Irish folksinger Robert Grace has a single out called “Home.” Released Nov. 5, the song has already earned nearly 1.4 million streams on Spotify, and a video of him recording part of it with his young son, Lincoln, has 1.2 million likes on TikTok.
Grace, 32, brought together three generations for the song, which includes Lincoln and his father, Bob, providing vocals. The video for the song on YouTube features candid footage of the three Graces, either from what appears to be home movies or footage from the recording session.
Here is where the “home” part comes in:
So, I'm gonna hold you 'til I'm old/This is your home/I won't let you go
It’s a heartening and layered message in a simple line. Love — wherever it comes from — can be as strong a protective force as masonry.
In another video, Grace makes it explicit that the inspiration was a romantic relationship, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also apply to the familial.
It’s also a hopeful line, arriving amid particular turbulence and anxiety with regard to homes and housing. At a time when foreclosures have been rising for eight continuous months, here is Grace promising to be a home that never lets go.
Home is one of the eternal subjects of music. And what artists have to say about the concept is often informed by larger social forces than a house.
Singers satirize suburbs
The 1950s and ’60s saw an explosion of tract housing built in newly formed suburbs across the country. Millions of people moved from disjointed rural and urban enclaves into rows of similar-looking houses on similar-looking culs-de-sac.
Singer-songwriter Malvina Reynolds saw this as the height of social conformity in her 1962 folk nursery rhyme “Little Boxes,” which Pete Seeger later popularizes:
Little boxes on the hillside/Little boxes made of ticky-tacky/Little boxes on the hillside/And they all look just the same
The Monkees, or rather their songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King, had an analogous reaction to moving from New York City to suburban New Jersey, which they summarized in 1967’s “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” To Goffin and King, the lives inside the homes became centered on petty materialism.
See Mrs. Gray, she’s proud today/because her roses are in bloom
And Mr. Green, he’s so serene/He’s got a TV in every room
This criticism of suburbia was also seen in movies such as 1968’s “The Swimmer,” in which Burt Lancaster plays a man trying to reach his home by swimming through his neighbors’ pools, and the 1975 sci-fi thriller “The Stepford Wives.”
But some still saw purchasing a house as the fulfillment of a dream.
Our house is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard/Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy cause of you
There’s a trick hidden in those lines from 1970’s “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. While the fireplace and the illuminated windows the song sings about sound lovely, it is the other person who actually makes life in the house worthwhile.
English band Madness presents roughly the same idea in its song “Our House” from 1982. The home is made of the narrator’s family, his “house-proud” mom who allows no mess and his father in his Sunday best. It’s a familiar home portrait, and younger listeners especially probably connect to the suggestion within the song that you’ve got to leave home eventually, that “something tells you that you’ve got to move away from it.”
Market inspires longing
It’s possible that these open critiques of homes or homeownership or suburban living were salient only because of the relative stability and predictability in the American housing market. The idea that a person would eventually buy a house after college or getting a job was something of a foregone conclusion.
The median U.S. home price in 1960 was $11,900, according to the Census Bureau, which translates to $131,915 today. The median home price in October hit $385,000, according to Homes.com, $10,000 shy of the record the price set in June. The 1960 price was 2.1 times the average income. October’s price was 4.6 times the average household income of $83,730 in 2024.
This is part of the reason the number of first-time homebuyers saw their lowest share of sales on record between July 2024 and June 2025, and why the average age of a first-timer hit 40 for the first time. It’s probably a big part of why the average American needs to save for 13 years and seven months to be able to afford a down payment.
And it may explain why songs about home from the past five years include such longing. On her own 2021 song “Home,” pop artist Silvervale sings what could be the anthem for every person endlessly scrolling through house listings online:
And so I’m searching/Across the world for something
Unsure if I’ll ever find it/A place that I call home
Several artists have covered 2009’s “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, which details the life of a loving relationship around a chorus that declares, “Home is wherever I’m with you.” It’s aspirational and a reminder that the thing people are hunting for isn’t described in bedrooms and square footage, that what’s being bought and sold is less valuable than the people living there.
The year 2009, when many people felt the Great Recession, also produced Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me,” a tragic ballad in which a woman going through hardship returns to the home she grew up in — and which her family no longer owns.
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it/This brokenness inside me might start healing
Lambert’s narrator discovers that the memories in the building, the ones that gave her strength and purpose, came from her life, not the walls.
It’s a vital, if sometimes trite, idea: a “house is not a home.” In fact, this idea was written explicitly in the 1964 movie “A House Is Not a Home,” with an accompanying theme song by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, sung by Dionne Warwick.
A room is still a room/Even when there's nothing there but gloom
But a room is not a house/And a house is not a home
When the two of us are far apart/And one of us has a broken heart
Songs about homes are always really about people.
Or, as Robert Grace puts it:
A house is just a housе on its own/But with you there/It will always be homе.