EXCLUSIVE: Highway Home Wants to Bring Country’s Big Harmony Groups Back Into the Conversation
Eamon Owen, Conner Sweeny, and Stanton Langley talk Broadway beginnings, country-radio influences, and the power of three voices finding each other.
Sometimes, a band starts with a carefully mapped-out plan. Highway Home started because a couple of musicians had other gigs.
One call for substitutes. One acoustic shift on Nashville’s Broadway. Three voices that gave the singers behind them a reason to keep going.
Now, Eamon Owen, Conner Sweeny, and Stanton Langley are building Highway Home around something country fans have loved for decades: heartfelt songs delivered by voices that belong together.
In an exclusive conversation with All Country News, the rising trio traced that connection back to a shared musical upbringing, and explained why they believe country’s harmony groups deserve more room in the spotlight.
Raised on the Good Stuff
Ask Highway Home about their influences, and the answer sounds like a very good day on country radio.
Diamond Rio. Restless Heart. Rascal Flatts. Lonestar.
“We are very lucky that our upbringing was very similar when it comes to what we were listening to,” Owen tells All Country News. “From a young age we were all listening to groups like Diamond Rio, Restless Heart, Rascal Flatts, and Lonestar.”
Those groups helped establish the musical vocabulary the trio now shares. Before Highway Home existed, its members were already learning to love the same thing: the way distinct voices can become a group’s calling card.
“When it comes to writing our own music, we can’t help but have a little inspiration from all of those groups mixed with our own little spin!” Owen says.
That last part matters. Highway Home’s sound draws from late ’90s and early 2000s country, but three singer-songwriters bring three individual perspectives to the table. Their influences give them common ground; their own stories give them somewhere to go.
The Broadway Shift That Started Everything
The trio’s origin story is a reminder that a routine night at work can turn into something considerably bigger.
About two and a half years ago, Sweeny had a trio acoustic shift at The Valentine on Broadway with Mac Eason and Hunter Holland. When other gigs pulled both musicians away, he needed replacements.
He called Owen and Langley.
“He called both of us for one shift and from that day on we knew we had something special,” Owen recalls.
It is an appropriately unpolished beginning for a group built around musical chemistry. Their first test happened on a gig, with microphones in front of them and a shift to fill. What could have remained a one-night arrangement became the starting point for Highway Home.
Three Writers, Room for Every Voice
Of course, recognizing that your voices work together is one thing. Figuring out how three songwriters share the storytelling is another.
According to Langley, the songs tend to settle that question themselves.
“It comes naturally, we almost always know within the first few minutes of writing who’s going to take the lead vocal on a song,” he explains. “Our individual styles all shine through in those moments!”
That instinct gives the trio room to operate as both a collective and three distinct artists. A song can find its lead singer without asking everyone else to disappear into the background.
Their Southern upbringings supplied the foundation. Nashville gave that shared love of country music a place to become a working partnership.
A Familiar Feeling, a New Introduction
When Highway Home steps up to sing, Sweeny hopes the connection happens immediately.
“As a group, we hope that with our first notes in three part harmony, we bring a flood of nostalgia that reminds you of a million things you love,” he says.
He points to the Eagles, Diamond Rio, Restless Heart, and Rascal Flatts among the groups they admire. But beneath those references is a bigger ambition: making that kind of vocal connection a more visible part of country music again.
“All we want to do is bring back a seemingly lacking part of our Genre that has always been an important part of the country music ecosystem,” Sweeny says.
It is a clear statement of purpose from a trio still introducing itself. Highway Home knows the lineage it wants to join, and understands that the next chapter needs its own stories.
The first shift brought them together. What they build with those three voices is the part worth watching.
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