Home Free’s Austin Brown Goes Solo for Grooving ‘Earn It’
Didn't see this one coming!
With their stop-you-in-your-tracks harmonies, country vocal group Home Free is all about working together … but sometimes folks need to take things into their own hands. That’s the case today (September 23) for the group’s Austin Brown, who’s going solo for the grooving get-‘r-done anthem, “Earn It.”
Marking the singer-songwriter’s first solo single, Brown’s first track puts him in a whole different kind of spotlight than fans are used to. Lighthearted but built on a confident strut, it’s a straight-up rural R&B jam, co-written by Brown with Asher Postman and Steven Martinez. Low-and-slow vocals with a drawling delivery join laid-back lyrics and plenty of plucky country wisdom, as Brown rolls through the virtues of hard work and dedication.
“After a lot of back and forth with my team, we decided to go completely independent with this release – really giving us the chance to see what we are made of,” Brown says in a statement. “Every songwriter I know says that Nashville is a ‘10-year town,’ and if I’ve learned anything from my time with Home Free, it’s that almost every ‘overnight success’ has actually been pounding the pavement in Music City for years before their first big break.
“That’s the very impetus for this song in general, which is why we picked it to launch my career as a solo artist,” he goes on. “When Asher Postman and I got together with Steven Martinez to write, we wanted a song about hard work…. I don’t hire out lawn care, or roofers. I’m the son of a 3rd generation building contractor. If a job needs to get done around the house, I dig my heels in and get it done myself. Being true to what my granddaddy taught me, we’re gonna buckle up, get dirty, and make music – just because we love it, and we’re lucky enough that we can. Hopefully, that hard work pays off.”
“I been workin’ with my hands, y’all / Plowing in my own fields / Raising up with the sun, working till the day is done / Daddy said if we wanna have fun … we gotta earn it,” goes the playful but determined chorus.
Along with Rob Lundquist, Adam Rupp, Tim Foust, and Adam Chance, Austin Brown is part of the a capella vocal group Home Free, a group who have stunned fans with their thick harmonies since breaking out on NBC’s The Sing Off in 2013. They released a number of independent albums over the years with a variety of members, and dropped their latest, Dive Bar Saints, last September.
