“Worst song ever made.” Eight days ago, a guy in Seattle named Justin Boldaji tweeted those words along with video of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros performing “Home” in an NPR Tiny Desk concert. In the footage, Jade Castrinos (hair cropped short, wearing a T-shirt, her shoulders emphatically swaying) is locked into a loving gaze with Alex Ebert, whose appearance (long-haired, bearded, shirtless under a white suit jacket) was recently summed up by journalist Jeremy Gordon with the phrase “Father John Misty as a cult leader.” Most days, I feel like this song’s charms outweigh its hokey affectations, but both “Home” and this specific performance are shamelessly earnest in a way that might strike you as and cloying.

Worst song ever made https://t.co/CJRrvp3C4r pic.twitter.com/BS4wHAqrLK

— Justin🦩Boldaji (@justinboldaji) August 4, 2025

It seemed to strike a lot of people that way; the post has been retweeted more than 14,000 times, with over 52,000 likes, sparking an extensive discourse about other “worst song ever made” candidates, naive Obama-era optimism, and the so-called “stomp clap hey” music that has become associated with early 2010s millennial culture. The noise around this 16-year-old track became so loud and pervasive that Ebert felt the need to get online and defend his biggest hit. In a video posted to Instagram, he argued that “Home” is good because it can be translated into many styles, arrangements, and contexts and because so many other bands attempted to rip it off. “I wanted to spread the porous happenstance incidentalism of Edward Sharpe,” he said “Instead what I spread was stomp claps taken and recorded better, and that’s depressing.”

Ebert has more to say about “Home” and its legacy — much more, it turns out. In an hour-long chat Monday, he expounded on why the song struck a nerve then and now, while providing some insights about the origins of the Edward Sharpe project and its folksy hippie aesthetic. Ebert’s career has been long and varied, so we also touched on many of his other endeavors including the dance-punk band Ima Robot (whose song “Greenback Boogie” became the theme song for the late-breaking streaming sensation Suits), winning a Golden Globe for composing the score to the Robert Redford movie All Is Lost, writing the music for the SpongeBob SquarePants Broadway musical, the collaboration he was planning with the late Heath Ledger, and the nine(!) unreleased albums he’s sitting on.

Below, read our conversation, edited for clarity.

I have a lot to ask you about, but I figured we could just start with the discourse of the moment. How did you become aware that people were discussing “Home” on social media?

ALEX EBERT: Can I just say first, just the fact that it’s being called discourse makes me so… there’s such a funny joy in hearing everyone… What happened over the last, like, six years? Something about COVID turned everyone — like, I love it. I love it. Yeah, the discourse. For me this is a long time coming in a way.

Obviously I knew that the 2010s were going to have their ironic return at some point. I’d be in a Target and I’d hear shit, and I’d be like, “Whoa, okay, so I’ll give it about three years and then we’re back to square one.” But I didn’t expect it to be this acute and Edward Sharpe-centric. I think first I’ll just say I see a great catharsis in a way, especially for the haters. They really needed this moment. You know, this is a long time coming for the haters, and I’m glad that they’re getting a moment to really let it out.

Because it must have been really confusing for the haters, and really sort of awful and disorienting, that this really not rock ‘n’ roll, horribly earnest, cringe thing was just spreading everywhere. It must have been really disorienting to the, you know, Pabst beer drinkers. I feel for them, you know? And I also think that this is a big moment [for them].

My story is that I was afraid of this. This would have been my archnemesis. I was inside of the church of, you know, orthodox rock ‘n’ roll. I didn’t deviate from the standardized nonconformity. I never smiled on stage. I remember I was afraid of smiling on stage. It was about punk rock, and it was about “fuck you,” and it was about dissent and all of the unsafe things. But then of course I started to feel the burden of the expectation of that behavior, and I realized, “Oh, this isn’t actually an unsafe behavior. It’s my expected behavior.”

Now, I know I sound like I’m preaching right now, but this is shit I was going through, right? It really fucked me up back in the day. Like in the 2006 era, I had a real crisis, and I was like, “I don’t feel like I have any relationship with my instinct.” I just, I had lost it. I was doing this thing, and ironically inside of this cookie-cutter zone, while being the most quote-unquote daring I could be on stage and jumping into trash cans, and fucking getting banned from Steve Wynn hotels in Las Vegas for life for inciting a riot, and all these things I was very proud of. And then I realized, “Well, what’s the thing I’m actually most afraid of doing? Because I feel like this is expected.” And I realized that the scariest thing to me was being uncool. Like, it was just the scariest thing to me. And I suddenly was like, “Wait a minute. What if that is the most punk rock shit I could do?” And so I really actually did it on purpose, because I needed to.

And yeah, it occurred to me that there would be potential commercial legs. Whenever you see a fabric of society, see something that might be missing, maybe if it is missing, then you know it’s going to be integrated ad nauseam. But I guess what I wasn’t expecting — ’cause I went into it earnestly, and I went into it like, “OK, this is really necessary for my own personal shit,” because I was just kinked up in that commercial repetition that I thought was unsafe but I was perfectly safe in. So I did that for myself, and then I start seeing these other little repetitions of it, and I start seeing it become its own — like, really, stomp clap is like the monstrous answer to the monstrous hypocrisy of rock ‘n’ roll. Where you had the orthodoxy of nonconformity, but no one wanted to realize that because it was so safe. I mean, what a nice convenience to be thinking that you’re being unsafe while being perfectly safe. To feel like you’re rebellious while you’re not at all. To feel like you’re part of a counterculture that is just the culture.

I mean, that is the job of rock ‘n’ roll is to transform counterculture into culture. Or at least that’s the commoditized trajectory of that, but we didn’t ever want to admit it. So when I did that, immediately — and I was used to being lit on fire. Like, the very first review I had of any of my Ima Robot stuff was in Rolling Stone. This is probably 2004. “Welcome to the newest, most annoying voice in rock ‘n’ roll.” So I started getting used to this kind of thing then. But the vitriol that we got from the gatekeepers of cool, I have never seen. If you go back to some of that shit, it was wild. And at the time, I was like, “OK, I was expecting a blowback, but I wasn’t expecting, like, real anger.”

And their anger was almost overridden by popular demand. I love this stomp clap genre, which is a great name for it. We’re going to have to ironically reclaim the pejorative, as you do. But I realize it’s a good little cathartic moment, and I love the discussion around it. Because if you want to take it seriously, it is actually kind of an interesting problem.

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So you think that the earnestness is what people are reacting to in the song, either back then or now?

EBERT: Well, I think it’s two things. It’s not the earnestness in a vacuum, because that’s whatever. I think that upset people that were aware of my Ima Robot past. I was a turncoat. I was on the inside, and then I was a turncoat and I went to the dark side. I became a hippie. You know what I mean? Like, “You don’t do that, man. We’re collectively embarrassed by that time, and now we have to scapegoat you.” So I got that. But the fact that it turned into its own commercial behemoth — that’s the fucked up part. Yeah, sure, OK, rock ‘n’ roll has a counterweight. But then the counterweight turns into its own commercial monstrosity, then almost now you need — it did a big favor for rock and roll. If anything, it made rock ‘n’ roll more necessary. You can’t just have runaway earnestness because that is too naive for the world.

So I think there’s two reasons why I would get upset, and one of those reasons I really did get upset. I got really upset at the commercial repetition of it. I got really upset that every time I turned on a fucking television, a Honda commercial was being sold with a ripoff of the thing. And by the way, the volume of ripoff that we were seeing, I don’t even think everyone totally understands. It wasn’t just big bands that were doing the ripping off. Commercial agencies would hire non-bands, just random musicians that happen to work in a commercial music house, to do something that is “Home” adjacent. So, we were hearing all of these cheap reiterations and variations on a theme to sell all this stuff and to sell this life is golden, we’re in a sort of Obama hope golden age thing. And that’s something to be outraged about, right? That’s upsetting to me. Do you know what I mean? I really hate that.

And uh and that’s why, for instance, we had a “Home” No. 2. I saw “Home” was getting big, and for our second album [2012’s Here], I’m like, “OK, well, Jade and I will sing another song back and forth in the vein of…” It was called “Let’s Roll.” And just before we put out the album, I was just seeing everything I just told you about, and I was like, “I can’t do it.” I took the song off the album. No one’s ever heard it.

everyone is conflating this with “stomp clap ho-hey” music but in reality Edward Sharpe were, by proximity in fanbase and music industry, closer to acts like Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes than The Lumineers or Of Monsters and Men https://t.co/1XYF8Ccx0i

— nick (@mechaaanic) August 4, 2025

One point of contention that I saw with people talking about the song was whether it qualifies as stomp clap. One post that you recirculated claimed that it’s more like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. But in your video that you put out, and you’re kind of reiterating it here, you’re claiming to be the genesis of the stomp clap trend at that time.

EBERT: I don’t want to be a dick or sound like a like an arrogant guy, but that was the genesis of stomp clap. Other people have stomped. “Hey ho, let’s go” — I mean, you’ve got the Ramones. But this iteration. And you know, I was privy to behind-the-scenes stuff, like I was privy to some of that repetition. Someone showed me a commercial audition that was looking for an Edward Sharpe type. There were bands that were actively seeking out people we had worked with. There were bands that are huge that got our album before they made their album, and then made a song so close that we thought about suing them. There was all this stuff happening.

Now, again, you know how much I hate stomp clap in the sense of, like, the obvious. It’s not that I hate the genre. I hate — look, man. If I was around at the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll and I saw the regurgitative repetition of rock ‘n’ roll happening at the Elvis Presley level, and I was there at ground zero, and then I’m seeing Bill Haley, and then I’m seeing the extrapolation thereof, I’d be just as fucking pissed off. More pissed off, right? Because that’s the original thing. And so I’m not upset at stomp clap. I’m just upset at the monster of rock ‘n’ roll. And sometimes I just don’t know how to approach it. Its basic function is to do that. Sometimes you can dream of making something that is so sort of commercial-proof, but how do you go pop without going pop? It’s very… I don’t know if that’s possible.

It seems like the stomp clap sound is kind of having its comeback moment right now too. Like obviously Mumford is still around and Lumineers are still around, but you’ve got Noah Kahan and newer artists like that too.

EBERT: Oh, I’ve heard about that. I haven’t heard it, but I’ve heard about it. But people are saying that that’s a thing. I should point out that if you listen to the first album, maybe some of the reasons people are saying that we’re not really stomp clap is because “Home” was the stomp clap song. There was no other song on the first album or really second album. As soon as I saw it start to go, I got embarrassed of doing stomp clap. I started not doing that. You won’t hear that much on any of the other albums. I think not at all. Oh yeah, there’s an ironic return of stomp clap on the album PersonA where I literally sing about “Hey ho, you’re stealing my ho.” It’s, you know, levity.

I was listening back through the catalog today. Nothing happens in a vacuum, I guess, so I hear parallels to other stuff that was happening at the time, like M. Ward or Ray LaMontagne or even Arcade Fire. And obviously lots of much older music is being reflected in those albums too. What were you taking inspiration from at the time?

EBERT: I didn’t know the M. Ward, Ray LaMontagne — I didn’t know the valley of musicians that we were walking into. What I was mostly taking inspiration from were two things. So in order to get out of my weird Ima Robot conundrum where I felt like I was just acting, where I lost my instinct, that point of the story, I thought back to when I was a kid, when I did have instinct. And the thing that kept coming up for me were these road trips I would take with my dad. And that was really my first introduction to music, and he would play two basic things. He’d play bombastic new age Vangelis type stuff, and he would play Willie Nelson type stuff. Those two things. And we’d be driving through Monument Valley, and I’d be looking out of the window, and we would go on these extensive trips just constantly in his van. And that’s when I felt all this freedom.

God, I’m almost welling up as I talk about it. I just took my daughter on a similar trip. I got a van that almost looked identical to my dad’s. I just got back from a road trip with her through the same area. That’s when I felt free. So I was thinking like, “Oh, what kind of music would I make as a 5-year-old?” That was literally my inspiration for Edward Sharpe: If I was five, how would I make an album? Like, what would it be?

And there was a third influence, which was this teacher — and Christian, who’s in my band, who’s our guitar player, he was at this same elementary school — and her name was Ruth. And she was this South African musician, and she would come in, and she was our music teacher. We’d sing these songs like “This Land Is Your Land,” whatever. And so those three things. And I thought back, and then I just started doing. So my main inspirations were going back and listening to some of that Western stuff my dad was listening to and then thinking about sort of the Vangelis thing and then thinking a lot about my elementary school music teacher and just these singalongs.

And the thing that I remembered about the singalongs I liked so much was how bad they were, and how out-of-tune everyone was, and how uncommercial it felt, even just thinking about it. And I was like, “Oh, what if I could un-commercialize commercialism? What if this could be, like, a mess, but also be charming in a way to people?” And so that’s why when I was bringing people on, I brought in a lot of basically non-musicians. Not all of them. A lot of them are great musicians. If anyone’s listening, I don’t mean — you know that. But we brought someone on simply to play the tambourine. We brought a guy on who was passed up to our stage by the audience. We’d never met him, and we brought him on tour with us for a while, Nathaniel. We had stuff that was unnecessary; we had a bunch of instruments we didn’t necessarily need, but we were like, “Oh, why don’t you come on tour with us?” And a lot of the people couldn’t sing very well — again, not trying to diss my own band. Like, great, great effort, but not necessarily always holding the proper pitch. And so everything sounded out of whack, and that was what I wanted. And that’s kind of the feeling that I was going for.

So those were the inspirations. And I will actually say my “hey ho” inspiration was the old Sergio Leone movies, the Morricone music. Because that’s the other stuff he would play, and he would show me those those things. So props to my dad for all that. [Imitates The Good, The Bad & The Ugly original score] That’s where I’m taking the “ho’s” from and the “hey’s,” because all that image of being in the desert and all that, and then I bring in The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly and I’m off to the races. So that’s really where I was taking from.

But I should also say I was just talking to a friend. In LA during maybe 2005 to 2009, you know what was going on in Williamsburg during that time, right? Echo Park was going through the most incredible thing. There was a lot of energy around that. So that was a big influence too, just being there. I think we were all really giving each other a lot of life and energy. So that was part of it for sure. There was some kind of weird psychedelic-adjacent renaissance happening there.

On one hand, I feel like it can’t be great to have people going around saying that this is the worst song ever. But on the other hand, have you had any kind of benefit from it? Have your streaming numbers been up or anything like that?

EBERT: Uh, they have been up a little bit, yeah. I think it’s funny. My reaction has been pure smiles. I don’t know why. There’s something inherently funny about it. And I love that people are talking. You know what it is? I think it’s an interesting subject. And obviously I’m predisposed to thinking that. But I think there’s something interesting about the question as to why that shit got big in the first place. I think there’s something very confrontational, actually, if people are willing to look at it in an interesting way. There was something very confrontational about that earnestness. It was almost like a defiant, ironic earnestness. So I think there’s something there. But other than that, I was fine with it.

I also know how many lives it touched. It’s kind of crazy, it turned into a top 10 wedding song. And sure, you know, like, “Fuck marriage,” or whatever. But I’m married, and I love it. I love being married. And these people would come up to me crying, like, “Your song is our song.” And countless people that told me — you get the classic stories of, “I was really depressed, and this really helped me,” and so on.

Certainly my favorite moment that we ever played live — followed closely by one at Osheaga, which was similar — was where at Lollapalooza 2013, I found this kid that we visited in the hospital dying of leukemia a year earlier, Haden DeRoberts. He became like a little saint in our band. We’re like, “I wonder how Haden’s doing.” Because he was like 18, and had a bone marrow thing… And we do this whole thing during “Home.” I’m going collecting stories from the audience, and everyone’s pointing at this kid out of 60,000 people. And there he is, and suddenly he’s tan, and he’s got cheeks. We invite him up on stage. And you know, when you have experiences like that with that song, and that song is the thing playing, it’s almost like you can’t be rattled. Do you know what I mean? Like, “Yeah, sure. Okay, I guess.”

You already have all this positive experience with it built up that a little bit of shit talk on the internet can’t really chip away at it.

EBERT: Yeah. But also, I get it. Like every time it comes on the radio in a restaurant, my first reaction is, “Huh?” Like, “Really? Okay.” But I’m always surprised. It’s not like I’m like, “‘Home’ is here to stay, bitch!” I’m just like, you know what I mean? I’m always surprised.

You mentioned 2016’s PersonA. You ended the Edward Sharpe project after that album. I read an interview with you from that time saying basically this whole thing where you felt like you had to find yourself had been completed, and you had been guided back to yourself. Is that why you broke the band up?

EBERT: I think my whole reaction against rock ‘n’ roll, or against cool, is a better way to put it. Like my whole personal reaction against that, and diving into almost like a defiant naivete. I’m not an idiot, but I was very much like, “Let’s try this experiment where we all do the thing together. We’re going to split all the money together. We’re going to do everything together. It’s going to be communal for real.” Even though I did 99% of the writing, it’s going to be communal, you know? So, I was really forcing this thing. And it was honestly beautiful and incredible at first. And this is why I have a double shit taste in my mouth — but it’s fine, and no complaints — is the very success of it took all the magic out of it.

It’s a classic story, right? Like it just got weird. And then I had to integrate that, right? So that’s like between album one and three. And I had to integrate that and be like, “Okay, fuck it. Life is weird. I live in the world I live in. Things aren’t fucking perfect. My sort of revolutionary spirit has been finally modulated by reality such that maybe now it can actually interface with reality in an actual way. And the result of that sort of realism, I think, was PersonA. And yeah, in a sense, getting to that state of realism led to, “Okay, well I don’t need Edward Sharpe now for myself.” It’s no longer like a thing that is coming out of me because that’s not where I’m at now.

Everything is an oscillation, right? Like, I hate to break — we’re in discourse, so may I say that everything is dialectical, and Edward Sharpe may have to come back, right? Because we end up going through these swings. I mean, there is a mass derealization around irony now, where through COVID, the explosion of irony has led to effectively a post-ironic world, where everything now is under the protection of irony. You can like Beyoncé ironically, but you’re not even doing it ironically, and the irony has disappeared because it’s everywhere. And so maybe you need a little Edward Sharpe again once in a while if that’s happening. I don’t know what you need, but you need something to fuck it up. And so who knows, in the future. But that’s why I haven’t formally closed the door on it.

On a completely different note, you’ve done a fair amount of film score work. While Edward Sharpe was still ongoing, you won the Golden Globe for All Is Lost. What was that experience like, to be recognized in that way?

EBERT: I wanted to be a filmmaker, and I feel like a fuckin’ — you know, there’s that old joke like, “I’m a trash guy, but what I really want to do is direct!” But really that is all I was interested in as a kid, and that was my main thing, and so on and so forth. I used to tell my managers in Ima Robot, they’d call me, be like, “Where’s this or that?” And I remember one time screaming into the phone, “I’m a I’m a filmmaker, not a musician! Leave me alone!” So when I finally got the call to score something, I was like, “Oh my god, I hadn’t considered that I might have a backdoor to the world again.”

So the first thing I scored, I got super spoiled. I mean, J.C. [Chandor], who’s the director of this movie called All Is Lost with Robert Redford, just calls up, and they’re like, “Would you like to do a movie?” I was like, “What is it?” “Well, there’s no dialogue at all. It’s starring Robert Redford out at sea.” I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is incredible.” They basically gave me carte blanche, and I just went to town. And I got really spoiled because I was like, “Oh, this must be the way that it is.” And fuck, is it not. So, I look back at that very fondly because it was an amazing — I still don’t know how it happened. Sometimes these things dumbfound me. I don’t know how they found me.

So that was the first movie you scored? Wow.

EBERT: Yeah. Then I scored another one with J.C., which I loved doing, called A Most Violent Year. And I like that score the best. Actually, one of my favorite singing tracks is on that, called “America For Me.” And then I got the Golden Globe, right? That was very strange because I beat John Williams and Hans Zimmer. It was just ridiculous. I couldn’t believe — you know, it was overwhelming. I couldn’t believe what was happening, and reality had become super strange. I went up to Hans Zimmer. I was like, “Hans.” I just started tearing up. And he shoved me in the chest. He’s like, “Bullshit. You deserve it.” It was fun.

And since then, I’ve been like, “Oh, I’m going to do scoring.” And then I realized… I don’t want to talk any shit. I’m not talking shit. But the industry is very, as you can imagine, the extent to which humanity is capable of treating musicians like minstrels? Well that’s definitely the case in the movie industry. We are treated as a minstrelled afterthought, unless you get the odd thing. So I guess that’s what I’m going to do now. I’m just going to sort of wait around for the odd thing where a director is like, “You know what? I want to just sort of trust someone.”

It says on IMDb that you are working on your own thing with Brantley Gutierrez. Is that accurate? Under The Big Top.

EBERT: Yeah. I guess that’s accurate. I feel really bad. Brantley has sent me a solid edit of that. And you know what, dude? You caught me red-handed. I’m glad you asked this question because, oh man, it almost makes me sad. But yeah, t’s a victim. That movie is a victim of this conversation, in a sense, of my mindset post-“Home.” Pre-discourse, you know — I was in my own discourse before the discourse. And everything to do with that vibe, I became very, I would say self-conscious, but it’s more than self-conscious. It’s not like a cool self-consciousness that was interested in preserving my status as a cool person. It was this thing where maybe I suffer from some kind of avant-gardism. Or I don’t know what it is, but I couldn’t bring myself to any longer promote a commercial movement. I can bring myself to promote a commercial thing, but a commercial movement, it’s a very strange feeling. You feel like you’re part of the Gestapo.

It’s a very strange thing for me and I and I and that movie was came out of that and I basically have just shelved it. Uh uh sorry Brantley if I don’t know if any of this is going to actually get posted but yeah sorry to Brantley u but but one of these days I think we should it’s I had to I had to go I was I went through my own rejection of the entire thing and now I’m finally feeling a little more irreverent about it obviously. So yeah.

So that’s a decision that you’ve made in the past couple weeks?

EBERT: Oh no. No. I don’t think I’ve made the decision yet. No, I’m not there yet. But I can feel it coming. I can feel it coming. Yeah, but I’m definitely not there yet.

It says that you acted in this, too. I saw that you were in a short film a decade ago, but was this supposed to be like your full-length feature acting debut?

EBERT: What, in the Brantley thing? No, that’s a documentary.

Oh, okay. I didn’t know what it was. It was called Under The Big Top, so I assumed it was a remake of the old black and white film.

EBERT: No, I wish. It’s a documentary. But anyway, I am thinking that instead of scoring — I keep getting fired from these scoring gigs. Like I just got fired by the venerable Barry Levinson. I was scoring something for him. It was very fun. But, you know, I can’t keep my mouth shut, and I comment on the actual edit. I do stuff I’m not supposed to do. And I realize I should just be making movies is what I’m trying to get at. So one of these days, yeah.

Was your experience any different on Broadway when you did the SpongeBob thing?

EBERT: Oh, that was fun. Yeah. Broadway, from what I can tell — I’m sure there’s an underbelly that is whatever — but from what I could tell from the musical side, it’s great. One of these days I want to do an opera or a musical. My grandfather was an opera director. My dad’s super into opera and classical, but my grandfather was a very well-known opera director, and his story is operatic. I keep thinking one of these days I’d like to do something. Actually, Heath Ledger. So, Heath was going to put out our first album. I don’t know if you copped any of that.

No!

EBERT: This is something I don’t talk about much, but Heath was going to be putting out our first album. In fact, he wanted just the demos. He’s like, “Just stay with the demos, don’t re-record it better.” He had his head on straight. And we were going to be the first band he was going to put out. The name of the label he was doing was called The Masses. And that was also part of this little collective that we had. I had this idea for a musical, and he was going to direct The Queen’s Gambit as a movie. And he no longer wanted to do that. I think they had the rights, even, or something. “I no longer want to do that.” He’s like, “What was that idea for the musical you had?” I was like, “Oh, yeah.” It’s still a good idea, and it hasn’t been done yet, so I’m not gonna divulge it here, but yeah, we were developing a musical. We were talking about it on the night he died, just going through the entire thing really in-depth. He was really excited about it. So that was a cool moment, and I still feel like I’ve got to resurrect that story for that night, you know? So, one of these days, the musical.

That must have been terrible. I’m sorry that your friend who you were working with…

EBERT: Yeah. It’s a very weird thing. He was so excited about it. So that’s what I always hold on to is just how much excitement and joy he had for life. In fact, after he died, everything that I fucking did, I was like, “What would Heath do? What would Heath do?” Heath was going to put out the album. What would Heath do? He’d start a label. Okay. What would Heath do? Heath might buy this 1984 American Eagle 10 bus off of Craigslist, and then gut it, and then take it to Marfa, Texas and play a show there for 20 people. These are the things that Heath would do. And so I kind of just let him be my postmortem inspiration for quite a while. It was a whole thing. But yeah, it was a very strange strange strange event.

How did you get involved with the SpongeBob Broadway thing? Was that connected to the film scoring?

EBERT: You know, I don’t know who that came through. I know that they had most of their people together, and they were still looking for a song called “Money.” One of my top five is Cabaret, and there’s that great money song that she sings. So I was like, “Oh, I could do a different version of that.” And there’s a certain liberty you give yourself when the song isn’t for yourself. It’s like you just kind of go for it. Same with scoring.

What kind of guidance did they give you?

EBERT: They gave me some lyric ideas, randomly. But very basic things, I can’t remember what they were. Like, “I’m a crab, and I get hot in the summer.” And then you’re just like, okay, that’s something they were thinking about. I’ve been working on the piano mostly, although I’ve been fucking with the guitar again. But you sit at the piano and write a thing, and then I just played it and sang it, sent it to them. They’re like, “Yeah, this is good, work it up.” So then you work it up, and next thing you know, you’re at the fucking Tonys, trying to grab that EGOT.

Ima Robot just did a reissue of 2010’s Another Man’s Treasure. Was that spurred on by Suits having its big comeback? Or what made you decide to reissue that one?

EBERT: That’s actually a good question. Timmy and I sort of started Ima Robot, Tim Anderson. That whole project got cut off in the worst way possible. It was like a really bad — we got shoehorned into a second album thing, and we got stuck on this horrible major label, and I just felt like I lost my soul during that project. And it was a bummer because that was like my Nietzschean phallic intrusion fucking post-teenage — that was my statement. And I just let it — that was hard, you know — I just let it get completely thrown into the commercial zone, and I’ll never forgive myself for it. So because of that, I’m always keeping an eye on “Well, how can I keep a pulse on this thing that I didn’t do right by?” Do you know what I mean?

This is strictly off of me clicking around Wikipedia, but that band is technically not broken up, right?

EBERT: [Laughs] Yeah, I guess not.

Another thing about that band —I hadn’t realized until I was researching you for this interview that you had Joey [Waronker] and Justin [Meldal-Johnsen] in the band early on. Do you stay in touch with those guys at all?

EBERT: Yeah. I mean, loosely. I just saw Joey has been posting these fucking Oasis pictures, he’s posting Wembley stuff.

Oh, right. Because he’s playing with the Oasis reunion.

EBERT: But yeah, I mean, we’re all friends. When you go through stuff like that, it’s like it’s a crucible, you know? It binds you.

You mentioned working on piano. I know you had a solo album in 2020, maybe another film score or two since then, but I’m not sure what you have going on in terms of musical projects right now.

EBERT: It’s going to sound ridiculous, but I’ve been sitting on nine albums. I just, I wanted to be in a place where… you know, one of the reasons first albums are so good is that you have all this time. You’re not on a schedule. And so the thing gets ready when it’s ready. And then it feels like it just suddenly happened, and then you’ve got to do a second album. And suddenly that window shrinks. And suddenly you don’t even know if the second album is ready, but it’s time to release it. And I just didn’t want that. I don’t like that when that’s my process.

So anyway, I’ve been keeping this under wraps. Even my manager hasn’t heard the stuff. I just played a few songs from each one the other day to them. But yeah, I’ve just been sitting on them waiting for them to finalize, and two of them are finalized. I may start releasing stuff, ironically, like this week. And then the others are just behind. The question for me is, the thing that I still haven’t come to terms with, is touring. Like, touring destroyed my life, so how do I reapproach touring, and do I reapproach touring, and can I just put out music, and so on. But yeah, lots of music is on the way, actually.

Why do you say touring destroyed your life?

EBERT: Just because your personal relationships — especially when I was a very young father — even though you think everything’s good, and you’re covering all the angles, and you’re there as much as possible… Maybe I should just say work. From around the time of doing All Is Lost and finishing the second and third [Edward Sharpe] albums, I got clinical, terrible, horrendous insomnia, and I was working 18-hour days and touring and finishing all types of stuff simultaneously. And then, next thing you know, I’m just a shell. And so maybe it’s not just the touring, but certainly being away from my kid five, six months a year, it just tore at my personal relationships.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So, all these albums you’re sitting on, would they be Alex Ebert albums, or would they be…

EBERT: You tell me. Someone should tell me what to do with them. But yeah, at the moment [they’d be Alex Ebert albums].

You could drop them all at once like Tracks II, where Springsteen put out all of his shelved albums at the same time.

EBERT: Just drop them all at once. All the albums separately. I like that. Because people have been doing the hundred-song album lately. But maybe just drop several albums all at once. That’s what I want to do.

Well, he did a box set.

EBERT: Oh, that’s right. But they were all probably like apropos of one another. These are fairly fairly disparate-sounding things. But in some ways that’s why I should release them all together anyway.

Before we go, since the prompt that sparked the discourse was, “What’s the worst song ever made?” Do you have a suggestion for that question, for the worst song ever made?

EBERT: Oh shit. Oh no. I don’t know if… I don’t know. Let’s see. No, you know what? I don’t think I want to be involved in generating that. Although I love the discourse. If someone else wants to suggest something… but I think I’m in no position, or maybe too much of the position, to say anything.