Cheltenham, Gloucestershire based singer/songwriter Vince Freeman has been working on his album Scars, Ghosts and Glory for two years. Due to be released on June 14th 2024, Scars, Ghosts and Glory is Freemans most personal work yet! Pre-order here.

Vince Freeman has had quite the career where he has won Two UK Indy Awards, appeared on BBC’s The Voice series 1 in 2012 and has lent his vocals for tracks with Lost Frequencies and Fedde Le Grande.

Vince’s career was put on hold however, when he unfortunately suffered a crippling spinal injury which required multiple surgeries. Vince collapsed at home one day and was unable to walk. He was taken to hospital and after examination he was told that he had an osteo-degenerative condition at the base of his spine, compression and two severely prolapsed discs. The resulting operation involving two discectomy’s and a laminectomy spelled the start of six year long battle to recovery.

“I was walking with a stick at times, I wasn’t stable enough to carry my son’

Vince had to hire someone to carry his equipment and drive just to continue performing.
Even during these years of constant pain, he still managed to write and perform on hit singles. Co-writing a 2013 German hit ‘The Singer‘ for Voice Finalist Chris Schummert with Ian Dench (EMF).

He received a Platinum disc for his vocal performance on the 2019 Lost Frequencies hit
‘Sun Is Shining’ (50 million streams) Co-writing and performing on the 2021 Fedde Le Grande hit
‘Devils‘ (11 million streams)

After recovering from years of chronic pain, the pandemic, like it did for many, put his career on hold for a second time. With live music being on hold during the lockdown, Vince had to think fast on other ways to pay the bills and support the family. So with that in mind, Freeman transported a horse box into a portable café and started a mobile coffee business called Coffee Rocks’.

Thankfully, it wasn’t the end of Vince’s music career and hopefully now is the start of something very special, especially with his new album Scar, Ghosts and Glory. The album, as stated above, was two years in the making and is his most personal work yet! It sees Freeman facing struggles of the past and moving forward.

Freeman is also on tour at the moment and will be playing LakeFest in Gloucestershire in August supporting headliner Olly Murs.

We caught up with Vince Freeman to discuss the new album, tour and more!

Enjoy!

Hi Vince – How has the tour been?

It’s been amazing actually! I sort of set up the tour for two reasons. One was, I didn’t want to spend weeks in a rehearsal space and the second and main reason is having done years and years of live music, I figured out very early on that you need to know where the magic is. You need to know what connects with audiences, what doesn’t and being able to lean into those things is really really important! The London show at The Camden Club was really special not only from my perspective but it felt like a tangible thing in the room!

Did you play songs off the new album?

Yeah! It’s the whole new album, the show is just those songs. It’s an idea I had! I wanted to see whether I could make it into what you would called “a dive in the wall show” because I don’t think that there’s enough artists doing that anymore! I feel like we are very close to a show that people will pay to come and see rather than, I feel like sometimes people are going to see an artist because they have millions and millions of followers on socials. I feel like moving forward, if I could be in a situation where people are booking to see me play because they know that they are going to be entertained and will get a good show, I feel that’s kind of a rare thing these days!

Yes and I get what you mean because obviously you get a huge chunk of people who love the music going to concerts but what I have noticed more and more these days is the amount of people (usually at the back) who go just to socialise and it’s really off putting because they are obnoxiously loud!

I feel like I have the opportunity to create an album that has stories and means something and I wanted to match that with a show! I don’t want people to buy the album and see me once. I want people to see me once and say “god I want to go again because I don’t know what’s going to happen next”.

I love that! So no set list is the same then?

No show is the same! I think at the moment, what we are doing is developing set lists as we go but I’ll give you an example of “no show is the same”. We did Newcastle, lovely venue, great sound and 20 minutes into the set there was a hard house techno rave that started underneath our feet!

Oh no!

Haha, it was so ear bleedingly loud that there was just no way to continue and I stopped and asked the audience if it was distracting for them and they were all nodding. I just took the whole audience out into the balcony. We just went out there and did an acoustic performance for the rest of the show and it was quite special! That’s what I mean by “no show will be the same.”

If you want, I can follow you on tour with various distractions such as techno music so that you have to do something different each show haha

Hahaha! You have to roll with the punches and do what you can!

That’s amazing though because they aren’t going to forget that show at all. It will go down as being one of their favourite, most unique concerts ever!

That’s the beauty of live music and why it’s so heartbreaking when you see numbers dwindling independent venues and it seems the only people who are selling out tours are people like Taylor Swift.

See that’s why I love the country community because the fans usually sell out shows for most artists that come here! You mentioned Taylor Swift and I have been a Swiftie since 2007 and she played shows here such as Kings College and Shepherds Bush and every member of that audience was a hardcore fan, even leading up to her arena days for the Fearless to Red tours, hardcore fans. With this Era’s tour, sadly it is a place to be seen and there will be a lot of influencers and people there just to say they went and that’s not only sad for an artists hard work but for fans who now struggle to get tickets and who enjoy every song and can’t get near the front.

I went to see Nerina Pallot last week and she played her album ‘Fires’ in its entirety and that show meant so much as that album meant so much and I just don’t feel the way I did at that show that much anymore!

I started this whole album on the basis for it to be an album that people can engage with. I try to write honest and when I write about not feeling good enough, not feeling part of the club, about growing up and being bullied, all these kind of things, I feel like it’s really impressive for people to hear music and be able to identify with it, be moved by it in some way! This is why so many acts of older generations are still hugely successful! These artists were allowed and were able to make these albums that people could relate to. Then you go to a concert and are cuddling and crying with your best mate because of this one song!

Tell us a bit more about the album! It’s great and it is timeless!

I tried over the years to write more and more honestly as I have got older and I feel like I have got a good sense of melody and I have a lifetime worth of musical influences and that has gone into making Scars, Ghosts and Glory. It is kind of the album I didn’t think I was going to be able to make because up until making it, I did genuinely feel that everything I had done up until this point was a bit of a compromise. Not enough money to go into the studio, not enough time to craft a song. Everything felt like a compromise. Aside from the health thing with the back, I just stopped performing my own material live and I didn’t stop writing but I stopped writing for myself about ten years ago. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to and it wasn’t because I stopped writing. It was an “until I was in a situation where I can take time or I have an opportunity where I can align myself with really exceptional people, great producers and stuff and do the album” I got given that opportunity about two years ago and last January I started recording the album. It’s like the theme tune to my life. For me, I wouldn’t dare turn around and say it’s the best album in the world but it’s the best album for me. It’s the thing that I am most proud of in terms of artistically. It’s nice to have something that every now and then I can put on and go “I did that!”. It ticks all my musical boxes.

That’s nice to hear! You said it started two years ago but was it a long process in terms of writing the songs?

I wrote the title Scars, Ghosts and Glory on my studio about four years ago! I didn’t know that it was the album title, I just pinned it on my wall. I am terrible for not finishing things. In my head they are done so sometimes I will write a verse and a chorus and I know exactly how the rest of it is going, so in my head I am like “ok so that’s finished, I’ll wait to produce the final thing”. There were a little of what I call spare parts in the bucket already. ‘Freedom’ which is the last track of the album, that was a 20 second iPhone recording that I did 14 years ago!

Wow and you still had it?

The weird thing is that I kept it because I always knew that it had this “something”! A lot of the songs by comparison are completely new songs and reflective of the last couple of years. ‘Stardust’ is the oldest song on the album, 2011 I wrote that! Sonically I feel that it’s a representation of my influences as well. I feel like it’s got elements of The Fugees in terms of beats, N.e.r.d and old school hip hop but then it’s got elements of Turin Brakes and David Gray, elements of soul with Sam Cooke, The Black Pumas. At one point we were referencing Selena Gomez because I love ‘Lose You To Love Me’. I love Old school ballads that were done with lots of production and had all this drama going on.

You mentioned Freedom as the closer, how do you decide on the bookends of an album? Is it important to you?

Oh yeah it was, it was really important! What it was that ‘Powers’ to me was the natural opener for a number of reasons. ‘Powers’ was the song that I wrote when I was getting my first deal with Virgin Universal for a one song deal. ‘Powers’ was the song I wrote literally the day after that deal. “I woke up this morning to a different sunrise”. It’s a great opener and a great opening line and then for me, the closing line of ‘Freedom’ is “and if it’s all the same to you, I’ll be a ghost, someone you loved once and remember most”. That is why the two things are either end. I love thinking about stuff like that! I don’t know how many people notice and think “that’s clever”

Well it’s something I always pay attention to and I always wonder why an album starts and ends the way it does and sometimes you don’t need to wonder as you can understand why!

It’s a little thing but it’s that poetic license to be able to go “you know what? I really love the opening line to a whole and album and it’s a really lovely closing statement to the whole album”

When writing do you envision what songs that you want to have a large production attached to them and ones you don’t?

Yeah! I am a very visual writer. I feel that if I can’t see a movie in my head when I am creating a song then the song is not good enough. I guess in terms of production, that sort of happens as I am going along but it is to do with the movie that’s playing! ‘Powers’ for example, as I was writing that, all I could see was this Monté Carlo car chase haha in an old Mercedes with the top down! For that reason it always had to be a glorious production. Then there were other songs that dictate something else. I feel that the sound of the album is quite big without being unnecessarily big. I kind of like that!

There’s a song on the album that’s called ‘Real Love’. My manager said “you need a universal song, something that connects across genres and connects across territories”. I was like “easy as that?” He was right though and I feel like ‘Real Love’ is that song.

‘Passing By’ is one that stood out to me!

Yeah, I love that song! It’s really come to life live! I didn’t expect that to happen. It’s a great song and it was because of my horse box business. I converted a horse box so that I could serve coffee and that was what ‘Passing By’was all about. It’s basically about being freezing in the horse box and watching people walk along, walk past me with takeaways cups of coffee from other coffee businesses haha. It was quite interesting as it wasn’t the greatest business but it did save my house to a certain extent but it was hard and I was cold most of the time. I did get to watch people all day, every day which was fascinating so that’s what ‘Passing By’ is all about.

Who doesn’t love people watching? I wanted to ask about working with Crissie Rhodes from The Shires?

Yeah! Crissie got in touch of me after The Voice. She was Crissie Vocals at the time on her you tube channel. She came up to Cheltenham and we did a few songs together and sort of stayed in touch. I supported them with Ward Thomas on their first tour! She has such a great voice. She is really sweet because a few years ago I was asked to be the South of England Ambassador for Music VS Cancer and I did this event where we raised a lot of money. One night I rung up Crissie to seen if she could donate anything and she hand wrote lyrics to their best selling song, framed an album and sent it down to me. It was really really sweet of her to do that!

What instruments do you play?

All of them badly haha. I play the guitar, I very rarely play piano live but I do play piano, I play bass. I have never touched the drums although I’m a wicked drum producer . That’s kind of about it!

Well I can’t wait till the album is out and hopefully I will see you at LakeFest. Thanks for chatting today!