by Calvin Staropoli (@cal_staro)
In 2022, when Burlington singer-songwriter Greg Freeman quietly dropped I Looked Out, his first record released under his own name, there was little fanfare. Looking back at it two years later, with this new vinyl reissue and a follow-up record seemingly imminent, it stands as a showcase of an exciting songwriter who came out of the gate with a fully realized musical vision and unique lyrical style, and nowhere to go but up. Through a combination of noisy alt-country bangers and subdued tearjerkers, I Looked Out explores the conflicting feelings involved in losing a loved one, sometimes through death and sometimes through distance, both physical and emotional.
Throughout the record, Freeman’s electrifying performances on both vocals and guitar are accompanied by sonic flourishes that fill the space perfectly, from serene slide guitar on “Before The Last Waves Took Vestris”, to the foreboding horn section on the incendiary “Towers”. His arrangements are simple, but he utilizes the instruments at his disposal tastefully, with everything serving the emotional truth of the song. Freeman’s solos are often brazen but never overly flashy. The distortion never masks the nuance. The record switches between guitar freakouts to slowcore-inspired slow burns with abandon, yet Freeman’s captivating lyricism and gripping vocal performance is able to hold it all together.
Freeman’s storytelling flips between an emotional vulnerability and dream-like extended metaphors. It is often cryptic, but the underlying feeling always comes through. “Before The Last Waves Took Vestris” uses the imagery of a shipwrecked ocean liner to explore a faltering relationship. Freeman puts himself at the bottom of the ocean, waiting for his shipwrecked love to come to him. The metaphor is obtuse, but Freeman’s energized performance gets the emotional point across. On the other lyrical end is a song like “Colorado”, a blown-out rager where Freeman candidly tells the story of going to a friend's funeral and having a brief encounter with the ghost of his friend. He sees the ghost “looking towards heaven, as if he knew the joke”. He then goes on to meet his late friend's Uncle, a “gambler with a butterfly tattoo”, who did a favor for the wrong guy and just got out of prison the day before. As he drives through the town after this encounter, he has an intense moment of clarity. Maybe it’s about his friend's death, maybe about his own mortality, but it’s clear these encounters have affected him in a way he can’t fully explain. Funerals are an often surreal experience, and Freeman distills that surreality perfectly.
On the fantastic single “Come and Change My Body”, he searches for escape from himself inside someone else. The playful, jangly guitar work makes the perfect foil to Freeman’s anguished cries of desperation. It’s an emotional gutpunch, as well as the catchiest song here. On its stirring outro, a squelching yet subdued guitar opines in the distance as the horns blow a bittersweet melody, creating the musical peak of the first side of the record. “Long Distance Driver”, the record's most tragic song, simmers with a quiet intensity but never totally boils over. It captures the bittersweetness of physically reuniting with a long distance lover. “Long distance driver/Press me to your head/We can lose the miles/Somewhere in your bed”. The horns play a lonesome cadence as the narrator reconnects with this person, a feeling always lingering in the air that this may in fact be the last time. The song starts to add layers of noise towards the tail end, suggesting an upcoming musical explosion, but suddenly it’s just a lonely guitar, drowned in effects that make it sound isolated from reality. As their long-distance driver inevitably has to leave, the music itself reflects that distance. The re-issue includes an acoustic version of this track featuring Pittsburgh singer-songwriter Merce Lemon. By adding a second voice, the intimate duet further accentuates the fact that both of these characters are aware of the inevitable collapse that is coming, but are both content to seek comfort in each other for this brief moment.
“I’ll See You In My Mind” reads as somewhat of a precursor to “Long Distance Driver”. Here he expounds on the conflicted feeling of wanting your loved one to leave your hometown and chase their dream, even if it breaks your heart to see them go. “Love is work if it’s true”. Piercing guitars punctuate the chorus and elevate it to that blissful state of acceptance. “Hey, I’ll see you in the springtime”. Freeman is gracefully able to find positivity and acceptance in bleak circumstances. Acceptance also plays a major part in the restrained album closer “Palms”, in which Freeman slows things all the way down. The narrator has a revelation that a recent romantic loss was actually not the end of the world, and that there may even be something to gain from it. His vocal performance starts off dire, begging to be a part of someone’s life again “If I could be of use/Just once in a blue moon or more”. By the end, however, he seems able to let it go. After Freeman pushes his voice to its absolute limit, there’s a brief pause, and then a subtle shift into a more hopeful chord progression and the addition of soft group vocals to create a sense of finality and resolution. “It’s not the end of it all/it must be a strange kind of grace”. Freeman once again resists the tendency towards cynicism. There is hope to be found, even in the anguish.
The final track on this new reissue, entitled “Sound Tests, Scraps, Lists”, gives a preview of what Freeman has in store. It’s a collage of eerie ambient music, musical explosions and acoustic ditties. It’s the perfect teaser for the future of Greg Freeman, a truly exciting artist who is able to effortlessly float above the modern country-tinged singer-songwriter pack with his vulnerable vocal performance, mastery of guitar noise, and cryptic yet bold lyricism. But what is most affecting about I Looked Out is its restless hopefulness. Even through tragedy and heartbreak, Freeman is able to find solace in the mere fact that he is still standing.