Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros frontman Alex Ebert has come to the defense of the band’s hit “Home” after social media discourse dubbed the 2009 single the “worst song ever made.”
Over the past week, a decade-old video of the band’s Tiny Desk performance of “Home” has been unavoidable on Twitter, with users both mocking the performance and blaming Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros for the “stomp clap” subgenre of bands that followed in their wake.
After a few (90 million!) views, the chatter got loud enough for Ebert himself to address the situation, as well as defend “Home” as “apparently a good song.” “It’s a question I’ve asked myself plenty — is home a good song?” Ebert wrote on Instagram.
“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.”
Ebert also posted a video sharing his thoughts on “Home,” as well as taking credit for the flood of “stomp clap”-sounding acts that arose after the song became a hit. “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,’” Ebert claimed.
“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.”
As for the “worst song” debate, Ebert said definitively, “‘Home’ is apparently a good song.”
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