Home by Now

"Home by Now" is MUNA's most road-worn track — driving rhythm, lyrics saturated with distance and movement, production that suggests motion even when standing still. The song interrogates the mythology of return, asking what home means when you've remade yourself away from the place that made you, whether return is possible or whether you're always arriving somewhere new. Gavin's vocal here has a particular tiredness that isn't defeat — it's the exhaustion of someone who has traveled a great distance and is still traveling. The arrangement is dense and muscular compared to some of their more atmospheric work, the rhythm section doing real physical work. There's a relationship between this track and the tradition of American road music — Springsteen's restless interstates, Gillian Welch's Southern melancholy — filtered through the specifically queer experience of leaving home to become yourself. The chorus opens up into something almost cinematic. This is music for late-night drives on empty highways, for airports at three in the morning, for the specific longing of people who made themselves somewhere they weren't born.