Hudson Freeman on his viral hit If You Know Me and growing up in an evangelical family

Alone on stage at the Oxford Arts Factory in Sydney, Hudson Freeman quietly strums his viral hit If you know me. It was only halfway through the set when the song’s familiar arched notes began to ring out; At first it’s more desolate than on the record, then it builds to a stunning crescendo.

When he finished, he nodded to the assembled crowd and said: “I think you can all go home now…” The audience laughs at the joke, a self-conscious jab at the song’s extreme popularity and the ridiculous journey it’s taken over the past year.

The Texas-born/Brooklyn-based indie-folk singer sat in the middle of a field in Indiana in late August last year, with crickets chirping. chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping. She posted an Instagram photo of herself performing the then-unreleased song while the sun was shining.

“I posted the video right after I shot it on that property driving from Indiana to Chicago, and it blew up along the way,” says Freeman. “I had a feeling it was going to happen. It was beautiful outside; the clouds, the sky. I was using that heavy metal font, and I knew if I just put it on the blue and then the green of the field… It looked perfect.”

The song entered the algorithm lottery. “It was the right place at the right time,” says Freeman. “The internet is really arbitrary, but maybe one of the things that catches people’s attention is that the internet seems so real at a time when there’s real fear about artificial intelligence and other things.”

Sipping coffee with his wife and creative partner Sophie Brown at the poolside bar of his hotel on Sydney’s Oxford Street, Freeman recalls the song’s success with the shy surprise of someone who got lucky in a bar raffle. He is 28 years old and has a boyish appearance in a gas station shirt and nose ring (the Internet calls him the “Eric Forman of indie folk”, his resemblance to Topher Grace’s character in the film being sarcastically noted). The 70’s Show).

He’s in town as the support act for Mumford & Sons’ arena tour of Australia and New Zealand; this is the biggest shows he’s played beyond his two-night stint in Hollywood with Kings of Leon in April. “Opening an arena alone is scary, but I stay cool and composed,” says Freeman. “It was an unusually nostalgic experience for me. I was introduced to folk and Americana through Mumford & Sons when I was about 13, so this feels like a dream from my youth.”

Instagram and YouTube are now full of part-time guitarists making their own versions. If you know me‘s iconic riff. Even guitar god John Mayer I gave it a chance. In Freeman’s Instagram comments, Limp Bikzit’s Fred Durst and bluegrass phenom Billy Strings posted to praise the song. Hollywood star Jack Black slid into Freeman’s DMs.

Freeman adds: “The most important person to me is comedian Tim Robinson, who we are a big fan of. “He followed me, I texted him and he replied. “I definitely dream of him directing a music video.”

The attention came just in time. Last May, Freeman released his third album. He is a People’s ArtistAfter 11 years of making little noise and trying to sustain her music career — Freeman was working day jobs as a cook in Brooklyn, Brown was working as a nanny — she was on the verge of scrapping the business.

“We were shooting this every year in New York. I released the album and felt like I had finally found a musical community, which was enough for us to start saying, ‘Okay, we can do it one more year and then reevaluate after that,'” Freeman recalls. “But I’ve been releasing music since I was 17, and I’m 28 this year, and I hadn’t really gotten a lot of listeners until six months ago, when that video went viral.”

Major labels called, but she signed with US indie Mom + Pop Music. “We flirted with big brands just to see what it was about, have a fancy dinner, but something told me to stick to my guns,” says Freeman. Always an independent kid (she’s even carrying a bag bearing Mom + Pop’s logo as we speak), she was wary of record labels’ big promises.

“Even though I’ve already done all this work and I’m actually hurting myself, it really surprises me that major labels want to take the majority of the credit for whatever the next project is. I don’t understand it,” he says.

“It would be one thing if people were trying to sign me before they discovered me, but the fact that they wanted to take all the royalties from a project that I marketed myself anyway, even if it had potential for greater advancement, I wasn’t that interested in that. I’d rather make the album I wanted to make.”

There was also a lingering fear surrounding his breakout hit. “I have a lot of anxiety about how to show that I’m more than just that song, and I’m trying to figure out how to not let it just be a one-hit wonder,” he says. “I was worried that if I went with a major label they would force me to camp. If you know me.

“I’ve seen that with some artists, someone like Noah Kahan, he actually had to do that. Rod Season For years – and I didn’t want this to happen to me. I wanted to find a label that wanted to push me and see me do something different. So I’m not really afraid of making the next album. “I’ve been waiting for this moment to really have a recording budget and give it my all.”

He’s been hard at work on a new album, and its unusual premise comes from the strange reactions he keeps hearing after the album. If you know me. “People would come up to me and say, ‘This song reminds me of this.’ The Last of Us“It got me thinking: What if I leaned into that and made a post-apocalyptic folk album,” says Freeman of the dystopian video game-turned-popular TV series.

Oddly enough, the apocalypse has personal resonance for Freeman. His parents are Pentecostal missionaries, and he and his wife Sophie grew up in the Assemblies of God, the evangelical denomination of which our former prime minister Scott Morrison is a part (neither of them had ever heard of ScoMo, although it features prominently in the Assemblies of God).

Between the ages of 13 and 17, Freeman and his three younger siblings lived in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) while their parents were missionaries. “It was a lonely experience, to be honest,” he says. “In some ways it was very normal and a community I have very fond memories of. In other ways there were clearly conservative elements. [the church] I don’t really identify or fit in. But it was definitely an interesting experience to be in a family that thought their life’s mission was to call them to another country. “They took this very seriously.”

He was homeschooled there, which is why he was so interested in music and playing the guitar. “I was avoiding doing schoolwork all day,” says Freeman. “My only social outing was being at church and playing in the church worship band.

“My mother was a worship leader and her father, my grandfather, was also in church and played the organ and the bass. He taught me the guitar. I always say it’s a very positive way to learn music: you get the chance to play in front of people and audiences every week.” to have applauding after every song. You really learn how to perform.

Had he fully accepted the family’s decision to emigrate to Eswatini when he was a teenager? “I was like that too at the time, but I fell out of love with him very quickly,” he says, laughing. “The denomination that we’re a part of really gets you excited about being a missionary kid. They get it into your head that you’re just as important as your parents and that you’re doing the mission just as much as they are. But when we got there, I remember being like, ‘Oh, I don’t actually think I should be here.'”

He says Freeman’s parents currently live in South Africa and have “primarily pastored a church” for the past eight years. Amid the uncomfortable intersection between colonialism and evangelicalism, Freeman has complicated feelings about missionary work.

“I think the work my father did was helpful because it was very similar to the humanitarian work that non-religious organizations did. He helped build wells and orphanages. At the time, Swaziland had the highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world at almost 50 percent; there was a huge perception that everyone you met was HIV positive. There was a huge economic and humanitarian crisis going on, and I think my parents believed that the work they did was helpful.”

Enter Brown, who moved from the United States at the age of nine to Jamaica, where her parents ran an orphanage. “Sorry, this is not my interview,” he says, laughing. “But I would say, similar to Hudson’s family, I feel like my parents had a really big heart for people and I think they did a good job, but at the end of the day you have to sacrifice for your family, you grow up in a different place, you feel different and out of place and alone, and I think those were defining things for our lives, being so young.”

“That’s really well put. I appreciate you saying that,” says Freeman.

Growing up evangelical, Freeman had a lot of fear about the end of the world. “We used to call this euphoria the end of days. And because of my country’s actions, I continue to feel anxious about the end of the world. And the next album plays with that, with my childhood anxieties and my anxieties about the state of the world now. This will be my post-apocalyptic road trip album.”

Hudson Freeman He is a People’s Artist And Adult ContemporaryHis collaboration with The Bedroomer is out now.