A young adult male wearing a dark jacket and scarf in a snowy outdoor setting during winter.

15:57

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Home Free's Tim Foust vs. a Minnesota winter

Name: Home Free's Tim Foust vs. a Minnesota winter
Uploaded: 2021-03-12T18:00:14Z
Duration: 15 min 57 s
Description: Tim Foust grew up in southeast Texas and didn't see snow until he was 20. So, naturally, the bass singer for Home Free heads to Minnesota in February.

Tim Foust grew up in southeast Texas and didn't see snow until he was 20. So, naturally, the bass singer for Home Free heads to Minnesota in February. more

His reason, he admits, is a little thin. He loves the Twin Cities "four months out of the year anyway," and he wants to know why people, two of his bandmates among them, stay the other eight. Walking on what he thinks is the lake, he notices his voice "materializing in the air." Soon his face "has ceased its normal functions."

The drive up from Nashville comes in captain's log entries, with Tim and Chris Chatham watching the numbers drop. It's 40 degrees when they leave, "already about 30 degrees too cold" for him. Somewhere in Illinois he logs, "I've made a huge mistake." By Iowa it's 13, with hours still to drive, and the one bright spot is fried cheese curds.

Minnesotans are happy to explain themselves, if not always helpfully. Asked what is good about winter, one local answers, "Nothing in the winter." Someone else insists it's not that bad out there, and Tim decides they have "different definitions of not too bad." One man's review of the season is hard to beat: "Winter's wonderful. It kills a whole lot of stuff," and then spring is beautiful. Another, sweating in a warm kitchen, says he would walk around in a T-shirt if it were a little colder.

Someone describes redneck sledding, where a truck tows a friend down the road on a sled or a tube at the end of a rope. This is news to Tim. "Why did no one take me redneck sledding? That's how you could have sold me on winter."

Day two starts with an iced-over windshield and no scraper. Then he sits down with Adam, a man in a face mask and beanie whom Tim introduces as "Bane from the Batman movies." Adam has a heated garage now, but he once lived in a trailer where ice grew on the inside of the door. Tim says it sounds like a horror film.

A person in a face mask and beanie sits back in a chair in a room lined with shelves of small items. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third. — Adam, introduced as Bane from the Batman movies, is going to teach Tim about Midwestern winter.

Asked what he likes about winter, Adam offers a trick with no official name. You sit in the hot tub, climb out, flop in the snow and flap your arms as fast as you can, then jump back in. He has done it, and he says it feels great. Tim did not pack swim trunks for Minnesota in February. Adam has something he can borrow.

On a count of three, Tim goes. He gets in about three swipes before he's back in the water. "My mustache is freezing," he says. "What's wrong with you people?" Then, for the second time on this trip, "Oh, I've made a huge mistake." Fans joke that the famous bass voice comes out of the snow a few notes higher.

A young adult male wearing a dark jacket and scarf in a snowy outdoor setting during winter. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third. — Tim Foust grew up in southeast Texas and didn't see snow until he was 20.

After shoveling, snowblowing and some light sledding, Adam takes it up a notch at a tubing hill. It's seven below and feels like 23 below. Tim goes down backwards for most of the run and calls it "pretty terrifying."

His verdict surprises even him. He enjoyed himself, and not because of anything they did. What makes a Midwestern winter worth it, he decides, is the Midwesterners themselves. Then he excuses himself to drive south "until the air no longer hurts my face."