Breaking News: Burlington Has Saved Rock and Roll

(*This column contains multiple unreasonable declarations that I believe are probably true. Fight me, you cowards.)

It was 1957, only six years after Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed started playing records on air that he described as “rock and roll,” when Danny & the Juniors released a defiant single titled “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay.”

“Rock and roll will always be,” lead singer Danny Rapp crooned. “It’ll go down in history.”

Think about that. Rock and roll was so new that it had barely been named, and already bands were going on about its immortality. Imagine telling all those DJs in the ’50s who smashed rock records and railed against the nascent genre that they’d have to hear songs about rock never dying for, um, basically forever. Bill Haley, KISS, Neil Young, the Who, Joan Jett, Avril Lavigne, the Ramones, Lenny Kravitz, Marilyn Manson … It’s hard to keep track of how many artists have sung about the indomitable spirit of rock — or the flip side, rock’s impending doom. Rock is either immortal or on death’s door. Somehow both are true and always have been.

I’m such a salty geezer, I recall the hand-wringing that greeted the Strokes’ third album, 2005’s First Impressions of Earth. The New York City band had been hailed as rock’s savior or the last gasp of the art form, depending on whom you asked, and the record’s tepid reception had many declaring, once again, that rock was dead.

Of course, rock isn’t dead any more than bluegrass or jazz is dead; it’s just settling uncomfortably into its dotage — a genre once centered on youth and chaos aging ungracefully, as it should. But rock demands being overdramatic, and it demands unreasonable declarations, so who am I to buck the trend? In that spirit…

Burlington has saved rock and roll, you guys.

That’s right. We did it.

Well, to be clear, Greg Freeman, Robber Robber, Dari Bay, Lily Seabird and the Burlington music scene did.

The aforementioned artists have dropped absolutely killer records this year that garnered national and international attention and acclaim. Among Robber Robber’s jagged and addictive Two Wheels Move the Soul, Seabird’s gorgeously lush Lightspheres on Their Way, Dari Bay’s psych-rock monument Surprise Wish, and the apocalyptic indie deconstruction of Freeman’s All Set the Bone, a Burlington sound has emerged, and the larger music world has taken notice. Our sound is weird, sometimes heavy, chock-full of post-punk aggression and balanced with evocative lyricism.

Burlington has boasted strong scenes in the past and sent some great bands and artists out into the world — Phish and Grace Potter are the obvious picks. But the town has never really had as cohesive an ecosystem as in the past six years. Maybe the music industry in the ’90s, when the Queen City produced the likes of Wide Wail, the Pants and Chin Ho!, was still too label-dominant for a DIY town such as Burlington to have a proper breakthrough. But in the streaming age, indie bands don’t need A&R bros hanging around. To put it in terms from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, you no longer need Eddie Van Halen and/or a triumphant video to break out.

This current generation germinated in the shadow of the pandemic. As restrictions eased, a young scene champed at the bit to see live music and navigated basement shows and DIY venues to do it. Acts such as Freeman, Seabird, Greaseface, Neato, the Dead Shakers and the Leatherbound Books eventually coalesced around Radio Bean when the nightclub reopened.

“There’s this tight-knit community of people that have chosen to stay here through all the phases,” Freeman told Seven Days last year, just after releasing his sophomore album, Burnover. “It’s felt special here for a number of years … but it’s mainly about the artists knitting it together, which is cool but ultimately fragile.”

Now, here’s the kicker, if you hadn’t already heard: Freeman did indeed bid Burlington adieu in 2026 and has relocated to Chicago. But it’s clear he hasn’t forgotten his Queen City roots: Touring with Robber Robber, he is in essence putting the city’s recent sound on the road for the country to hear.

Nonetheless, Freeman’s Burlington exodus is good cause not to take what we’ve had — and what we have now — for granted. The city’s current crop of indie-rock talent reminds me of a pattern in our thriving local comedy scene: Over the past decade, Burlington has become a proving ground for comics eyeing careers in bigger cities. Add in the current venue crisis (more on that in a few weeks), and there’s a real chance other local bands will follow Freeman’s lead and leave.

That’s my way of saying you should get your ass to the Higher Ground Ballroom in South Burlington on Saturday, November 21, for one of the most important shows for local music in a generation. It’s a homecoming, of sorts, as Freeman’s North American tour swings through his onetime home base.

He’s joined by Robber Robber, a band whose Vermont roots run deep. The group’s core duo of Nina Cates and Zack James started out in the Brattleboro high school rock act the Snaz. Then they moved to Burlington and formed the band Guy Ferrari, which eventually became Robber Robber. After dropping the buzzworthy Wild Guess in 2024, they promptly signed to Fire Talk records and released Two Wheels Move the Soul, which includes my pick for the best single of 2026: “Talkback.”

“We’re all in contact and listening to each other’s records,” James told me back in April, speaking to the scene’s cohesion. “We hang out; we share demos; we play on each other’s songs. We fuck with Burlington. We love it.”

As a musician and writer who has fucked with Burlington — did I do that right, Gen Z? — I’ve been waiting for a moment like this for years. It takes such a strange brew of circumstances and sheer dumb luck to create the type of ecosystem we have now. Who knows if it will happen again? The Higher Ground show, not to mention Seabird’s upcoming performance at Foam Brewers in Burlington on December 12, feels like an exclamation point on a year when the sounds of Burlington have spread far and wide.

So next time someone brings up Vermont’s foliage, or Bernie Sanders, or ice cream, or even weed, you grab that person by their jacket lapels, look them dead in the eye and say, “We just saved rock and roll, motherfucker.”