Hudson Freeman and Brian Gerald Bulger reflect on friendship, shared faith ahead up Uptown gig

Hudson Freeman. // image courtesy the artist

Hudson Freeman and Brian Gerald Bulger play the Encore at Uptown Theater on Wednesday, March 11. Details on that show here.

Last spring, Brooklyn-based musician Hudson Freeman released his latest album, Is A Folk Artist. Kansas City-based singer-songwriter Brian Gerald Bulger released his new EP and accompanying memoir, Thank God I’m Far From Heaven, in January.

Both artists’ music grapples in a genuine manner with growing up in faith-based homes and what happens when you find yourself walking away from that, and pairing both releases feels like the songs are in conversation with each other.

Therefore, it’s unsurprising to find the pair are currently touring together, the culmination of a friendship that began when the pair met in 2016 at Missouri State University in Springfield, as members of the same church group.

“I think that’s the first time we ever played together or did anything together,” recalls Freeman over Zoom. “We were both considered worship leaders for this little church group. It wasn’t like a real church–it was in a coffee shop.”

Brian Gerald Bulger. // image courtesy the artist

Bonding as fresh-faced college students in a small religious group led to the two bouncing ideas off one another while living in the same town, but now, Freeman and Bulger’s musical similarities are due less to the fact that the pair collaborate than the fact that they have similarities in their pasts.

“I think we’re both wrestling with growing up religious fundamentalists, certainly,” Freeman muses. “That’s probably where the dovetail happens.”

Bulger is quick to point out that both he and Freeman’s music has frequently been produced by mutual friend Ephraim McFarland and, while the two end up talking about each other’s stuff, Bulger thinks of himself as more a songwriter than an audio engineer.

“I feel like most of the time when I’m listening to something Hudson sent me that he’s working on, I’m thinking about it in a songwriting sense,” Bulger notes. “Maybe Ephraim or other people in Hudson’s circle might be thinking about it in a production sense, but that’s usually what I’m always drawn to.”

Bulger says that, whenever Freeman sends him new music, his reaction is always, “Send me the lyrics. I wanna read the lyrics. I wanna know what it’s about. I wanna analyze it.”

Bulger and Freeman’s friendship has gone through multiple periods. They lived together in Springfield for a month at the start of Covid, as well as having worked together at a music store for nearly two years. They’ve also toured together in the past, mostly as a duo, with Freeman occasionally backing Bulger on bass or keys, but it was mostly just DIY weekend stints at house shows.

Since both musicians grew up Evangelical and have since stepped away from that, we wonder aloud whether it helped to have a friend who was navigating the same sort of things? Sure, says Freeman, pointing out that “basically everyone” in their community of friends has been going through a similar experience the last few years.

“But I think it helped to have art as a way of reflecting on it and going through it together,” Freeman says. “But yeah, I think me and Brian and several people that came outta Springfield were all using writing and art as a way to–I don’t know, make meaning out of things.”

“Process things,” Bulger clarifies. “I think it made it a lot less scary to not only deconstruct, as they say, but also write about those types of things in our music. I think it made it less scary because we were all thinking it and talking about it together.”

It wasn’t just one of the group being like, “Hey, guys? I don’t think I wanna be a Christian anymore,” Bulger continues, saying that he thinks it was very much just a cultural shift that they were all going through and writing about, so it was nice to have that solidarity.

“But I’ll also say that it’s not as if everybody in that little time period of our lives in Springfield ended up going the same way when they left mega churches,” continues Bulger. “It’s not even just Evangelical Christianity; it’s mega church Christianity. All of us left that, but I think we all went different ways.”

It’s not as if the group created a new dogma, Bulger explains.

“It’s like we really just learned how to grow up and believe the things that we wanted to believe based on our own experiences, our own values,” he says. “It was a lot less scary because we were all in that together and writing about it and processing it through our writing.”

Interestingly enough, Freeman points out that he stayed in the church for so long and stayed committed to the tradition in which he grew up because of music. He says that he got a lot of his own feelings of spirituality and meaning-making through music, but eventually started to realize that music itself had meaning.

“It didn’t have to be worship music to have this meaning,” says Freeman of his realization. “It’s a strange thing, realizing that art and music has this power, and realizing how much you’ve constrained it.”

Both Bulger and Freeman’s music feels like part of a spectrum alongside Pedro the Lion and David Bazan, Phil Elverum and Mount Eerie, and Sufjan Stevens. All of these are artists who have, at various points, grappled with faith while also making this music that’s very intimate lyrically, but big musically.

How do Freeman and Bulger get so much sound with what is, in some cases, just their voices and their guitars? Does it come from being mega church members, where they were getting out there in front of what are, at times, over a thousand people in the audience?

“Both of us were worship leaders in high school,” remembers Freeman. “I remember really being like, ‘Okay, if it’s just me and an acoustic guitar, I need to figure out how to make this dynamic and powerful and I need to figure out how to use the my voice and of my strumming and stuff to have this real dynamics without other instruments and stuff.’ I imagine we probably both learned how to do it in that venue.”

Bulger agrees, saying that the venue taught him how to both play with a band but also, as Freeman noted, have his own dynamics.

“Honestly, your own stage presence,” Bulger admits. “Also, I do think the emotion that’s in specifically youth-centered worship songs is that they’re written and composed to be emotional, and so I think that is something that–whether we want to admit it or not–it’s definitely an influence.”

From seeing other worship performers, Bulger learned he wanted to listen to artists who, when they sang, you heard confidence. Not because they were loud or because they had a confident, macho voice, but because these performers had the confidence of knowing they didn’t need to project every single moment.

“That some moments were softer and sweeter, and some moments were big, and it was just a mastery of that flow,” says Bulger of what he learned. “When to go up and down–that’s what I was always drawn to listen to.”

For whatever it’s worth, says Freeman, the privilege to begin performing in the venue of a church means that a musician essentially has a captive audience that has to engage with what they’re doing and is inclined not to be critical of that performance.

“I think it’s a really beneficial thing for a kid to learn how to play in front of people in that space,” Freeman says.

Learning dynamics has led to the two friends creating music which is begins with just a voice and a guitar and eventually becomes something bigger. While Freeman’s “If You Know Me” gained TikTok fame with a demo version, wherein one can hear chirping crickets and a passing vehicle, it’s since become a full-band song without losing any of its power, something Bulger credits producer McFarland with bringing to both he and Freeman’s music.

“I think he’s one of the best at that–to hear a song where he’s only listening to one voice and one instrument,” Bulger explains. “He’s already, ‘Oh yeah, I would do this, and this and this and this and this,’ and it never cheapens it. It never makes it feel like you’ve sold out.”

McFarland, says Bulgers, knows how to take their bare-bones work and turn it into something bigger without it losing its value, punch, or authenticity. That’s why the reaction to the full-band version of Freeman’s big single was so positive, he says.

“That’s why people were like, ‘I didn’t think I was gonna like when you put the drums in,’” Bulger explains. “And it’s, ‘No, it still has that same character to it.’”

Freeman says that dealing with people’s real fear about how he was going to produce the song from the demo and then their attendant surprise that it turned out well was more due to the history of people having viral songs online and them not having made music prior to it.

“But in my case, I’ve been producing music for 10 years,” Freeman says, further explaining that, for all its lo-fi tendencies, the demo version of “If You Know Me” was itself produced. “It wasn’t just my iPhone recording. I used a nice mic for it, and I made it sound like an old tape recording, which is a production choice, and that’s fully what I intended to do whenever I recorded it.”

Hudson Freeman and Brian Gerald Bulger play the Encore at Uptown Theater on Wednesday, March 11. Details on that show here.