Hudson Freeman Is the Indie-Rock Philosopher Who Happened to Go Viral
The pensive singer-songwriter embodies a jumble of contradictions: He’s a Brooklyn leftist who was raised in the evangelical church. An indie boy with grand ambitions. A viral phenom with songs that are built to last.
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.)
Get access to everything we do at Hearing Things—including weekly album and song recommendations along with our ever-growing archive of interviews and reports—with a free 30-day trial!
