Celebrating the fifth anniversary of his solo album Southern Gravity, Kristian Bush’s own musical compass comes into play while chatting late on a Thursday morning. Sounding more like a Horatio Alger story or even something out of a pulp paperback, Bush’s prolific professional music career technically started when he was in middle school. Now 50, the former member of the duo Billy Pilgrim, and one-half of the country music duo Sugarland, has added seven additional tracks on Southern Gravity, a feat that should come as no surprise to an industry and fanbase that know Bush for his writing gifts. No beans about it, writing is in his blood. 

Originally released in April 2015, via Streamsound Records, Southern Gravity yielded the hit “Trailer Hitch”, a song Bush wrote with his brother Brandon and Tim Owens. An exasperatingly fun song, “Trailer Hitch” is like a trademark to Bush’s sunny personality. Bush felt like, at the time of the original release, it was his chance to express something different than what Sugarland fans had come to hear. 

“With Sugarland going on hiatus, all bets were that Jennifer was going to put out a solo record, there was a very blurred concept that Sugarland was her. That was what was being fed,” Bush said. “As we took a break, no one really expected me to put out a record…I want to reach the most people possible with my music. I’m agnostic about my delivery system.”

Teaming up with Byron Gallimore, a producer who has worked with Tim McGraw and Sugarland, Bush said he was actually a little standoffish to sign with Gallimore and Jim Wilkes’ indie Streamsound Records. 

“They usually don’t have the megaphone I’m looking for to find strangers,” Bush, who garnered two Grammy awards for Sugarland’s “Stay” in 2009, said about independent labels. “Byron and I, you know, did a great job putting the rest of this record together. But I was kinda turning it in already done.”

Bush said he had a staggering 300 songs ready (in the can). 

“I was trying to get rid of record one and record two,” Bush said. “I want to make record one and kill it, make record two and kill it and make record three. Now, I finally figured myself out, have the sound I want, this is what I really sound like…I was worried that because Jennifer is such a good singer that I was delivering B or C level songs because she was so good. I can’t sing like her, but I can write something that makes you feel something. That’s what that was as an album. Put a flag in the sand.”

Bush’s writing style and making his fans “feel something” can be traced back to the time before boarding school and Emory University. He’s the great-grandson of Bush Brothers and Company founder A.J., and destined to run a cannery in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains. Instead, the family-run company reorganized and off went Kristian to boarding school in Connecticut. 

“I pretty much left home by the time I was in ninth grade,” Bush said. “And I never came back.”

After high school, he planned to return to the south again for college. Atlanta’s Emory University proved to be the perfect, big city backdrop to an already music hungry writer. 

“You got to remember, like, when my brother and I were in grade school or middle school, before we got shipped off to boarding schools, we were making records on four-tracks, just the two of us,” Bush, whose brother Brandon played keys in the band Train,  said. “We would split up who played what instrument. He’d play drums, pianos, keyboards, and I would play bass and guitars. So we would figure out how to do all this stuff. By the time we were in high school, we had made like five records and we would be selling to our friends. I knew pretty early on the dynamic of record companies. The unsold inventory is motivating. So, being in Atlanta by having made seven or eight different records, I got plopped in a music scene that was insane. 1988 was stupid interesting.”

The timing started to take shape and work in Bush’s favor. The Indigo Girls, known for “Closer To Fine” and attending Emory University, were building a fervent following and Bush found himself on many A&R reps’ radars looking around Atlanta for talent. 

“I was immediately the youngest kid in the scene,” Bush said. “They just let me stay there, I just wanted to see it.”

He was also still a student at Emory University and had a major to choose. He thought pre-med might be his path. 

“Within a couple of years, I was supposed to see how it all shook out,” Bush said. “I was pre-disposed to literature, but by the time got to organic chemistry, it just about kicked my ass. I got a chance to take a creative writing course – I couldn’t believe they assigned me to make shit up. I didn’t spend my whole life looking for a creative writing degree…Jimmy Carter taught my autobiography class, we had Kurt Vonnegut and Maya Angelou and more as our teachers.”

Bush, who turned in several songs as part of his senior thesis, performed with the rock band Storyteller, before forming the folk rock duo Billy Pilgrim (a nod to the protagonist from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five), with Andrew Hyra. They released their self-titled debut album in 1994 and Bloom in 1995 and are known for hits “Get Me Out Of Here” and “Sweet Louisiana Sound”. 

“We were playing in an acoustic scene, like the tail after Indigo Girls,” Bush said. “We were part of a revitalization of neo folk movement, from New England, down to Georgia, to West Texas.”

A six-time BMI songwriting award winner, Bush continues to pack his distinct brand of soul, Americana and country rock into his work. One of the newest tracks on Southern Gravity’s re-issue is the stirring “American Window”. Like teenage roller-coasters without breaks, we keep pavin’ over the top of our mistakes, it’s beautifully broken, but ain’t it great?, sings Bush.

Bush co-wrote “American Window” with famed songwriter Tom Douglas. Among the dizzying amount of Douglas hits are “We Made Love” (Alabama), “I Run To You” (Lady Antebellum), “The House That Built Me” (Miranda Lambert) and “Drive” Eli Young Band.  

“He’s a fixture in the Nashville environment,” Bush said of Douglas. “He’s very studied. His office has a typewriter. Everything he starts writing is very lyrically based. I’m like an odd bird, I’m not from Nashville,  my writing is just more instinctual, I’m not a highly trained writer from the music industry. But like all collaborations, what you do is turn the other person on. Once you turn them on, it rolls.”

Bush said the song is an interesting look through the window. 

“What you see is not necessarily awesome,” Bush said. “I said ‘what if what you see is contradictions’, what we see makes us feel better, what we see also redefines what we are. I’ve traditionally had a hard time using America in the song. I think it stems from my creative writing training, which is be very careful writing about what people already have a preconceived notion. I can hear the Grady High School marching band on good days, way in the distance. I remember hearing Good Night Moon as a kid and reading Good Night Moon to my kids. This song, it’s almost like a Springsteen moment that you don’t realize that he’s now changed, you know Born in the USA on you, it’s not that dramatic. The outside is beautifully broken.”