When I was approached at providing press coverage for Billboard Songwriting Contest winner, multi-Top-20 hitmaker, Zach Adam, I jumped at the opportunity, especially after finding out Zach wrote 3 songs for one of my all time Entertainment Idols, Grammy nominee Martha Wash.

Another reason I wanted to talk with Zach was because after reading the description for his new chamber musical about a queer musician, his estranged father, and the decade of silence between them, I felt Zach was out here quietly pulling my heart strings with Homebound The Musical.

Between writing musicals, chart topping songs, I also loved that Zach somehow found time to run his own Nashville theater company to give new work a real shot. 

In this interview, Zach answered my call to share:

• Inside the creation of Homebound The Musical and why Broadway Bound Theatre Festival was the perfect home for the show
• How a true story of a queer musician and his estranged father became a lockdown chamber musical about healing
• Why director Shea Sullivan was the only person trusted to hold this intensely personal story
• The moment in Homebound that nearly broke him to write, and what it had to balance emotionally
• The deeper meaning behind “Some things, it turns out, you can’t fix with tools” in his own life
• How writing hit songs for icon Martha Wash reshaped his approach to voice, story, and authenticity
• What running The New Theater in Nashville gives him that songwriting and composing alone never could
• So much more 

Connect with Zach: Website, Instagram

Connect with Homebound The Musical: Website, Instagram

Connect with Broadway Bound Theatre Festival: Website, Facebook, Instagram

In Homebound The Musical, a pandemic lockdown traps Jack, a queer musician, in his Tennessee childhood home with his estranged, secretly dying father, a decade of silence finally has an expiration date. Can two people who never learned to speak the same language forgive each other before time runs out?

Homebound The Musical is "where silence finally meets its deadline."

Homebound The Musical will play at AMT Theater in NYC as part of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival from August 5-9, 2026. Click Here for Tickets!

Zach Adam
Photo Courtesy Homebound The Musical Social Media

1. This August, your newest show, Homebound, is going to be presented as part of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival. What made you want to submit your show for this festival?  Homebound's a four-person chamber musical: one house, one family, no spectacle. A show that small needs a stage built for intimacy or it just gets lost. BBTF is set up for exactly that, new work, close quarters, people in the seats because they want to see something before it has a reputation yet.

The dramaturgy on this piece has all been in the direction of saying more with less, so a festival built around discovery felt like the right kind of pressure. And not gonna lie, getting picked mattered a lot. Out of a few hundred submissions, we were one of two Musicals chosen for the 2026 season.

2. How did you come up with the idea for Homebound The Musical? Homebound's inspired by true events. Families are coming apart right now over politics, belief, trauma nobody ever actually dealt with, that's just where we are.

I wanted to write toward the opposite of that. At its core this is a story about healing: a father and son who love each other and lost the muscle for showing it, stuck in the same house for the first time in ten years, with 2020 as the thing that finally locks the door behind them.

Director Shea Sullivan
Photo Courtesy Homebound The Musical Social Media

3. What was it about Shea Sullivan's artistic vision that made you realize she needed to direct this show? I met with a handful of directors before Shea. Her talent and track record made the shortlist easy, but here's what actually decided it: she's a queer woman who understands the South and has lived some version of what's in this story. That's not a box I was checking off. A director who's lived it recognizes things on the page that a director who's just studied it won't.

Beyond that, she doesn't need a line explained twice or a moment underlined, she trusts an audience. Which matters, because this whole show runs on what doesn't get said, tools instead of speeches, silence instead of confession. Working through revisions with her, that instinct held up in scene after scene.

4. What do you hope audiences come away with after seeing Homebound The Musical? Families and friendships are splitting apart right now just because people see the world differently, and it's easy to assume that once things crack that badly, there's no going back. I don't buy that, and this show doesn't either.

Frank and Jack don't talk for ten years, and Homebound isn't going to pretend that gets solved with a hug, some things really can't be fixed with tools. But forgiveness in this show isn't one clean moment. It's mechanical.

You do it in pieces, badly, late, imperfectly, and it's still worth doing. If somebody leaves the theater and picks up the phone to call a parent or a kid they've gone quiet with, that's the whole point.

5. What was the hardest scene or song to write, and why? The funeral eulogy near the end. Jack's alone, addressing a whole town that let him leave without a word, and I needed it to do two things at once that don't usually want to coexist: let him actually go after the people who stayed silent, and still land the forgiveness of his father a few minutes later without one undoing the other.

If it's too soft the ending feels unearned, if it's too sharp the forgiveness looks naive, and I went through a lot of drafts trying to find the version where he's clear-eyed, even a little merciless, about what that silence cost him, and still gets to "I forgive you" without it feeling like he just changed his mind.

It was hard for a more personal reason too. My dad's dealing with some health and age stuff right now, and there were lines in that scene I wrote with actual tears running down my face. Not a figure of speech. That's just what happened at my desk some nights.

6. The show's description says, "Some things, it turns out, you can't fix with tools." What's something in your life you've had to fix that didn't require a tool? Myself, and it's not close to done. The real work has been figuring out why I think the things I think, and whether there's a better way to think them. There's no finish line on that one. It still catches me off guard, which I've decided is a good sign, not a bad one.

7. In addition to musical theatre, you are also an accomplished songwriter, who has written 3 songs ("I’ve Got You," "Proud" & "Something Good") for one of My Entertainment Idols, the legendary, Grammy Nominated Martha Wash. How did you know that Martha’s voice was the one who needed to sing these songs? Those three were written for her specifically, not shopped around after the fact. My publisher, Ed Razzano, introduced me to Martha and her manager, James Washington, and from there it turned into a real back-and-forth about where she was in her life and what she actually wanted to sing about, instead of me just handing her something generic.

After that, honestly, the hard part was done, because Martha Wash can sing the phone book and make it sound like scripture. Getting to write for that voice was a privilege, plain and simple.

Zach Adam, Photo Courtesy Homebound Press Team

8. I’d love to find out more about you by playing off of these song titles.

• Proud - What are you most proud of today, either personally or career wise? That I haven't gotten jaded. This business will absolutely make you jaded if you let it, theater, music, all of it. I'm proud that I still show up ready to take a chance and do the actual work.
• Something Good - What is Something Good that happened to you this week? I started auditioning actors this week for Voice!, the show I co-wrote with Eidan Lipper. It's getting a full production at AMDA SummerFest this summer, directed by Igor Goldin. Hearing real voices in a room for something that's been seven years in the making, that's a good week.
• I’ve Got You - When has there been a time you’ve said to someone, “I’ve Got You”? The people close to me already know that, it's just how I show up for them. But I said the actual words out loud recently to a good friend in Nashville who was going through it. He already knew. I said it anyway.

9. On top of working in musical theatre & being a songwriter, you are also the Artistic Director of The New Theater in Nashville, TN. What do you get from running  your own theatre company that you don’t get from your other creative ventures? Writing gets me control over one thing at a time, a scene, a lyric, a moment. Running The New Theater gets me control over the whole ecosystem those things grow in. I watched too many genuinely good, original stories die on the vine because the commercial pipeline is set up to move IP and adaptations, not new work from people nobody's heard of.

TNT is my attempt at being the room where that doesn't happen, where a writer actually gets developed instead of getting a nice rejection. I'm building the thing I wish existed for me ten years ago, just not for me this time. It's a different kind of authorship than sitting alone with a lyric, and it feeds something the writing alone doesn't.

10. What's something we didn't get to talk about that you'd like readers to know? Every show I write ends up being about the cost of a performed self, a character who built a version of themselves just to survive and what it costs to put that down.

Homebound's the most personal version of that I've written, but it's not the only one. If your work keeps getting passed on by everyone who's supposed to green light this stuff, that doesn't mean it's bad. It might just mean the system was never built to move a story like yours.

Build your own room instead of waiting for someone to let you into theirs.

Zach Adam, Photo Courtesy Homebound Press Team

More on Zach Adam:

Zach Adam is a Billboard Songwriting Contest winner, multi-Top-20 hitmaker, PMG recording artist and BMG staff writer, and recipient of ACUM Composer of the Year and Song of the Year awards.

He has written and produced Top 20 Billboard hits for artists including Martha Wash, Offer Nissim, and the First Ladies of Disco.

As a writer-composer of musical theater, his work is about people fighting their way to being heard, and his career has spanned New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, and Nashville.

With co-writer Eidan Lipper, he is the composer-lyricist and co-book-writer of Voice!, an ensemble musical that turns The Little Mermaid inside out: a young woman in a 19th-century fishing town disguises herself as a male writer to compete in a fairytale contest, and the parallel story she invents becomes the engine of her own escape.

Voice! was selected as the sole musical for AMDA SummerFest 2026, and was recently presented in concert featuring Tony winner Bonnie Milligan and Donald Webber Jr.

Zach is the founder and Artistic Director of The New Theater, a Nashville nonprofit dedicated to originating, developing, and producing new musicals. ASCAP. Dramatists Guild.

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