Home Free

Join us for Home Free - DIVE BAR SAINTS World Tour presented by Emporium Presents

In country music, there are endless debates about what kind of instrumentation really defines the genre as it constantly updates itself and divides into traditional and contemporary factions. Home Free found an ingenious way to get around those kinds of arguments: just ditch the instrumentation altogether. Their five members are all about what has always inarguably been at the core of country music: the human voice.

That Home Free is country music’s only real a cappella group is a novelty that, on the radio or on record, might only occur to listeners after the fact, since arrangements that are so fully fleshed out — and we do mean fleshed out, as opposed to machined out — have a way of tricking the ear. In concert, of course, it’s a different story: all at once, from first row to last, jaws drop at the first sight of all those throats in action, followed by nodding, dancing and even crying as the group’s powerful musical storytelling unfolds.

For the ultimate proof of Home Free’s dynamic range, you only have to look to a recent song-off on the group’s Twitter account, which paired different tunes from their catalog, then asked fans to vote on their favorite. One day, the choice that came up was… “Hillbilly Bone” versus “How Great Thou Art.” Brown says it was just coincidence that those two songs came up together that day, “but really,” he laughs of the contrast between those tunes, “there’s no better picture of our fan base.” In Home Free’s homegrown but rapidly globally expanding audience, saints and barhoppers are all very much present and accounted for.