive, which offered the resources to realize his vision without the pressure to compromise. Now, with “All Set the Bone,” he has fulfilled a long-held dream — with help from Congleton — of making a record full of live-in-studio, full band recordings.
“There’s not too many records these days where you can hear the band playing together, you know?” he said. “That was always a sound I had wanted to achieve, but I never had a nice enough studio setup to be able to pull that off.”
“I TRAVELED a long distance to breathe in this crazy building,” Freeman said on a video call a few weeks later, flipping his camera around to display the hulking Harold Washington Library Center in the center of Chicago. Freeman moved there a few months ago, needing a change after 10 years in Burlington. “It just felt like too much for me, personally, to be in a 1-square mile radius of every life experience that has happened to you in the past 10 years,” he said. “Kind of a haunted vibe.”
He’s found a thriving underground culture in his new town, full of “tape labels, zines and great lo-fi music” courtesy of a scene of interconnected bands like Horsegirl, Lifeguard and Sharp Pins. “Being in Chicago is very inspiring,” Freeman said, “because there’s so many young D.I.Y. bands, doing things on their own terms.”
I returned to his statement about not wanting to play rooms larger than Webster Hall, to check if it had just been the pilsner talking. But Freeman doubled down. “My bookers aren’t going to like that,” he shrugged. “But I think a show is supposed to be some kind of transaction between you and the audience. And at a certain point, you stop being able to see the people that you’re playing for, you know?”
That conviction is part of what makes Freeman unique. “The fact that he doesn’t want to play a place bigger than Webster Hall — he’s probably going to lose that argument,” Congleton said with a laugh. “When you check in with him again in two years, maybe he’ll be somewhere different. But I do think the integrity is going to be there, always.”
The post Greg Freeman Is Trying to Level Up Without Selling Out appeared first on New York Times.
