It’s a grey March afternoon in Des Moines. Hudson Freeman is relaxed and happy as he ambles outside xBk, the venue where he’s set to perform in a few hours.
He's just completed his sound check, as well as the first week of a tour that’s scheduled through late summer.
He took time to speak with Studio One about his career after what’s been a huge year, starting with how his recent work is a stripped down departure from the bigger sounds of his last two records.
"I think since moving to the East Coast, the difference between my previous albums and the one that came out last year was this move from Missouri to New York, and I guess an interest in more rock band, four-piece instrumentation. I think the other big thing is I started tuning down my nylon string guitar and that just started kind of bringing out these grungy kind of songs, so that bedroom pop stuff was less compelling to me."
You’ve been at this for eleven years. Do you look back at that time and track how far you've come?
"I do think about things in these arcs of time. If anything, I think I tend to narrativize my life. I'm not necessarily nostalgic, but narrativizing certainly, self-mythologizing, certainly."
In a recent interview, Freeman described himself as “self-motivated, even though I don’t really view myself very highly.” I asked him to elaborate.
"I don't know, maybe it's being like a small guy or something, but I definitely have struggled with self-confidence, certainly. I think I feel confident in the things that I feel like I'm good at or feel like I excel at. I feel kind of contradictory about myself. Sometimes I can be kind of like almost egomaniacal; then other times I kind of **** on myself."
Freeman’s grungier sound has attracted the attention of bigger names, like John Mayer, who posted himself learning the guitar line of Freeman’s song “If You Know Me.” This is the track that blew up last year, and brought Freeman viral fame by racking up hundreds of thousands of views (on Instagram alone). The song released commercially in November, and it’s given Freeman the kind of exposure he’s been looking for. He describes the song as more lyrically sparse than previous works, and feels lucky that his hard work is paying off.
He goes on to explain why he thinks the song resonates in this moment.
“I intended the song to be about the way we feel when we're online and this feeling that people don't really see one another in a good faith way. I don't say anything about the internet or whatever, but if I was to take a swing, I think people feel that sense of disconnection that I'm trying to get up in the song. Or at least I hope so.”
The notoriety of “If You Know Me” could be a factor in Mumford and Sons — the band that inspired Freeman to make folk music in the first place — taking notice of his work. Freeman is set to open for them in Australia in April this year. It’s the culmination of over a decade of work.
In spite of his recent success, the Dallas, Texas native isn’t naive about where he’s at in his career, saying with a wry grin:
"I'm struggling to sell tickets in Dallas. A prophet's never respected in his hometown, it seems."
The April leg of Hudson Freeman’s tour finds him on the East Coast before playing dates in Australia and New Zealand with Mumford and Sons. He’ll set out with Jesse Welles for dates in October.
