Ali Louis Bourzgui—star of Broadway's Hadestown and the recent revival of The Who's Tommy—is readying to release his debut album via Joy Machine Records. Becomes a Home drops September 19. A single from the release, "Gloucester," releases on streaming platforms August 22—but Playbill has an exclusive first listen. Hear the track below.
Becomes a Home is a concept album Bourzgui has made with Joey D'Amore, collectively the band Resident Lightweight. Each song puts the listener in a childhood home, with the past flooding back as each room is visited. Recorded in an upstate New York home, the album features arrangements and orchestrations by Jonah Bobo, and is produced by Bobo and Nicky Young.
We caught up with Bourzgui, currently starring as Orpheus in Hadestown on Broadway through August 31, to find out more about his latest Broadway outing and the upcoming album. Find out what he has to say below.
How's it feel to be heading into your final performances at Hadestown?
Ali Louis Bourzgui: Time certainly moves fast when you’re having fun and when you pair that fun with meaningful artistic expression. This show has given me so many gifts in the form of community, hope, healing, and a renewed belief in the power of art. I will miss this show and its people like crazy, but I am leaving changed and inspired. It feels like such a special moment for the last performance to be on my birthday and to be sharing it with the final performances of all my fellow principal cast mates. It’s sure to be a pretty weepy show—sorry in advance if all the words don’t come out properly. Hadestown has true magic in it, and I’m so excited for the next cast to get to inhabit it, and to see their take on these characters. I love how much the show changes with the individuals that tell the story.
Tell me about the album, and the inspiration behind it.
My writing partner and roommate Joey D’Amore and I have been writing music together in our living room for the past three years and have always used music as a form of journaling and introspection. Last year, we started to compile those songs into an order and started tying motifs and themes throughout the whole piece. My Broadway career so far has been solely staged concept albums so I figured, why not make my own? Becomes a Home is part album, part soundscape. We wanted to create a little sonic world you can enter with your headphones whenever you’re overwhelmed and asking life’s biggest questions or trying to reconnect to your softer side. The listener is placed center stage, becoming the protagonist of the journey. The album takes place in a house, a physical representation of returning to a childhood home and searching for answers to a past gone too fast. The album is continuous, and each song is in a different room or space as you walk through and interact with your surroundings. We recorded the album in a house upstate and recorded all the footsteps and house sound effects in the actual space. Becomes a Home asks the question of what “home” means as you grow through life. How it defines our past, how we attempt to find new versions of it in the present, and how it informs our decisions for the future.
What made you pick this track to release as the final debut single before the album drops?
“Gloucester” is the big finale track on the album and the song I feel most authentically represents our hearts and artistic core. We wrote it in one night as Joey wrote the guitar part, and I just sang my feelings about the state of the world over it until we had lyrics that stuck. It features returns from many themes throughout the album and includes a large collection of instruments also making their big finale return. The song is about the experience of keeping your heart open in a harsh world and what it’s like to feel the weight of collective pain. It’s a reminder that to be empathetic is a deeply human trait, and to desensitize ourselves to pain, whether it be ours or someone else’s, is deeply harmful in the long run. The song is named after the place in Massachusetts where my grandmother’s ashes were spread, which perfectly mirrors something that is perfectly balanced in its beauty and deep sadness.
What do you hope this album shows us about you as an artist and performer that we haven't seen yet?
Writing your own work is the most freeing mode of artistic expression and the most fulfilling. The lyrics and melodies I’ve written on this album are a very vulnerable encapsulation of my soul and the most honest performance I’ve put out in the world to date because these songs are basically journal entries and reflections written in times where I was working through something. As a whole, this piece is an homage to the place where Joey and I grew up (Massachusetts), the trees, mountains and rivers that we miss while living in NYC, and our families that raised us. I’m proud of the sacred space that we’ve created in the form of sound, and the sacred cozy gatherings we’ll be having when we play the album live in the fall and winter! Be on the lookout on Instagram @ali.louis and/or @ResidentLightweight.
Hear more of Resident Lightweight's work on Spotify.
Myra Malloy, Daniel Breaker, Ali Louis Bourzgui, and company of Hadestown
Myra Malloy in Hadestown
Myra Malloy and company of Hadestown
Myra Malloy and Ali Louis Bourzgui in Hadestown
Ali Louis Bourzgui in Hadestown
Ali Louis Bourzgui in Hadestown
Ali Louis Bourzgui, Myra Malloy, and company of Hadestown
