In 2008, my wife and I moved away from Kansas — where I had spent all but a year of my life — to Philadelphia. It was a big and life-changing event.
A month later, our son was born.
Folks: I don’t really recommend moving 1,000 miles away from your friends and family right as you’re about to become parents. But there was justification for it: The startup I was working for when Jo got pregnant suddenly and prematurely cut the cord. I didn’t have a job and we were about to start a family. There was a job in Philadelphia. We took it.
The logic was sound. The job wasn’t. It lasted 18 months, the foulest working environment I have ever been in — the publication no longer exists in any meaningful sense. I worked myself ragged, took a paycut when the Great Recession set in, would walk home — a half-basement apartment straight out of “Parasite” — at night fantasizing about winning the lottery with tickets I didn’t feel like I could afford, and was generally miserable.
It was going to get even worse, though I didn’t know that yet.
But I loved my wife and kid.
About a year into all of this, a song came out that immediately became ubiquitous. I know this because I felt all but cut off from pop culture at the time, yet I heard it a lot.
You know the song. Alabama, Arkansas, I sure I do love my Ma and Pa…
“Home,” you may have heard if you’re overly online, has recently been proclaimed one of the worst songs of all time. It’s just so cringe.
Here’s Kyle Chayka, writing this morning in The New Yorker:
If you were living in Brooklyn during that time, in the cranking furnace of the faux-lumberjack, mustachioed, Mason-jar-clutching, acoustic-guitar-strumming hipster Zeitgeist, the Magnetic Zeros were ubiquitous. By 2011, the track had been used in commercials for the N.F.L., Microsoft, and Levi’s. Even Pitchfork, which gave the album on which the single appeared a score of 4.1 out of 10, allowed that “Home” was worthy of attention. As the economic casualties of the 2008 financial crisis reverberated, the song captured an accessible vision of American domesticity. It made you want to bail on the impossible job search and start a commune somewhere.
From the vantage of today, when the cultural lingua franca leans toward an incoherent, chronically online nihilism, it all appears rather alien—which is why a clip from the band’s 2009 performance for NPR’s Tiny Desk concert series has been electrifying the internet over the past week. The footage surfaced when the children’s-book author Justin Boldaji shared it in response to a (now deleted) prompt on X requesting the “worst songs ever”; Boldaji included the decisive caption “Worst song ever made.” The post is now nearing a hundred million views and inspiring paroxysms of millennial self-reckoning. Hailing from a time before the relentless onslaught of social media, Trumpian politics, COVID, and artificial intelligence, the Magnetic Zeros’ prelapsarian sincerity now appears disastrously blithe.
And all I can say is: Fuck that.
When I was a new parent in a bad job, getting no sleep, one thousand miles away from most of the people I cared about, while my body was slowly starting to try to kill me and it looked like nothing might ever be good again, there were these lyrics:
Oh, home, let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you
Oh, home, let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you
Say what you will about the song’s “prelapsarian sincerity” but in that time and in that place and in those circumstances, those sounded like the truest words I had ever heard.
I needed them.
I latched onto them.
They became a mantra for me.
My wife and kid were my home. They were the reason I kept moving my feet forward when it felt otherwise useless. The song made it feel like something worth celebrating when I didn’t have much to celebrate.
And honestly, fuck you if you think that’s funny. Because I needed — we needed — a lifeline. And for a few white hot months in 2009, “Home” offered it.
The worst song you ever heard might be literally lifesaving for someone else.
We’re back in Kansas now. I miss Philadelphia and I miss people there. It was home for awhile. But “home” is where Jo and T are.
That baby? He started his senior year of high school today. He towers over all of us.
I am terrified for his future. Worried that he’ll have to go through much rougher times than I ever experienced. I’m having to have faith that he’ll find his way forward.
I don’t hear the song “Home” very often anymore. But I get choked up every time I hear it. It’s maybe not the song I want to hear the most when I put on music. But it might be the most important song of my life. You had to be there.
I also love that song
I am an unapologetic fan of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, though I realize I’m not their desired demographic. But I too love that song. And the sentiment, “home is wherever I’m with you.”