Greg Freeman - All Set the Bone

BY allie hoffert

The end of the world has come and gone with little fanfare, and we’ve been left to pick up the pieces. So says Greg Freeman on “Cahokia,” the opening track and thesis statement to his staggering third album All Set the Bone. Taking a step forward from 2025’s Burnover, Freeman trades in the pedal-steel piano ballads and small-town tales of the Northeast for the overdriven guitars and sweeping deserts of the Southwest. The result is a career highlight laden with slacker-rock influences and drenched in postmodern vertigo. 

All Set the Bone’s 13-track run sees Freeman’s idiosyncratic tenor pushed to its fullest potential; he delivers a choked, angry exhortation during the bridge of “Marooned,” a warbling cry on the final chorus of “Untitled 10” and a triumphant shout towards the end of “Culture” as he declares “no culture, and no more rock and roll.” It’s a highlight track, with a horn-filled chorus that crescendoes towards an incisive denouncement of the kind of excessive, violent spectacle that’s come to define the American zeitgeist. 

You heard the sirens, the cracking of bells / They even showed you them signing every shell / No illusions, no remorse / While they paint another face on the face of a corpse

A 90s-inspired rock anthem spurred by a car-crash-induced existential crisis, “Totaled” is another early highlight. Opening with a drum roll into a heavy, Fugazi-esque guitar, the song immediately distinguishes itself from Freeman’s earlier alt-country sensibilities with its heart-pounding percussion and screeching guitar bends mimicking slamming brakes. “Totaled” gathers momentum until it reaches its last chorus, where Freeman’s final plea of “don’t leave me hanging tonight” comes out with the breathless rhythm of a runner matching pace with a motorcycle. 

As All Set the Bone progresses, its tight song structures and slacker-rock hooks give way to looser, more experimental arrangements, best exemplified by “Marooned,” the album’s emotional centerpiece. The song shifts constantly over its seven-minute run; sorrowful and minimalist guitar lines fade into a terse, rhythmic interlude before jumping into a tension-filled chorus that evolves into a beautifully-arranged string-heavy outro. It’s one of several highlight performances from violinist Scott Daniels, a longtime Freeman collaborator who contributes heavily to All Set the Bone’s back half.

Another standout track, “Untitled 10” sees Greg Freeman at his most bitter. Over a distorted lead guitar reminiscent of Drive-By Truckers, he takes shots at his own overbearing creative impulses (“A thousand gears between my ears, working overtime / To taxidermy every worthy heartbreak into rhyme”), compares partygoers to bugs trapped in amber and angrily tells his addressee “you don’t have to try so hard / to be alone, to be all on your own.” Towards the end of the final chorus, Freeman’s venom abates; his guitar fades into the background as Daniels’ plaintive violin takes center stage, sostenuto notes clear as broken glass sailing over a dirge-like bassline for a stunning instrumental epilogue. 

All Set the Bone’s lyrical highlight comes in the form of its final track: “Bury Me The Shovel,” a melancholic banjo-driven waltz absent of the distorted guitars and punchy percussion characteristic of the rest of the album. Violin and accordion melt into each other as Freeman delivers an earnest plea for connection that sounds right at home among the stables of Gregory Alan Isakov’s That Sea, The Gambler. “Bury Me The Shovel” unfolds with simple, beautiful metaphors and comforting aphorisms that sound vaguely familiar, like half-remembered sayings from an old hometown. “At the bottom of the barrel, there’s nothing - you can’t stand,” Freeman tells his subject, someone with a “bottle on [their] coat of arms” and a tongue “tied like an ampersand,” before he asks, “Won’t you help to bury me the shovel, my friend?”

Paint the town red, redder than Mars 

You earned that bottle on your coat of arms 

With two more on the way and one in the hand 

Your tongue was tied like an ampersand 

And at the bottom of the barrel 

There’s nothing - you can’t stand 

So won’t you help to bury me the shovel my friend

Greg Freeman’s lyricism has always been sharp, but All Set the Bone pushes his imagistic pen into the spotlight. He paints surreal scenes of state crucifixions on telephone poles and soldiers dreaming in night vision (“Costs,” “Loser’s Prize”), describes skyscrapers stabbing constellations and light pouring out of the sky like sands from an hourglass (“Bury Me The Shovel”) and evokes hopelessness during “Hail Mary” with an extended sports metaphor in the same realm as Jason Molina’s “The Big Game Is Every Night.” 

It’s difficult to characterize All Set the Bone as anything short of pessimistic. Communication breaks down, authority becomes farcical, love falls out of fashion, subtlety is dead and gone and the clock keeps ticking. “These are the days of one thing after another,” Freeman declares on “Cahokia.” Even the upbeat love song “Indu” can’t escape a certain sense of time running out, its sweetly romantic chorus followed by an assertion that “these days come so quick / these nights go so quick, now.” 

Still, despite it all, Greg Freeman offers slivers of hope. “In a machine where nothing works,” he says on “Costs,” “it could always get much worse / but I just want a reason to stay.” There’s joy to be found in the little moments: looking at the moonlight in the eyes of someone you love, reconnecting with an old friend, finding someone to regret the morning with. In a world where doomsday’s come and gone, these human connections, messy or fraught as they might be, are something to hold on to.