On “(For a While) I Couldn’t Play My Guitar Like a Man”, Freeman toys around with a bluesy lament, but it’s impossible to tell if he’s aiming toward a Crossroads-style soul-selling or a 12-step-style soul search (or if, after Clapton, there is even a difference). Indeed, part of what made Ween so great was Freeman and Melichiondo’s refusal to distinguish between sincerity and silliness, a mainstay of the druggy teenage boyhood that neither ever left. Such balance of abject pathos and profane teenage-boy hardheadedness is a Ween trademark, which Freeman mastered on 1994’s “ Baby Bitch,” a heartrending breakup song that had “Bitch” in the title and the line “Fuck you, you stinkin’-ass ho” gently inserted into the verse. “Fuck you all, I got a reason to live/ And I’m never gonna die,” he asserts, as the image of a New Age recovery facility gives way to a vision of a packed arena. After gently pirouetting on a “ Dust in the Wind”-style guitar figure for a few minutes, “Discretion” suddenly shifts gears into a slick hesher anthem. As is his wont, however, there’s no easy emotional true north on FREEMAN. The same behaviors that a 20-something Freeman would use to antagonize audiences, and with which he accumulated a fanbase of countless suburban stoners, had become blatant symptoms of a serious problem-what made Ween also killed it. In front of 3,000 fans who paid $50 per ticket, Freeman laid down on the stage during songs and slurred his lyrics when he could remember them. “Discretion” is also the first public step of a drying-out process triggered by a sad January 2011 Ween show in Vancouver that would lead to the band’s dissolution the following year. “I’m your best friend, I’m your superstar/ Yeah, I’m down with the brown.” Despite it all, Ween could be a very reflective band, but “Discretion” is the first song sung by Aaron Freeman about the cost of living as Gene Ween. “Covert Discretion” opens the album with a crushing level of vulnerability: “Another gig now, got an aching head, and I’m back on display,” he murmurs in a soft, folky voice that hasn’t deepened much since he was a teenager. Now, there’s FREEMAN: on Aaron Freeman's self-titled solo album, the 44-year old singer finds himself on the other side of recovery, atoning for a life lived brown. Flash-forward 30 years from the DIY spirit of Ween’s early recordings and performances, past the decade-plus when they packed amphitheaters, played late-night TV, got Elvis’ old backing group to perform on an album with a song called “Piss Up a Rope”, and released a double-disc live album on Elektra called Paintin’ the Town Brown.
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