Start Listening To: Graham Hunt

With American Pyramid, Greg Freeman leaves the home studio behind in search of bigger sounds, buried songs and the elusive sound of freedom.

Greg Freeman has spent the past few years writing at a relentless pace, following ideas as they appear and seeing where they take him. He describes the process as divination: grabbing the dowsing rod, probing around and searching for the water buried somewhere beneath the surface.

His latest album, American Pyramid, changes the process. Freeman swapped home recording for Minnesota’s storied Pachyderm Studio, brought in a full band and arrived with songs captured simply as iPhone voice memos. What emerged is a record grappling with loneliness, isolation and what Freeman sees as the increasingly unavoidable consequences of modern American life.

We caught up with Freeman to talk American Pyramid, surrendering control in the studio, songwriting as divination, the mythology of Rancid and his continuing search for the sound of freedom.

For those unfamiliar with your music, can you tell us who you are, where you’re from and about the music you make?

Well you know, I’d like to think I’m working in the lineage of three chords and the truth, two turntables and a microphone, that sort of thing. When you name something it is lost forever.

You've released an incredible amount of music over the past few years. What is it about songwriting that keeps pulling you back so quickly after finishing one record?

Most of the time I feel as though I am being pulled forward into something that already exists in the future. A lot of songwriters talk about this… it’s less like climbing a mountain and more like grabbing the dowsing rod and searching for the water buried in the earth. You don’t need to see it, it’s down there… I like to probe around. I think if I didn’t have so much fun with the divinatory process I wouldn’t be finding a lot of water.

American Pyramid feels like a turning point in the way you make records. What convinced you it was finally time to leave the home studio behind and put your trust in a full band?

It just seemed like a good time to introduce a new shape to the music to create a new sound. Having a big band creates a dimension that you don’t get a lot in contemporary music. Geometry plays a bigger role than I wish it did… numbers have always pissed me off, but you gotta take that sort of thing into account in music, because as many people say, it’s a mathematical field. We got the band going and it was just adding up.

You deliberately limited yourself to simple iPhone voice memos instead of fully demoing songs beforehand. Did stripping everything back help you focus on what really makes a song work?

Definitely. It’s all about digging it up, taking a look with the magnifying glass. When you dig for something you create leverage. The force is multiplied.

You admitted that hearing the first rough mixes was a bit of a crisis because the album didn't sound the way you'd imagined it. How difficult is it for you to let go of control as a songwriter, and what did that experience teach you?

The ideas you get in your head about sounds can be kind of nebulous. There’s usually some kind of an angst at the completion stage, no matter what. It reminds me of that line from The Killing Moon: “Fate… up against your will…” But at the end of the day it's easy to let go of control when you have a positive relationship with your own creativity. I wouldn’t say it taught me much, if anything it introduced more questions.

A lot of American Pyramid seems to wrestle with loneliness despite being surrounded by people. Why did that feeling become such a central theme for this collection of songs?

Well, you see that thing looming large on the horizon these days, terminal loneliness as the sort of logical conclusion to the limitless desire of Capital. It’s in the air.

You've described that isolation as something that feels uniquely American. Do you think music has become a way of making sense of that experience, or simply documenting it?

Music can be whatever you need it to be… but it’s always gonna be a document whether you want it to or not.

Your songs constantly move between surreal imagery and incredibly grounded emotional observations. Do those two sides of your writing come from the same place, or do they feel like different creative instincts?

Yeah, I’d say they come from the same place- the existence of the darkness implies the existence of the light and vice versa, and so on and so on.

Pachyderm Studio has such an incredible history, from In Utero to Once Twice Melody. Did recording somewhere with that kind of legacy affect the sessions at all?

It was a beautiful facility. But when I enter a recording studio my main thought is: how do I escape? This is true of any home recording environment as well. The sound you always hope to get is the sound of freedom, freedom from the past and freedom from the future. I want to make my next record inside a moving vehicle.

The record bridges your home-recorded past with this new collaborative approach. Having made it, do you feel you've opened a new chapter creatively, or are you already thinking about another way to challenge yourself?

The ways I’m thinking about challenging myself going forward are maybe more about tactics than techniques.

What do you love right now?

Making pesto from scratch

What do you hate right now?

I hesitate to say I hate anything… I hate kratom. It has taken everything from me and given me nothing in return.

Name an album you’re still listening to from when you were younger and why it’s still important to you?

...And Out Come the Wolves by Rancid. It deals in mythology.

Finally, you say that making music is the closest you've come to filling that existential hole so many of us feel. When listeners finish American Pyramid, what do you hope sticks with them?

I hope that they listen to the whole thing. I hope that they enjoy listening to an album. It's still a good medium in my opinion.

Photography By: Sahan Jayasuriya