Hudson Freeman Is the Indie-Rock Philosopher Who Happened to Go Viral

Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.

As Hudson Freeman was driving through rural Indiana last summer, he was hit by an uncanny sense of intuition: Something life-changing is about to happen. The singer-songwriter was in the middle of a small, weeklong tour, and the sky outside his car window looked almost surreally blue, accented by puffy clouds worthy of Bob Ross. Leading up to the shows, an Instagram video he posted of himself playing an unreleased song called “If You Know Me”—highlighted by a twangily hypnotic acoustic riff—went minorly viral among guitar heads, so he set out to record more clips of the demo as he made his way through America’s heartland. On that picture-perfect day, he had both an intense gut feeling and some algorithmic mojo working in his favor when he stood in front of a verdant field and sang his song. His unseen accompaniment was impromptu and right-on-cue, in the form of droning insects, a tweeting bird, and a rumbling motorcycle. “When I was filming the video and the moment I uploaded it, I was just like, I know this is gonna do something,” the 28-year-old recalls earlier this month, still in awe at his own premonition.

By the time he arrived at his next tour stop in Chicago, the video had already collected around 200,000 views. That night, Freeman, who grew up as the son of Christian missionaries before falling out of evangelicalism and finding his own way to faith, prayed to the point of tears. Please, please, please, God, let this be the thing that happens. Over the next few days, the clip continued to ping around online, as hundreds of thousands of people were stopped short by the sight and sound of this ratty little dude cracking open a deep well of country-folk profundity. (I was one of them.) 

Several major labels immediately reached out, though hardly any indies did, which was “pretty devastating” for Freeman, who adds, with a self-aware laugh, “I very much consider myself an indie boy.” He didn’t really know how to monetize the video (“I probably could have turned it on,” he shrugs) but ended up signing a short-term distribution deal for the song with the Sony-owned company AWAL worth around $10,000, as he began figuring out how to leverage the attention toward a sustainable future as an artist. 

The surreal moments kept coming. One of his childhood comedy idols, Jack Black, followed him on Instagram and sent him a message: I dig your tune. In November, John Mayer posted a video of himself attempting the song’s signature riff, his eyes closed in concentration as he bent the notes. (For the record, Freeman does not consider Mayer a huge musical reference—he’s more inspired by Sufjan Stevens’ conflicted folk and the epic post-rock of Godspeed You! Black Emperor—but he admires how the guitar hero champions young players.) Earlier this year, he took the stage in front of thousands of people while opening for Kings of Leon at a hockey arena. This spring, he will play a handful of shows in Australia with the band that originally got him interested in folk music as a kid, Mumford and Sons. (When I rib him about Mumford’s uncoolness, he laughs and allows himself a brief burst of ego: “I think that me opening for Mumford and Sons does not make me less cool, it makes Mumford and Sons more cool.”) He’s recognized in his everyday life at least once a week—though, he adds, it’s usually by middle-aged Instagram guitar guys.

By now, the “If You Know Me” clip has around 7 million views across the big video platforms, with its raw audio racking up another 3.5 million plays on Spotify. Subsequent clips of Freeman playing the song in different locales, with different friends, kept the momentum going for weeks, boosting his IG following more than tenfold, to 220,000. All of which is ironic considering that “If You Know Me” is a mesmerizingly despondent song that Freeman says is about how online life is nothing but an illusion that tricks us into thinking we know each other, and ourselves. Meanwhile, legitimate connection is lost amid an expanse of algorithmically curated content masquerading as reality. In this way, the song’s popularity seems like a glitch in cyberspace—or maybe a collective SOS signal from those who are scrolling their way toward oblivion.

“We feel alienated from ourselves and one another because of social media and our phones, but we cannot look ourselves in the face and say we are participating in forms of mediated communication that do not actually help us communicate with one another,” Freeman says. “We’re all so ashamed or embarrassed by it. I know that my relationships are being negated by social media, but I still cannot get myself out of it. It’s like we have to rescue ourselves from social media by using social media.”

In a plaid button-up, beanie, and green pants, Freeman is looking very much like a quintessential indie boy when he invites me into his tiny one-bedroom apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn on a frigid recent Friday afternoon. With a purple pimple patch stuck to his chin, he’s soft-spoken but confident, his deadpan sincerity laced with an impish streak and a sly half-smile. Thumbnailing his personality at one point, he says, “I feel extremely self-motivated, even though I don’t really view myself very highly.” 

As we chat, his wife and creative partner, Sophie Brown, also a child of missionaries, taps on her tablet nearby. Their cat Percy is curled up on a chair, occasionally roused by the mechanized drone of his automatic feeder. Their cozy place is dotted with a friend’s unfinished artwork, a vinyl copy of retrofuturistic pop duo Magdalena Bay’s 2024 album Imaginal Disk, and a kitschy motivational poster with a rock climber and the word “COURAGE” emblazoned on it. “Hudson demands that we set that up everywhere we move,” Brown notes of the poster, in a smiling tone. Behind Freeman is part of what he calls his “aspirational” library of books: “I’ve still got to finish all of them.” The spines include the collected works of internet-era cultural theorist Mark Fisher; Allen Ginsberg’s Beat Generation landmark Howl and Other Poems; The Tao of Pooh, a beginner’s guide to Eastern philosophies; Sellout, the chronicle of turn-of-the century punk and emo culture; and several books on Marxism including his current favorite, Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, by the author and academic Anna Kornbluh. An inherently curious thinker, Freeman is compelled by leftist concepts but also acknowledges their limitations. “Economic inequality is what is wrong with our world, but it is a really complicated question as to how you ameliorate that,” he says. “There are a lot of nitty-gritty political problems that can’t be reduced to ideology.”

He shows me the fake chainsaw he wielded in the music video for the final, full-band version of “If You Know Me,” which came out a few months after the song’s explosion online. The concept of the video involves Freeman attacking the camera—along with the very idea of internet stardom—and it served as a kind of self-imposed end point to his viral moment. Since then, he’s shied away from posting more clips of his most-known song. Because while Freeman is a savvy modern artist who’s been uploading music and jokes to social media for more than a decade, he’s also aware of the pitfalls of milking your own virality ad nauseam. He’s a viral artist who knows that, for a certain sect of the music world, going viral is lame—even though it’s one of the only ways people without industry connections or rich parents can get noticed in the modern music industry. Holding the plastic chainsaw, he presses a button, and it makes a goofy revving noise.

The Hudson Freeman story doesn’t start with “If You Know Me.” In fact, in the months leading up to the song’s takeoff, he was seriously thinking about giving up on his big city dreams of making it as a musician. Last April, a month before the release of his third album, Is a Folk Artist, Freeman posted a montage video with a vulnerable—perhaps quietly desperate—voiceover alongside grainy clips of him playing to humble crowds in living rooms and bars. “2025 is a weird year for me because it means I’ve been making music for a decade now and I don’t really know what I have to show for it,” Freeman began. “It kind of needs to happen this year. I gotta figure out something. Going for your dreams feels really moronic and kind of childish. Should I just go into marketing?”

Is a Folk Artist, a gorgeous album in which Freeman combined grunge, indie rock, and shoegaze alongside folk and his casually philosophical songwriting, arrived to little fanfare. “Good Faith,” a woozy track about Freeman losing his religion, and the majestic rocker “Guilty Running,” which recalls early Coldplay, were added to a couple of popular streaming playlists, but that was about it. Ever since Freeman and Brown spent all of their savings moving from Missouri, where Freeman studied music and production at Evangel University, to Brooklyn in 2022, the couple were living paycheck to paycheck while working various day jobs and making art off hours. After three years of little momentum, they were considering heading back to the Midwest. Just weeks before “If You Know Me” went viral, they had moved in with a friend after their previous lease expired. “We didn’t want to leave New York, but we were basically at the end of our rope,” Freeman says. “It was very precarious.” Luckily, around the same time “If You Know Me” was blowing up, some other friends were moving out of their rent-stabilized apartment in one of Brooklyn’s nicest neighborhoods. It seemed like, after years of dead ends, the universe was finally leaning their way.

Given Freeman’s religious background, and the way so much of his songwriting deals with the fallout from losing parts of that faith, I ask him how he squares his recent good fortune with the concept of divine providence. “I don’t know if I have the ability to square that,” he admits. “It’s really hard for me because I don’t want to believe it, but I’ve had friends and family my whole life who have said, ‘Don’t forget us when you’re famous,’ and told me it was going to happen for me. It has very much fucked with my head and made me be like, Is this destiny or is it not? For whatever odd, arbitrary, serendipitous reasons that I’ve had the life experiences that I’ve had, I feel like I do have something I want to share. The one thing I feel really confident in is that I’m a good writer. It’s something that is always pulling me along. I can believe in that form of destiny, maybe.”

Freeman was born on February 17, 1998 in Waxahachie, Texas, outside Dallas. His parents were members of the Pentecostal denomination Assemblies of God and, when he was 4, they felt a calling to start a church. So that’s what they did, on the other side of Dallas, in a city called Allen. Freeman’s mother taught him piano and how to sing, and he grew up playing for the congregation. “I think it’s a potentially good thing for musicians to play in church, because you have an audience that isn’t really there for you—everyone’s supposed to be performing for God—and you’re not supposed to be the center of that performance,” Freeman says. “So you have an easy audience to consistently play for.”

When Freeman was 13, his parents felt another calling: to move the family to a small, mountainous country near the southeast coast of Africa called Swaziland, where they would develop churches and infrastructure in the name of God. (In 2018, the country changed its name to Eswatini.) Freeman’s father had taken several mission trips there, and was struck by the country’s entrenched poverty and inequity. “When I’m thinking in good faith about why they chose to move there, I think they were devastated by what they saw on trips, and their belief is that the way you fix that is by building churches,” Freeman says. “That’s debatable, undeniably.”

Freeman remembers using a camcorder to make a montage video chronicling his big move across the ocean to Eswatani; he used Hans Zimmer’s “Time,” from the Inception score, as the soundtrack, and the video ended with him landing in his new bed in a house on top of a hill. But any initial excitement soon wore off, and Freeman became profoundly depressed, anxious, and lonely. He found solace by obsessively playing guitar and burrowing into musical rabbit holes through YouTube, Bandcamp, and a website called Noise Trade that offered free downloads in exchange for an email address. He got into the Lumineers and Mumford and Sons, which led him to Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver. A volunteer at church heard his electric guitar tone and recommended Explosions in the Sky, which led him to Sigur Rós. During this period he was performing twice a week at church, where he says he learned how to improvise and vamp “because the Holy Spirit’s supposed to lead the service.” Four years later, when Freeman was 17, he moved back to the States. 

Looking back at his time in Eswatini, Freeman is deeply conflicted. He’ll never forget the devastating poverty and sickness he witnessed there. At this point he’s aware of how many people view modern Christian missionaries as neo-colonizers forcing their beliefs upon vulnerable populations that are systemically starved of resources. “I understand the way missionary work participates in perpetuating economic disparities, where these countries are in this subjected relationship with the West,” he says. “But at the same time, a lot of these missionaries also realize it is a problem that people there don’t have their own infrastructure that they can reproduce themselves. It’s vexing. I’m unwilling to disavow my parents, nor say that what they’re doing is completely the right thing to do.” Freeman’s mother and father are currently continuing their missionary work in Durban, South Africa.

Freeman’s precipitous fall from evangelicalism started when he was in college. It was catalyzed by his growing frustration with Christian music, which increasingly sounded to him like a neutered facsimile of popular secular bands like the 1975. “It was an aesthetic fall for me at first,” he says. “I was like, If you really believe God deserves the highest kind of artistic expression, then why are people selling this bullshit product?” From there, he started exploring different understandings of religion that coincided with his evolving worldview. “Christianity ended up becoming like philosophy for me, and that’s still where I’m at with it,” he says. “I am still very interested in it and moved by it ethically and philosophically, but I’m just not necessarily convinced of it as this thing where belief equals heaven or hell. I almost have a materialistic understanding of Christianity, where it’s about how we live on earth.”

That understanding extends to how he’ll navigate his newfound notoriety. When we meet, he’s on the verge of finalizing a record deal with a star-making independent label. He’ll soon embark on his biggest headlining tour to date, and is scoring major bookings including this summer’s Newport Folk Festival. He’s got a new EP due out in the spring, and is recording his next album, too. He’s imagining the LP as part of the road-trip folk tradition, inspired by records like Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Sufjan’s Illinois. “The idea is to play with my fundamentalist Christian background, where there’s this paranoia about the end times,” he says. “Because lately I feel like I’m living in a farcical version of end times that’s partially created by American evangelical foreign policy intervention, it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Freeman knows this all sounds very ambitious, and he’s unapologetic about it. “I’ve waited my whole life to have the resources to make the record that I want to make, so I don’t feel like I should flinch in doing that.”

As someone with lefty views, he’s well-aware of the music streaming economy’s shady, monopolistic practices and is interested in the proliferation of alternate platforms and musicians’ collective power. But as an artist who’s trying to build a living out of a viral moment in 2026, Freeman doesn’t feel like he’s in a position to buck the system by, say, taking his music off certain egregious streaming platforms. “Maybe I’m getting the majority of my money through Spotify, but I’m finally in a position to be able to live and to pay my bandmates and the people that record my music and make my videos,” he says. “Is it really selling out for me to be able to pay my friends?”

This line of conversation reminds me of the opening lines of one of his most moving songs, “I’m Most Me”: “I’m most me when I’m bored/When I’m tired/When I’m poor.” The country-ish lullaby plays like a reminder to give himself grace when he’s down and out, and Freeman says it was inspired by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek. How does he plan to maintain these virtuous ideals now that things are looking up? Freeman takes a beat to ponder the question. “I probably will be presented with the opportunity to be rich and to live my life trying to protect my interests as a rich person, and I have to make the ethical choice to not do that,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “I have to be willing to not take opportunities just because they give me more security. I ultimately have to decide to reject wealth for its own sake. That’s a tremendous ethical challenge that I am going to have to face seriously.” I, for one, have faith he’ll stand by his word.