{"id":922422,"date":"2026-10-06T06:04:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T06:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/922422\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T06:04:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T06:04:09","slug":"greg-freeman-all-set-the-bone-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/922422\/","title":{"rendered":"Greg Freeman: All Set the Bone Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Greg Freeman<\/a>\u2019s music, every passing second is an emergency, another last chance not to be alone forever. Even the tender sentiments on his fierce, heart-cracking new album, All Set the Bone\u2014\u201cWhen I\u2019m alone, I can be anyone, but when I\u2019m with you, I\u2019m me,\u201d for example, from \u201cLoser\u2019s Prize,\u201d or \u201cAll I wanna do is look at you looking at me with your moonlight in your eyes\u201d from \u201cIndu\u201d\u2014come out sounding panicked and bewildered, like Freeman\u2019s fending off loan sharks in a back alley.<\/p>\n

Freeman sings this way by design. The tone and grain of his voice tends to invoke comparisons to Jason Molina<\/a>, but the Vermont singer\/songwriter has talked about his love of blues hollerers like Skip James, Charley Patton, and Howlin\u2019 Wolf, singers whose voices sound like disruptions or warnings. Freeman lets his voice splay and skid, cracking and skating past the pitch center, because this is the sound his characters\u2019 nervous systems make. He stumbles into his own immaculately composed rock songs like he\u2019s blind drunk at a party, eyeing everyone unsteadily and warily, fight-or-flight hormones coursing through his system and a load of condemnations on his tongue.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Those condemnations flow thick and fast. As on his 2025 breakout, Burnover<\/a>, Freeman\u2019s lyrics cram so much human disappointment and dashed hopes into small spaces that each song seems to gaze out at you, coyote-ish and hungry. \u201cEverything you look at\/Looks back at you,\u201d he warns on \u201cIndu,\u201d and across All Sets the Bone, Freeman introduces us to dozens of souls, all nameless, who fix their beery, hardened stare on us.<\/p>\n

Freeman recently left his longtime home of Burlington for Chicago, but his songs often take place in specific upstate New York towns\u2014your Romes, your Vestals, your Rennselears. These are places where the economic strain of spiraling city rent meets the crumbling infrastructure of American small-town life, where the only thing everybody can agree on is that \u201cthese are the days of one thing after another.\u201d On the opening song, \u201cCahokia,\u201d he sings about the feeling that \u201cdoomsday came and went for everybody else,\u201d and this is the default setting for Freeman\u2019s music: His characters are angry and they feel alone. In the words of one song, they are \u201cMarooned.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Greg Freeman\u2019s music, every passing second is an emergency, another last chance not to be alone forever.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":922423,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[342,49,48,75,341,343],"class_list":["post-922422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=922422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/922423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=922422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=922422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=922422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}