Ali Aslam

Ali Aslam’s nuanced and expansive debut record, The Last American, easily holds seemingly conflicting but ultimately congruent perspectives in hand. One of the most optimistic yet daunting themes across the record lies in the idea that we are ultimately responsible for the world we create. Aslam’s songs let us know we’re doing okay, but we can do better. “Is this what everybody’s dreaming?” he challenges us. Can we dream bigger, more inclusively, more expansively? 

The Last American explores questions of identity, belonging, and perspective--not just as independent concepts but as interrelated factors that inform our relationships to culture, each other, and ourselves. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter’s tracks find their foundation in Aslam’s examination of his own identity as a Pakistani-American Muslim with a strong but complicated relationship to the mythology of American culture.

That mythology loomed large for Aslam growing up, as he straddled the Pakistani tradition of his parents and the American culture of his childhood. 

“With one foot in each culture, it was hard to feel like I truly belonged in either,” Aslam noted. “This made the major cultural touchstones that connected me with others that much more important. I also started to observe relationships more closely. I noticed that the ways people connect to culture and to each other shape and are shaped by their own sense of identity--we see the world in relation to what we belong to, and what we think belongs to us.” 

Aslam grew up loving the classic pop culture moments of the 80s and 90s, while acknowledging a need for more diversity and representation.

“I noticed that in all these icons of our culture, in the mythology that helped frame the American Dream, that there was nobody that looked like me,” said Aslam. “Anyone with a background as hyphenated as mine--Muslim-American, Pakistani-American--will try and take ownership of that mythology, but also be fundamentally aware that our relationship to those things is qualified, somehow ‘other.’ It applies to my relationship with myself as well. I can love all of these things about myself, and still feel, or be made to feel, like I don’t have a right to. I think with this record I'm asking if everybody feels this way.” 

Aslam wants to carve out a space for people to belong by telling his stories and the stories of the communities he comes from, in hopes of creating resonance with others. The Last American shares these stories with the conviction that we must look outward as we explore how to lift each other up.

Aslam defines The Last American as a supersonic folk record. While the songs nod to American pop culture’s most recognizable sonic moments, he’s created a genre of his own, combining American folk, rock, and pop into a sound that supersedes traditional classification. The album, recorded in Brooklyn and Queens, traverses a wide territory in its twelve songs. At the heart, though, lies the formative expectations and experiences of the American Dream, in all its complexities, fulfillments, and shortcomings.

The Last American arrives in late 2020.