This week has been full of outdated indie discourse about whether or not Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros' 2009 hit "Home" is the worst song of all time. A clip of the group's Tiny Desk performance has been recirculating on X with many strong opinions about “Home,” the “stomp clap” era, and whether “Home” is “stomp clap.” Now bandleader Alex Ebert (who also fronted the dance-rock group Ima Robot before Edward Sharpe) has weighed in.
"Here's how you know when a song is good," Ebert begins the video saying, continuing:
If the bones are good, if the bones let the song survive context, if you pull it out of acoustic guitar, you put a piano there and it works, it's a good song. You pull it out of the piano, you put it on the harp, it's still working, you take out of the harp, you sing it a capella, it's still working, good song.
Now "Home" has been covered multiple times, different things. Some of them are hits, like actual hit songs. Some guy takes it from baritone puts it in falsetto, you know, the one that went viral. Edith Whiskers, shoutout to whatever that is, that went viral. By the way we were the first to do the stomp and clap fuckin' folk pop thing to the point where the Lumineers, they sought out one of our co-producers — he wasn't actually our co-producer — and were like, "Hey, do that Edward Sharpe thing for us." For real, that's a real story. Of Monsters & Men, they got our album before they ever made an album because our agent was their manager and she showed it to them and they basically got so close to "Home" that we almost sued them. They were doing Apple commercials and I was getting calls saying, "Congratulations." That's how closely people started doing this.
And by the way, "Home" isn't a good recording, it's just a good song. But it not being a good recording is what I love about "Home." It's like a moment. We recorded it 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 happenstance incidentalism of Edward Sharpe. Instead what I spread was stomp claps taken and recorded better, and that's depressing. But "Home" is apparently a good song.
In the caption, he added:
It's a question I've asked myself plenty — is home a good song? Something I forgot to mention is I recently was asked by my 90-year-old father to play home at his birthday. He was begging as if his life depended on it so I had to oblige. There was a piano in the restaurant so I just played it like that, whole chords, just me at the piano in a restaurant at noon. I'll try and find a recording of it, but it turned into just about my favorite version of the song. In fact I keep thinking maybe I should release a version of it. Anyway, that's when I made up my mind that Home, the bones of it at least, are great. It's a good song.
Well, onto the next discourse.
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it’s worse
— Father John Misty (@fatherjohnmisty) August 6, 2025
