Greg Freeman Looks Out to the End on New Album ‘Burnover’

Seven Ways Seven Days Gets You Through the Week:

Trustworthy local reporting. Piping‑hot food news. Thoughtful obituaries. Must‑do events. Stuck in Vermont videos. Eye‑opening personals. All the fun stuff: horoscopes, crosswords and Ask the Rev.

Support Your Paper!

Fair warning: If you’re in proximity to Greg Freeman and utter something — anything, really — vaguely interesting, the Burlington indie-rock singer-songwriter just might snatch it, reconfigure it and turn it into another of his opaque, observational epics.

“I try to be on the clock as a songwriter,” Freeman said as he put down his drink at a Queen City pizza spot not far from where he holds down a day job. “People are saying crazy shit all the time.”

Freeman is a songwriter’s songwriter, whether he’s lifting strangers’ phrases or working in historical references such as the 1980 Chicago firefighters’ strike, which pops up in “Burnover,” the title track on his excellent new album, due out in August via Canvasback/Transgressive Records.

“If you got a secret / don’t keep it too close to your chest,” he sings on Burnover‘s opening track, “Point and Shoot.” But Freeman’s songs are suffused with mystery, like dusty mirrors left in roadside shacks. You’ll hear strains of middle-American indie rock, à la the Replacements, all caught up with shades of dark folk and country subversions. The result is a sort of neo-American-gothic, indie sound crafted for road-tripping across a crumbling empire.

Freeman popped up on the radar with his excellent 2022 debut, I Looked Out, initially released on the DIY cassette label Bud Tapes and rereleased on Transgressive in January. The record established Freeman as an indie troubadour in the mold of MJ Lenderman of Asheville, N.C., or Jason Molina, the late front man of Songs: Ohia. Sprawling tours followed, and the 27-year-old adopted Vermonter found himself part of the new wave of Vermont indie rock with friends and frequent collaborators such as Lily Seabird, the Dead Shakers, Dari Bay and Robber Robber and other acts such as Brattleboro’s THUS LOVE.

With Burnover, Freeman has ascended to another level, writing some of the best songs of his career while tapping the powerful local scene to help craft the album. He’s already released four advance singles from the forthcoming LP; the latest, “Gallic Shrug,” dropped on June 25.

After a summer of largely lying low in Burlington, Freeman will set off in September for a tour of the UK and European Union, then join a U.S. tour supporting California indie-rock outfit Grandaddy. With another winter tour planned, he won’t perform in-state again until a February show at Higher Ground.

Since he’s still around, Freeman sat down at Rogue Rabbit in Burlington to share his view of the local scene, offer insights into his writing process and ponder whether an observational writer such as himself can afford to stay in a small town, creatively speaking.

That last question is very much on Freeman’s mind lately. He recently returned from New Mexico, where he rented a spot for a few weeks and wrote a new batch of songs — his first not written in Burlington for some time.

“The last album and this new one were so influenced by living here,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to communicate anything specific about the Northeast, but I just wanted it to feel like the music came from where I was physically writing it.”

Wanting a change of scenery, Freeman headed west to write new material, which raises the inevitable question: How much longer will he be part of the Vermont music scene? He certainly wouldn’t be the first musician to leave the Green Mountains in search of a wider audience.

“Vermont is always where I’ll call home now,” Freeman assured Seven Days, even as he noted that “As an artist, I want to see more of the world and experience more. And it’s so specific here, part of me wonders how much a songwriter can grow in a small town.”

His pale-blue eyes widened at a sudden thought: “But then, take Emily Dickinson. She could write about anything just sitting in her house in western Mass.”

It’s not something Freeman plans on deciding anytime soon, while the rush of a new record is upon him — and what a record it is. Burnover moves on from the indie charm and scruffiness of I Looked Out to present a sort of post-American epic, full of twang and fuzz in equal measures. Above all, it shows us Freeman’s notebook of a mind taking everything in.

Freeman recorded the songs with engineer and coproducer Benny Yurco at the latter’s Burlington studio, Little Jamaica Recordings. The record also features a ton of Freeman’s friends and scene mates, including Zack James (Robber Robber, Dari Bay), Scott Maynard (Wild Leek River), Sam Atallah and Cam Gilmour. Freeman has appeared on many of their records in the past.

“I guess it is a scene, yeah,” Freeman admitted with a soft laugh, contemplating the current landscape of local music. Originally from Bethesda, Md., he moved north to attend the University of Vermont, where he studied anthropology and religion.

“By ‘scene,'” he continued, “I mean there’s this tight-knit community of people that have chosen to stay here through all the phases. We started out as students in basements, moved on to playing little clubs that are gone now, like SideBar, then on to Radio Bean. Now a lot of us are touring.”

Burnover comes on the heels of Lily Seabird’s excellent LP Trash Mountain, an ode to the Queen City in its own fashion. Like Freeman’s album, Seabird’s was recently featured in Rolling Stone. For all the shared success and buzz, Freeman is quick to point out that the musicians of Burlington’s indie scene follow different paths toward their goals. Despite their connections, they don’t sound or operate the same.

“It’s so diverse right now — even the electronic music, which is awesome,” Freeman said. “It’s felt special here for a number of years, but … if one venue closes or one person moves away, everything can shift overnight. Other scenes like this, in Asheville or Bloomington [Ind.], have structures in place, like labels, that help sustain it. Here, it’s mainly about the artists knitting it together, which is cool but ultimately fragile, as well.”

If Freeman feels the Burlington scene is constantly on the cusp of ending or changing, a similar mood permeates his work. Seeded throughout the songs on I Looked Out and Burnover is an overarching sense of mortality, a curious eye for the endings of things.

“Pass right by the broken dreams of the broken-into cars,” Freeman sings over and over at the end of “Rome, New York,” creating a sort of “Hey Jude” moment as a chorus of backup singers joins him to repeat the foreboding line. Lyrics such as “cruciform fossils lay excavated on your memory,” from “Curtain,” also encode that sense of finality.

“The natural conclusion of thinking about anything is that it ends,” Freeman said. “I want to think through what I’m writing about as much as I can, so I’m not bullshitting myself. And yeah, everything ends. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. It’s just the arc of the universe.”

As he finished his drink and stood up from the table, Freeman didn’t have the look of a man near the end of anything, however. With Burnover‘s release, the work will begin anew. For now, he’ll try to enjoy the last days of a quiet Burlington summer, but the world awaits.

This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.

Got something to say?

Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!