If Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros does not ring a bell for you, there’s a good chance their song, “Home,” might.
Especially if you were a music fan around 2010.
Music was going through a heavy stomp, clap folk pop wave, and “Home” made it all the way to No. 25 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart.
There is really nothing overly offensive about the song. It is kind of catchy.
Or maybe there is. And, maybe it isn’t. You can listen to the song here.
That brings us to the reason the band and the song are in the headlines this week. It seems some folks rediscovered them thanks to a clip shared to X from their NPR Tiny Desk concert. To be fair, it was not a great version of the song that they performed there.
“Worst song ever made,” one person wrote while sharing it.
The post was viewed 92 million views.
“I hated this song when it came out and I hate it more now,” one person responded. “Millennial hipster anthem from the fiery pits of hell.”
There were some folks who took up for the song, though.
“You just had to be there,” one person responded. “I LOVE this song. It’s fun songwriting and simple romanticism. Yall hate everything and wonder why there’s no love or joy in this generation.”
It all escalated to the point to where Alex Ebert, the frontman who formed Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros,” addressed it all on Instagram on Aug. 7 in a video titled, “Is Home a good song?”
“Alright, here’s how you know that a song is good,” he said. “If the bones are good. If the bones let the song survive contest. If you pull it out of an acoustic guitar, you put a piano there, oh and it works? Oh, it’s a good song. If it works, it’s a good song. If you pull it out of the piano, you put it on a harp, it’s still working. You take it out the harp, you sing it a cappella, it’s still working. Good song.
“Now, Home has been covered multiple times, different things, some of them are hits, like actual hit songs,” he continued. “Like some guy takes it from baritone, puts it in falsetto, … you know the one that went viral?’
Ebert said that “Home isn’t a good recording.”
“It’s just a good song,” he said. “But it not being a good recording is what I love about Home. It’s like a moment. We recorded on tape. We didn’t even know how to record on tape. It sounds like it’s made in some muffled garage. I wanted to spread the porous, happen-stance, incidentalism of Edward Sharpe. And instead what I spread was stomp claps taken and recorded better.
“But other than that, yeah, home is apparently a good song.”
Ebert also claimed his band was “the first to do the stomp, clap (expletive) folk pop thing.”
“To the point where Lumineers sought out one of our co-producers,” he said. “He wasn’t actually one of our co-producers, but they were like, ‘Hey, do that Edward Sharpe thing for us.’ For real. That’s a real story. Of Monsters and Men, they got our album before they ever made an album because our agent was their manager. She showed it to them, they got so close to ‘Home’ that we almost sued them. They were doing Apple commercials, and I was getting calls saying, ‘Congratulations.’ That is how closely people started doing this.”
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