Hudson Freeman’s new album, Doom Country, follows an imagined journey through an America at the end of the world. Its landscape includes an interstate passing Oklahoma windmills, deserted amusement parks and the uneasy suggestion that the Rapture has either arrived or already passed. Freeman uses that setting to revisit the apocalyptic ideas he grew up with as the son of evangelical missionaries in Texas.
In an interview with Consequence, Freeman said the record was a way to take apart his childhood fear of the Rapture. Rather than treat the end times as solemn prophecy, he wanted to picture them with a darkly comic edge. That approach appears in “Fell Ass Backwards,” whose title and chorus turn the idea of the Rapture’s ascent into a fall back to earth.
The album draws on folk and Americana, but Freeman resists making the sound too polished or reassuring. He said he is uncomfortable with folk’s more saccharine tendencies and is interested in bringing ugliness into the music. Dissonance appears in the production, harmonies and lyrics, including the climactic shift in “Western” and the strained harmonies of “I-40.”
Freeman described his changing relationship with spirituality and his upbringing as contradictory. On Doom Country, that tension informs a vision of beauty as something messy and marked by grit, rather than something clean or uncomplicated.
Sources: Consequence.