At her best, she still sounds like an old soul. Originals like “Lovers on the Run” and “Cold Waves”, meanwhile, suggest that life hasn’t been all honeysuckle and sunshine for the singer, the former exploring the many flavours of hell that are relationships, the latter coming at the issue of depression in a movingly languid fashion. Letters Never Read covers of Jim Reeves’s “Yonder Comes a Sucker” and Linda and Richard Thompson’s “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” suggest Rufus Wainwright and Peggy Lee aren’t the only artists Freeman has an undying love for. I fell back in love with country music and really got into exploring it more.” “My dad had wanted me to do that for a while, and that’s when I started coming back around to traditional music. “Then, when I was 15, I kind of took an interest in playing the guitar,” she says. As is often the case, she pulled away from the music she was raised on in her teens, becoming a Warped Tour kid obsessed with the likes of Motion City Soundtrack, Hawthorne Heights, and Fallout Boy. But, smartly, Freeman also isn’t afraid to branch out on Letters Never Read’s 10 tracks, dabbling in easygoing twee pop for “Just Say It Now” and adding lounge-revival vibraphone to the Sunday-afternoon folk of “Turtle Dove”.įreeman was raised on Americana and folk on the stereo around the house, and at jam sessions held by her dad and grandfather. Last year’s critically lauded sophomore outing, Letters Never Read, showcased the singer as an artist who hasn’t forgotten her love of a sepia-toned time when gingham dresses were a thing and every parlour had a Philco 90 cathedral radio. It was one of the first places that I really performed.”įastforward eight years and Freeman has blossomed into one of the most buzzed-about singers in contemporary Americana. Then, later on, I started playing at this little series that my dad and my grandfather did at this little framing shop and art gallery that my family owns. “I’d performed a bit with my dad when I was a teenager-in high school I’d go to shows that he was playing and come up for maybe one or two songs. “Those are from 2011, so I would have been about 20,” Freeman says, on the line from her countryside home in Galax, Virginia. The singer is just out of her teens in the clips, which range from a stripped-to-basics rendition of the folk standard “Hard Times Come Again No More” to the cowboy classic “I Ride an Old Paint”, but what stands out is the way that she sounds like an old soul. For a good idea how steeped in the traditions of old-timey music Dori Freeman is, start with the relatively recent phenomenon known as YouTube, which is home to all sorts of videos featuring the Appalachian singer-songwriter performing Americana classics with her dad and granddad.
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