Hudson Freeman wants to soundtrack the end of America. All he needs is a nylon-string guitar
“Something about playing rock music on an acoustic guitar really got me,” Hudson Freeman affirms, enthusiastic yet brittle, over the chattering of crockery in a busy Hackney cafe.
After immediately expressing his woe over the mean bout of flu that ruled him out of End of the Road festival – and very nearly this cover story – our conversation meandered onto how Nirvana’s seismic MTV Unplugged session subconsciously impacted him as a budding songwriter. There’s no end to the list of artists that feted, candle-lit show inspired. In Freeman’s case, an idea fomented that everything he needed as a musician was within the acoustic guitar.
Hudson Freeman on the Guitar.com Cover. Image: Joseph Bishop for Guitar.com
“I’ve always had an allergy to thinking about tone, pedals, amps and all those decisions around electric guitar,” he insists. “It has always been acoustic guitar for me. I think tuning and the strings you use are the whole toolkit.” This insistence on maxing out the capabilities of his acoustic guitar helped him create a very deliberate guitar language, which has set Hudson Freeman apart. Bending de-tuned nylon-strings as a compositional device catalysed a guitar riff that made a B-side into the centrepiece of the viral video which transformed his career.
Anybody dialled into alternative music scrolling on Instagram and TikTok towards the tail end of last year would have likely stumbled upon a video of Freeman strumming the gloriously lo-fi demo version of If You Know Me. In an era where there’s a natural suspicion about the humanity behind anything that’s too polished, it’s not hard to see why the sound of Freeman summoning the song’s slackly-tuned slowcore riff in a South Indiana cornfield – complete with chirping insect accompaniment – quickly caught people’s attention.
Image: Joseph Bishop for Guitar.com
What wasn’t predictable, however, was how the song would catch fire on social media – becoming the plaintive soundtrack to hundreds of thousands of TikToks and Instagram reels, and sending his follower counts skyrocketing into six figures.
It’s the sort of viral success that most young artists can only dream of, except it wasn’t really. Freeman was no fledgling upstart: he was an overnight success over ten years in the making, and one that is determined to make music on his own terms.
“Something about playing rock music on an acoustic guitar really got me”
Hero Worship
At the age of just seven, Hudson was gifted a Squier stratocaster from his parents. “My family is musical and involved in church: my mum was a worship leader and my dad was, and still is, a pastor. That was the route into it, though I didn’t really learn anything at first.”
The gentle nudge towards writing Christian songs didn’t appeal to Freeman initially. His interest in rock music ignited after playing Guitar Hero, which provided a rite of passage onto an actual guitar. The first song he learned was the acoustic version of Foo Fighters’ Everlong. “I’ve been totally infatuated with the guitar since then.”
As Evangelical Christian missionaries, his parents lived a nomadic existence, moving from Texas, where Freeman was born, to the Kingdom of Eswatini when he was just 13. Uprooted and isolated due to being homeschooled, his guitar became foundational – or as he puts it, “My guitar was my best friend.”
Image: Joseph Bishop for Guitar.com
That isolation was lessened somewhat by the internet. Freeman has been sharing his music online since he was just 14 years old. “I got on to YouTube and started a channel with the help of my dad,” he explains. “I started writing songs around the time I moved to Africa. They were all cringey Christian songs.”
As a teenager, he began questioning the moral absolutism his parents instilled in him, and later rejected his faith altogether. He then moved to Springfield, Missouri for college, and now resides in Brooklyn. His family are still in Eswatini. While their love for him is unwavering and unconditional, Freeman admits that his break with religion can make the relationship tough going.
“It’s kinda hard,” he says. “I’m the only member of my family that’s not an Evangelical Christian anymore. I feel isolated from them in that way. But they’re very supportive. We talk all the time. We just don’t have a lot in common anymore.”
Image: Joseph Bishop for Guitar.com
Fittingly for an artist who deals with big subjects through a folk-tinged lens, Freeman cites Sufjan Stevens as his greatest inspiration. “He’s an artist that’s also tied up with religion,” he explains. “He wants to explore religion aesthetically but also philosophically. It interested me in the cinematic scope of indie rock music.”
From a technical perspective, singer-songwriter Andy Shauf’s penchant for obscure melody and tunings fascinated him, while My Bloody Valentine’s glide guitar mechanics compelled Freeman to explore similar possibilities on nylon-strings, which became his signature.
“I realised having nylon-strings, and them being so stretchy, I could always be moving my left hand on the fret. The idea with using nylon-strings was to make it sound kinda shoegaze-y. I just started doing it whenever I played chords.”
“I’m not going to be the new Noah Kahan. I’m explicitly not trying to find the biggest fanbase”
Know Yourself
It was this unconventional approach that would lead to Freeman’s signature guitar moment. He had been playing around with a dramatic G-string bend on the third fret throughout the writing and recording of his 2025 album, Is A Folk Artist, where he’d used the technique in more subtle ways in the songs Guilty Running and We Should Eat.
But what if he could write a whole song based around it? “I just thought it’d make a sick hook,” he reflects. “I’d been doing the de-tuning thing for a while and started to get a real bend because the strings were so loose. I posted it as more of a technique thing, really. To me it sounded like a B-side.”
In an age of screen media where people don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, Freeman’s view is that people are starting to respond more to things that are less polished. “Lo-fi music is insistent on under-producing,” he observes. “Which makes people feel like they can trust it.”
Image: Joseph Bishop for Guitar.com
The riff is also, it has to be said, an absolute belter. Striking that rare balance between sounding fresh, while having a timeless universality, it worms its way into your brain. If you’re a guitar player, chances are it makes you want to pick up an acoustic and work it out for yourself – which is exactly what happened with John Mayer, who posted his attempt to Instagram.
“I have a lot of respect for him being a major artist who co-signs younger, unknown artists,” Freeman says of Mayer. “It doesn’t feel like a lot of legacy artists go out of their way to do that. Most people know who John Mayer is. He’s probably the last seriously palatable guitarist on a mainstream scale, so for him to co-sign If You Know Me was cool.” That said, Freeman says he’s happy to stay in his lane, and probably “wouldn’t make a song with him” even if the opportunity arose, appreciative as he is of Mayer’s support.
The thing that bears repeating about the If You Know Me that went viral is that it was just a demo. When Freeman recorded the song how he originally envisioned and released the results, he got a crash course in the less fun side of parasocial media, seeing the lines between fan participation and entitlement blur firsthand.
“When I released the official recording, people had this irrational anger towards it being produced in any way,” he says. “Like it was sacrilege. I found that bizarre. I released the demo because I thought it was special, and you can buy or stream it as it is. But I thought it’d be cooler adding drums, and making it sound the way I truly wanted it to sound. It’s got just as many streams as the demo, though, which is justification.”
“It has always been acoustic guitar for me. I think tuning and the strings you use are the whole toolkit”
Tuning It Out
With the increased visibility that came hand-in-hand with his viral triumph, Freeman was snatched up by both Kings Of Leon and Mumford & Sons to support them on their respective arena tours earlier this year. He was both enamoured and daunted by the experience. Not only was he highly exposed playing alone to huge audiences in cavernous venues, but the pitfalls of his unique guitar approach and sticking with his trusty Córdoba C7 guitar became quickly apparent.
“I’ve been doing all these alternative tunings, and playing the fuck out of it so much, that it keeps going out of tune. I’m re-tuning constantly,” he shrugs, in exasperation. “I’m spending about 20 minutes per show re-tuning.” Freeman candidly admits it doesn’t help to sharpen his stage banter either. “I’m terrible with banter. I need to get a lot better filling that time. It’s excruciating.”
Plenty of other artists would have a rack of backup guitars in different tunings to speed things up, but that sort of rock star excess doesn’t vibe with Freeman’s defiantly DIY approach to making music. He’s an artist that is committed to his vision, refusing numerous offers to sign to a major label on the back of his viral success, instead sticking with indies: he was with Mendel Records between 2019 and 2025 and has signed to Mom + Pop (home of Courtney Barnett, Tom Morello and Beach Bunny) for his forthcoming album, Doom Country.
Image: Joseph Bishop for Guitar.com
Doom Country, as you might get from its title, is an album that doesn’t shy away from the current state of America, while still keeping things true to his lo-fi ethos.
“It’s the most cohesive thing I’ve ever made,” he explains. “It’s inspired by Sufjan Stevens insofar that it’s a concept album. The backdrop of AI, being in America right now. People have commented that it sounds like a series of post-apocalyptic songs, and that the lo-fi aspect makes it feel like The Last Of Us. I just took that and ran with it, conceptually.”
Wrestling with big subjects is something Freeman clearly doesn’t shrink from, even when they hit very close to the bone.
“There’s a very personal quality to the record,” he explains. “Growing up as an Evangelical Christian, the idea of the apocalypse, the Rapture, the idea of being left behind is pervasive. When Jesus takes all of the Christians to heaven, I had this fear that my parents would be taken, and I’d be left behind. Everything feels kind of apocalyptic now. Political institutions are falling apart, all these various ways where society is collapsing. I really did imagine that I’d be left behind. There’s this quality to living in America right now, where it’s not just bad. It’s stupid. It’s a tragedy.
“I really want to make an album about the fallout of the Rapture, but it’s farcical. It’s not so much that the world is ending, but more than American hegemony is ending. It’s been this superpower, economically and culturally. Now it’s fading, and it feels like the end of the world.”
“The idea with using nylon-strings was to make it sound kinda shoegaze-y”
Suffice to say, it’s not the next move you’d expect from a viral star, but it’s entirely in-keeping with Hudson’s determination to do things his way. Far from bowing to the pressure to build on his success, he almost seems to be trying to distance himself from it (“If You Know Me is not on the album,” he notes) and from the “next folk star” narrative he finds himself burdened with.
“I was repeatedly telling labels that I’m not going to be the new Noah Kahan,” he insists. “I’m explicitly not trying to find the biggest fanbase. The real pressure is finding the people who really understand what I’m doing.” With Doom Country, he just might.
Doom Country is out 6 November on Mom + Pop Records. Hudson Freeman will tour Europe and the UK from February 2027.
Words: Tom Curtis-Horsfall
Photography: Joe Bishop
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