“Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and “Home” by LCD Soundsystem have a bit in common beyond their name. They were released in 2009 and 2010, during the heyday of indie alternative, with the latter being the year that I graduated high school. Both songs served as a soundtrack while I fell in love with my high school sweetheart, and got plenty of play during backseat make out sessions. Both bands also contain a small core group and a rotating cast of occasional collaborators, while both songs contain messages pertaining to the concepts of belonging, and of course, homes. There is one key difference though, one that cannot be ignored. One of these songs is a banger and the other is an atrocity.

Forgive my love of hyperbole, but everything about Edward Sharpe’s version deserves a second and discerning look. Like a stomp-clap folk band peaking on untested MDMA, Home represents everything of its era that is worth leaving behind. It contains over three minutes (Three. Minutes.) of whistling, according to a Wikipedia source who listened to the song again so that I didn’t have to. To further deepen the lore surrounding my distaste for the song, I learned that Edward Sharpe isn’t even Edward Sharpe, he’s a fictional character dreamed up by band frontman Alex Ebert, whose whimsical, “my girlfriend and I saw you across the bar” vibe comes only second to the 2000s top knot and dead eyed, American Apparel ad stare. According to a New York Times profile of Ebert from earlier last summer, he’s regarded in some circles as a kind of philosopher, perhaps even a guru. His Substack is quite popular.

But, yes, this is about a song, and The Zeros are indeed a band. It’s the background of the person singing that gives such an icky sheen to their iteration of Home, something that inspires the word “performative” out of me, a word I tend to avoid. “Well, hot and heavy, pumpkin pie, chocolate candy, Jesus Christ, ain’t nothing please me more than you,” the vocalists drawl, trading in their Los Angeles roots for a dialect perhaps seen as more “authentic” during this time where the backlash to disaffected hipsterdom was dependent on the outer extremes of earnestness. 

On the other side of the country, James Murphy and friends of LCD Soundsystem embodied this perceived east coast irony. Six hours south in Virginia, I was livid that my parents wouldn’t let me go see indie rock and pop royalty at shows as a high schooler. My perception of LCD Soundsystem’s song “Home” is also shaped by the larger context of the band, whose discography and live shows demonstrate that there are layers between earnestness, authenticity, and irony. Live performances of “Home” show a band that cares enough to wear suits onstage, but not enough to tuck in their shirts. I’ve always interpreted it as a song about the type of mindfulness that occurs when we accept where we are in our lives, even if this place doesn’t always look the way that we imagined it would. 

“If you’re afraid of what you need, look around you, you’re surrounded, it won’t get any better,” read as solemn, but paired with the exuberant repetition of the band and the callbacks to earlier songs mixed in, the acceptance sounds joyful. It is neither sweet, nor saccharine, nor interrupted by spoken words of gushy love like the other song that I’ve pitted it against. Both songs share an ecstatic quality, but comparisons get iffy after that. 

One of my more annoying personality traits is that I’m drawn to anything seen as esoteric, and that’s probably why I’m so repulsed as an adult by the Edward Sharpe “Home” as compared to when I was 17-years-old. As a kid, the jingly-jangly packaged joy that they delivered, perfect for commercials and viral videos, scratched an itch that I just don’t have anymore. Besides, if I want twee, The Boy Least Likely To is at least a musical project that went all-in on being twee. Edward Sharpe’s “Home” is funnily enough, just a version of twee molded to be more crowd pleasing, and this somehow makes it worse. 

At 31-years-old, both songs have shifted considerably in the brain space they occupy for me. The indie folk “Home” went from blissful and endearing to grating and the background of the song itself has shifted since 2009, as the female vocalist on the track, Jade Castrinos, split with the band in 2014 under weird circumstances. The loving duet between Castrinos and Ebert sounds especially strange now, distant from the rehearsed expression of over the top authentic love that TikTok creators are still chasing in the age of constant documentation. 

The finality that comes from LCD Soundsystem’s song can’t be divorced from the fact that the band reunited only years later. What was meant to be a kind of goodbye, the final song on the anticipated final album before “retirement,” has a new life within the framework of their current catalog as a band in 2022. The hopeful finality, acceptance, and bigger picture feel like a mirror to the year I turned thirty and grappled with whether I was actually supposed to grapple with being in my thirties. Transitions are a constant in life, and marking where we are can come with a lot of joy. 

Perhaps most of these thoughts come across as dramatic, but both of the songs are somewhat dramatic, and I always rise to the occasion. Authenticity is always going to be a bit of a performance, but some of these performances hit somewhere they didn’t intend. These songs are two perfect recordings of a moment in American culture, now among the echelons of the budding new contenders for bands considered “dad rock.” Dads, choose wisely, one of these songs pretty much just sucks.

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