He made the viral song of the year. Now comes the hard part

Meet Hudson Freeman, the indie-folk singer behind the breakout hit If You Know Me.

Alone onstage at Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory, Hudson Freeman quietly strums his viral hit If You Know Me. He’s barely halfway through his set when the song’s familiar bent notes start ringing – at first more desolate than on the recording, before it builds to a crashing crescendo.

As he finishes, he nods to the gathered crowd and says, “I guess you can all go home now ...” The audience laughs at the quip, a knowing jab at the song’s outsized popularity and the ludicrous journey it’s taken over the past year.

It was in late August last year that the Texan-born/Brooklyn-based indie-folk singer posted an Instagram of himself performing the then-unreleased song in the middle of a field in Indiana, with the crickets chirping and the sun beaming like a Thomas Kinkade painting.

“I posted the video immediately after I filmed it in that field on this drive from Indiana to Chicago, and it blew up on the way there,” Freeman says. “I had this gut feeling that it was going to happen. It was just too beautiful outside – the clouds, the sky. I’d been using that heavy metal font and I knew if I just put it in the blue and then with the green of the field … It just looked perfect.”

The song hit the algorithm lottery. “It was the right place at the right time,” Freeman says. “The internet’s really arbitrary, but maybe part of what got people’s attention is because it seems so real in this time when there’s a real fear about AI and stuff.”

Sipping coffee by the poolside bar at his hotel on Sydney’s Oxford Street, his wife and creative partner Sophie Brown by his side, Freeman recalls the song’s success with the bashful wonderment of someone who lucked out at a pub raffle. At 28, he’s boyish in a gas station shirt and a nose ring (online he’s called himself “the Eric Forman of indie-folk”, a sardonic shot at his resemblance to Topher Grace’s character in That ’70s Show).

He’s in town as the support act for Mumford & Sons’ arena tour of Australia and New Zealand, the biggest shows he’s ever played beyond a two-night stint in Hollywood with Kings of Leon in April. “It’s intimidating to open an arena by yourself, but I just stay cool and collected,” says Freeman. “It’s been unusually nostalgic for me. I was introduced to folk and Americana through Mumford & Sons when I was, like, 13, so this feels like a dream from when I was younger.”

”A huge one for me is a comedian we’re fans of, Tim Robinson,” adds Freeman. “He followed me and I messaged him and he messaged back. I definitely have a