CoSign is a recurring feature series from Consequence that puts a spotlight on a rising artist who has caught our eyes and ears with an exciting new release. For the latest edition, we chat with rising singer-songwriter Hudson Freeman, who returns this week with his standout new album, Doom Country.
Welcome to Doom Country. This is the land of the sprawl and the squall: an interstate cutting through the country past Oklahoma windmills, a folk song swelling into a whine as guitar and violin curdle against each other. Here, hell is real. The signs along I-40 say so. Its drivers chase what’s left of the American dream and wonder whether God is angry. The Rapture is coming, or maybe it already came. All that’s left are shuttered amusement parks, a lone gunshot on the interstate, and the eerie hiss of a cassette tape — a transmission from a country that may already be gone.
For Hudson Freeman, the New York-based songwriter and our latest CoSign, Doom Country wasn’t just about depicting some poignant vision of the end times; it was about subverting the one he grew up with. The son of evangelical missionaries, Freeman is from Texas, and he was raised with a dark fascination with the apocalypse and a genuine fear of the Rapture. Making this record was a way of taking that fear apart. “I almost wanted to do something really farcical with it,” Freeman tells Consequence over Zoom, “and imagine that it really happened, but in this almost funny way or this darkly humorous way.”
That’s why the chorus of “Fell Ass Backwards,” one of Doom Country‘s singles, starts with “Fell ack basswards.” It’s an easy detail to miss as it rings out in a raspy harmony, but it’s a clever way of inverting his own inversion. “Rather than [the Rapture] being this ascent, it’s more like the descent,” Freeman says. “‘Fell Ass Backwards’ is like falling to earth. So I think this fallen angel kind of thing, this beautiful thing that’s falling back or disintegrating, is just really compelling to me, sonically and then lyrically.”
Freeman actively resists providing any easy answers, choosing instead to render his standard folk and Americana-adjacent style knotty and tense. In Doom Country, ugliness lies in beauty and vice versa. “I feel very uncomfortable with the saccharine tendencies, maybe, within the folk or indie folk genre,” he says. “I think that’s a lot of what compelled me as a teenager getting into it. But the older I get, the more I feel like it’s more interesting to be playing with the ugliness.”
Though he confesses that he has a “tendency to make kind of pretty music,” Freeman says he’s always working dissonance into the production, the harmony and even the lyrics, and it shows in the thrashing turn at the climax of “Western” and the whining harmonies of “I-40.” “I have very much reimagined how I view my growing up and spirituality in a more contradictory way,” he says. “So just viewing beauty, and these aesthetic ideas of beauty, as really contradictory, really messy, having dirt, grit to it.”
