Broadway’s Ali Louis Bourzgui Releases New Music — and Reveals Why It Hits Close to Home (Exclusive)
Broadway’s Ali Louis Bourzgui Releases New Music — and Reveals Why It Hits Close to Home (Exclusive) originally appeared on Parade.
Ali Louis Bourzgui is gearing up for the release of his new concept album Becomes a Home.
Created by the Hadestown star and collaborator Joey D’Amore, known collectively as the band Resident Lightweight, the album drops Friday, Sept. 12, and Bourzgui is sharing an exclusive first listen of the song “Impression of a River” with Parade ahead of its release.
AdvertisementAdvertisement#«R14e4kr8lb2m7nfddbH1» iframe AdvertisementAdvertisement#«R24e4kr8lb2m7nfddbH1» iframe“I feel like every time I write a song, I go into it with a challenge. So my challenge for myself with this one — there are multiple challenges — was that I wanted to write a song that took us on an adventure,” Bourzgui tells Parade. “This song is almost six-and-a-half minutes, but I really wanted it to be an immersive experience. That was the first challenge. The second challenge was that I wanted to make the song sound like what a river would sound like if it was music.”
The new tune, which drops at midnight on Friday, July 11, is a love letter to Bourzgui’s paternal grandmother and to Morocco, where his father is from. Recorded in an actual house in upstate New York, it makes the listener feel as if they are returning to the “literal/metaphorical version of a childhood home.”
The throughline of the new album Becomes a Home, Bourzgui explains, is “trying to figure out what home was, what has changed, how it's morphed, how to get back to it or how to accept it.”
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The actor and musician, who currently plays Orpheus in Hadestown, made his Broadway debut as Tommy in the 2024 revival of The Who’s Tommy. He was also on the road with the national tours of Company and The Band’s Visit, so he knows what it’s like navigating unfamiliar terrain.
AdvertisementAdvertisement#«R1ae4kr8lb2m7nfddbH1» iframe AdvertisementAdvertisement#«R2ae4kr8lb2m7nfddbH1» iframeAs the Broadway star explains, “When you're in your 20s and your childhood home isn't really your home anymore, you're trying to create a home, and you're constantly moving between multiple different homes. You're trying to make New York City a home, or you're trying to make being on tour a home.”
Resident LightweightClay SingerBourzgui also grapples with the feeling of living between two worlds. “My dad is from Morocco, and his whole side of the family is from there, and a lot of them still live there. We go visit a lot, but I only learned very minimal conversational Arabic growing up,” he explains. “When I go there, I always have this desire to be so much more part of the culture and to have more of a home there. They're so hospitable, and I feel very at home there, but there's always this slight barrier that, because I'm the son of an immigrant and I'm not exactly from there, it always feels a little distant.”
When it comes to his relationship with his grandmother, “She only speaks Arabic, and I only speak mostly English,” Bourzgui explains. “So our whole life, I had this unique experience where me and my grandmother don't necessarily have, like, a talking relationship. We have conversed or shared love solely through physical gestures and physical touch — or the way that she cooks for me and puts the love into cooking and feeds me, that's her way of communicating and expressing love.”
Resident LightweightClay SingerWith “Impression of a River,” Bourzgui tried to both create “the metaphor of me trying desperately to form myself into being perfectly in this culture — and not being an imposter in it.”
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Throughout his musical project, distributed by Joy Machine Records, “I was able to get my dad to record a spoken word about what he misses about his country and what he's proud of there,” Bourzgui explains. “And I have a couple of old video recordings of my grandmother laughing and us playing together, so it's just this soundscape [that] also celebrates the beauty of the culture.”
AdvertisementAdvertisement#«R1je4kr8lb2m7nfddbH1» iframe AdvertisementAdvertisement#«R2je4kr8lb2m7nfddbH1» iframeThis is the debut record of Resident Lightweight, distributed by Joy Machine Records, produced by Jonah Bobo withadditional producing and engineering byNicky Young. It was recorded in an actual house in upstate New York.
Broadway’s Ali Louis Bourzgui Releases New Music — and Reveals Why It Hits Close to Home (Exclusive) first appeared on Parade on Jul 10, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 10, 2025, where it first appeared.
