Greg Freeman Shares New Single 'Cahokia'

Greg Freeman releases “Cahokia,” the ferocious and thought-provoking new single from his recently announced forthcoming album, All Set The Bone, due October 2nd via Transgressive/Canvasback. The track arrives with a video, directed by Gabe Long, shot on 16mm in New York City earlier this summer.

“Cahokia,” the album’s opening track and thesis statement, invokes the American civilization that rose, thrived, and then vanished in the Middle Ages. It’s a metaphor for contemporary society, where consumerism, environmental anxiety, and authoritarian threats compound and we all become participants as well as victims in this vicious cycle.

Freeman calls All Set The Bone a “reflection of a lot of change, and a lot of tension.” It’s a box of political and personal yarns spread across four sides, “inhuman events” and grief pulled into a “perfect tsunami.” While writing and recording it, Freeman moved out of his longtime home in Burlington, holed up in a middle-of-nowhere part of the Southwest, and stepped into music full-time, leaving behind odd jobs as a cemetery landscaper and restaurant line cook. The following album is populated by a grain of similarly unsettled people: a voter buried in credit card debt, a pair of Christian hearts clanking like trapped lobsters, a town of bent necks, a lover with limbs bent like crabapple trees.

All Set The Bone features Freeman’s longtime collaborators Garrett Linck and Sam Atallah, and new ones including Florry’s Joey Sullivan, The Rockin Worms’ Carney Hemler, Anna McClellan and Trinity Ace. The album is produced by John Congleton.

Tour Dates:

• 08/27 - Paris, FR @ Supersonic
• 08/28 - Eindhoven, NL @ Hit the City Festival
• 08/29 - Vlieland, NL @ Into The Great Wide Open
• 10/20 - Cambridge, MA @ The Sinclair *
• 10/22 - Toronto, ON @ The Mod Club *
• 10/23 - Lakewood, OH @ Mahall's *
• 10/24 - Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall *
• 10/25 - Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon *
• 10/27 - St. Paul, MN @ Amsterdam Bar & Hall
• 10/28 - Omaha, NE @ Reverb Lounge
• 10/30 - Denver, CO @ Marquis *
• 10/31 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court *
• 11/02 - Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern *
• 11/03 - Portland, OR @ Aladdin Theater *
• 11/05 - San Francisco, CA @ The Independent *
• 11/06 - South Pasadena, CA @ Sid The Cat Auditorium *
• 11/07 - San Diego, CA @ Voodoo Room at House of Blues San Diego *
• 11/10 - Austin, TX @ Antone's Nightclub #
• 11/11 - Dallas, TX @ Club Dada #
• 11/13 - Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade - Purgatory Stage #
• 11/14 - Asheville, NC @ Eulogy
• 11/15 - Durham, NC @ Motorco Music Hall
• 11/16 - Washington, DC @ The Atlantis
• 11/18 - Philadelphia, PA @ First Unitarian Church
• 11/20 - New York, NY @ Webster Hall
• 11/21 - South Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground Ballroom

* w/ Hello Shark

w/ Walker Rider

* w/ Trinity Ace

# w/ Touch Girl Apple Blossom

w/ Robber Robber

More About All Set The Bone:

Traces of pre-Good News Modest Mouse and early Pavement linger, but All Set The Bone resists easy lineage through a deliberate fracture that’s twisting yet familiar. Freeman’s longtime obsessions with Fugazi and Unwound color the album’s heavier dirges and its spangled outposts grew from a diet of Big Star, The Drones, and Mission of Burma. Lyrically, Freeman’s pen is too strong for analogy, as he riffs on bodies turned to ground beef, or chasing a dream but settling for a niche.

After Burnover’s queasy fixation on ghost stories and various New York locales and histories, Freeman again returns to the immediacy and anxiety of time and history, building a choir of questions out of constellations where “the light pours in just like hour glass sand.” Opener “Cahokia” is titled after the ancient Indigenous mounds that sit on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, whose builders disappeared. Freeman uses taxidermy and amber-casted bugs to contextualize songs about love and grief. Near the end of side one, he even makes this striking declaration: “No culture, and no more rock and roll.” But “Decade” may sum All Set The Bone up best: “History rubbernecks at each of your darkening thoughts.” Freeman says there’s a “sense of time running out, of us becoming stuck in the trajectory of our own history.” It’s a theme that he’s been unpacking since I Looked Out, but he’s never done it better than right here in these seventy minutes.

On All Set The Bone, he embraces friction instead of refusing it, using scant rehearsal times and urgent, self-appointed deadlines to fill his third album with ambitious whims: smile-stretching guitar scorchers, cosmic percussive surges, near-baroque piano riffs, psych-rock noodles, brass cutouts, and enough key changes to build an unsolvable musical maze. All Set The Bone was finished quickly, in a real Hollywood studio with one of rock’s best modern architects, and with minimal separation between idea and outcome. For Freeman, uncertainty has become his wealthiest currency. “It should never feel comfortable,” he says. “Every album should scare you.”