Home Free is Adam Bell-Bastien, Adam Chance, Rob Lundquist, Adam Rupp, and Tim Foust.
In 2024, the five member group started a new tour, Crazy(er) Life, celebrating the 10 year anniversary of their breakout album, Crazy Life (2014), released after winning NBC’s fourth season of “The Sing Off” in 2013. The release extends their run of Top 10 Billboard Country chart appearances to a total of fourteen in the last 10 years.
Their latest album, Crazy(er) Life follows the 2023 album As Seen On TV, which hit #8 on Current Country Albums chart, and the chart-topping success of 2022’s So Long Dixie, which hit #1 on the Current Country Albums chart to become the sixth Top 3 album of the group’s career.
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 acappella 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
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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. The maturity in the songs belies just how long the group has been at this. Most fans probably have no memory of Home Free before they applied for, and ultimately won, the fourth season of NBC’s acappella competition series, “The Sing-Off,” impressing judges Sara Bareilles and Ben Folds as well as millions of nightly viewers in 2013. That victory put the turbo drive to a career that had already been over a decade in the making.
Founding member, Adam Rupp, provides the group’s percussion sounds and beatboxing, which makes for some of the most show-stopping live moments, but also some of the subtlest undercurrents on record. Members have shifted slightly through years of touring and “The Sing Off,” and Home Free signed with Sony for a string of four albums that all debuted in the country top 10.
Points out group member Rob Lundquist — “Tim Foust joining the group in 2012 was a game-changer for Home Free, big time. When he actually made that switch and he became a full-time member, we exploded after that. He’s a big reason why we are where we are today.” Without taking that much credit, Foust acknowledges that he “shared more country with the group, and that led to us covering some Josh Turner, which was fitting for my deeper voice.” Adam Chance, the group’s baritone and newest addition, joined in 2016. Austin Brown joined the group in 2013 and spent more than a decade with the group. The newest to the group is Adam Bell-Bastien, whose silky smooth tenor is winning over long-time fans and adding to Home Free’s sound and spirit.
Home Free’s primary “platform” — very unofficially speaking — has been YouTube, where they’ve racked up a staggering 750 million+ views to date and 1.7 million subscribers, 900,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, and 925,000 followers on TikTok. The video success makes sense, apart from their canniness in choosing attention-getting covers: Home Free is a group that demands to be seen as well as heard, if only to prove anew each time that, yes, it’s five humans doing this...not just “home free,” but hands-free.
“When we signed with our management company, right after winning ‘The Sing-Off’,” recalls Brown, “a big part of the plan was based around YouTube, and a portion of our success has been and will always be that, just because it stays there forever.” In recent years the group has hooked up with the
Patreon crowd-funding platform that allows fans to invest in their video production. “We’ve made close to a hundred music videos now. And while a lot of them are country covers, sometimes we’ll do things outside the box, because you never know which music video is going to be the one that turns an ear onto Home Free.”
There is one very good example of that. Diana Ross asked the group to perform at her 75th birthday party, after she discovered their video covering her hit song, “Love Train.”
Her appreciation is proof of the power of search results to turn celebrities and non-celebrities alike into Home Free super-fans. “Oh, man,” says Foust. “Diana Ross is one of the few people that can call on Thursday and say ‘Hey, what are you doing Tuesday?’ and we say, ‘Whatever you want!’ Our minds were blown that we were on her radar at all. Once we got out to L.A., her assistant told us that she had spent the entire previous day sitting in front of her computer watching Home Free music videos, which is just crazy. The fact that someone who has lived music for over half a century —three quarters of a century! — is moved by our music is such an encouragement to continue doing what we’re doing.”
They certainly haven’t lacked encouragement from within the country genre, especially getting appreciation from other vocal harmony-oriented groups like Little Big Town and Rascal Flatts, who understand just what it is they’re pulling off, even if those other acts don’t perform without the safety net of bass, guitar and drums. Growing up, Foust’s wish in life was to be like Richard Sterban of the classic vocal group the Oak Ridge Boys. Eventually, of course, Home Free earned props from those same Boys. “They said they feel like we’re the only group they’ve ever come across that they feel can properly carry their torch forward,” says Foust.
Covers have always been a crucial part of what the group does. John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads is one of their most requested songs and Vince Gill’s Go Rest High on That Mountain is really moving for their fan base. But they have also released original material, including on their 2019 album Dive Bar Saints. Their album As Seen On TV was released in November 2023, and includes killer covers of Life is a Highway, Ring of Fire and Oh, Pretty Woman.
At this point in Home Free’s career, you might wonder who makes up the core part of the group’s fan base: Is it acappella buffs who are thrilled that such a thing exists in the country world, too? Or rank-and-file country fans who might love this music with or without an all-vocal approach?
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“A little of both, actually,” says Adam Rupp. “First and foremost, we view ourselves as a country band that happens to be acappella. To this day, there’s still a stigma out there about acappella music; people think it’s barbershop, and that’s the extent of the conversation. But there’s definitely that fan that loves the fact that we don’t use instruments and thinks it’sunique and outside the box. At the same time, with a lot of the music that we produce, we’re just competing as best we can with what’s sonically happening on the radio — making sure that it’s got impact in the ‘drums,’ that the bass is nice and full, that we’ve got the harmonies going, and then we throw in little, instrumental imitation grooves behind it. And some people don’t even really think twice about it. They think that they’re just listening to good music, and then they find out after the fact: ‘Oh, they’re not doing that with any instrumentation.’”
Yet, Rupp points out, crucially, the goal is not to try to 100 percent duplicate the sound of a normally arranged, full-band record — because the world is already full of those, after all. “It’s definitely a challenge,” Rupp says, “because especially with the beatboxing and percussion stuff, you have to play this fine line of making it sound like a drum but yet have enough human quality that it sounds believable that a person is doing that. You can’t go too crazy in the editing to make it sound not human at all. You always have to keep a little bit of that humanity in the sound of what you’re doing. People don’t want to be glossed over with a bunch of production. They still want to relate to someone actually doing it.” For the ultimate proof of Home Free’s dynamic range, you only have to look at a recent songoff on the group’s Twitter (X) 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. It was just a
coincidence that those two songs came up together that day, but there’s really no better picture of their fan base. Between the one-of-a-kind nature of the group, their extraordinary showmanship and quick wit, plus their homegrown but rapidly expanding global audience... saints and barhoppers alike are wildly loyal fans of Home Free’s upbeat, Nashville-dipped pop hits, country and western standards, and incredible harmony-laden vocals.
Home Free’s first release with new member Adam Bell-Bastien is their new music video of Bonnie Raitt’s enduring romantic anthem Something To Talk About Marking the first single and official music video with new lead tenor, Adam Bell-Bastien, the clip comes with special personal meaning to Bastien. “In the process of deciding what song to release as my first single with Home Free, I compiled a list of songs that filled me with nostalgia,” Bell-Bastien says. “The rest of the guys were excited when I mentioned Something to Talk About, so we immediately went to work to bring it to life.”
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“This song reminds me of childhood family camping vacations in the tip of Michigan’s ‘thumb’ at a gorgeous campground right on the shores of the Saginaw Bay,” he went on. “We’d sit under the canopy of trees at our site with local radio station Cruise 102 playing in the background, known then as ‘the station that rocks the docks and shakes the lakes in FMX Stereo!’ This song never ceases to make me smile and I hope our version can give listeners the same effect!” Spreading feel-good harmony (and irresistible grooves) on the Bonnie Raitt song, the five-piece group celebrate the inclusive power of love with cameos from country star Mark Wills, plus broadcast journalists Alecia Davis and Meagan Alexander. And in the process, they also tribute some of Bell-Bastien’s most cherished childhood music memories.
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