Kristian Bush live in Union, WA | July 13

At age 52, singer-songwriter Kristian Bush was in the final stages of reinventing himself. It wasn’t the first time, and it probably won’t be the last. In fact, he is such an expert on resilience and reinvention you would think he could do a Ted Talk on the subject. And you’d be right. You can find it on YouTube.

“I started reinventing myself when I was twelve,” recalls the East Tennessee native and owner of a pair of Grammy Awards and a half dozen CMA awards, who kicks off the Peace, Love & Union Summer Songwriter Series in Union on July 13. He grew up in the Bush family that owned the Bush Brothers Baked Beans company. Every expectation was that he would grow up and help run the family business. Then his grandparents were forced to make a business deal and lost it all.

“They spent the rest of their lives angry and bitter about it,” Kristian recalls. What they lacked, he says, was resiliency - the ability to adapt to their changing reality. “But I was a kid, and kids are resilient. They were bitter, but I didn’t really understand it or care much about it. At twelve, I had lost the job I was literally born to do, but I saw it as an opportunity to be something else. I decided to be a musician.”

And he was a good one. He was in his early 20s when his folk rock duo Billy Pilgrim signed with Atlantic Records. Just months later, some friends of theirs from the same area signed a record deal with the same label. In 1994, both groups released albums.

Billy Pilgrim sold 200,000 records, while their friends Hootie and the Blowfish took over the charts and sold 16 million albums. When they were dropped by their record company a couple years later, it was clear that Billy Pilgrim was not the road to success.

“I knew I was good at writing and producing music,” he says, “and it was a mystery to me why it wasn’t good enough. But I knew I had to keep going, that I was not finished making music, and so I formed Sugarland.”

Sugarland’s first and biggest hit was a song called “Baby Girl,” a hopeful, optimistic, almost fairy-tale like song about making it in the music business, delivered in singer Jennifer Nettles’s signature twang, written at a time when success in the music business was the polar opposite of their reality.

“When we wrote that song, no one had ever seen a Sugarland concert or bought a single Sugarland record,” Kristian reflects. “And it was written at a depressing time. My mom had recently died, and the towers had just been hit by planes. But we just decided to write a song about what we wanted to be and wanted to see.”

The song would go on to spend more time on the Billboard Country Charts than any song in history to that point. The duo went on to notch twelve top ten hits, including five Billboard Number Ones.

But eight years after Sugarland exploded onto the scene and became Kristian Bush’s identity, the duo went on an indefinite hiatus. And while he initially thought his success as part of the duo would make for an easy transition as a solo country artist, he was not so fortunate.

“I knew everyone in the business and in country radio, but it was as if they didn’t know who I was with-

out Sugarland,” he says, “I didn’t understand how that could be, but I realized that the Sugarland momentum was not going to transfer to me as a solo artist.”

After more than a quarter century in the music business and an armload of Grammy and CMA hardware earned with Sugarland, Kristian finally found himself recording his first solo album.

And in preparing for that album, Kristian Bush wrote a lot. He wrote nearly 300 songs for the project, a creative burst which he describes as “almost unhealthy, really.” When he started the process of culling the hun-

dreds of songs down to the nineteen that made the cut, he had to dig deep.

“I asked myself what do I want to say and why do I want to say it,” he reflects. “What can my voice deliver to you now [as a solo artist] that previous versions of me couldn’t?”

The result of that inquiry was Southern Gravity, an album that produced the top 20 hit “Trailer Hitch” and which touches frequently on Southern life, including an aspect of Southern culture rarely captured in song.

‘There’s an often overlooked thread in the culture that isn’t talked about very often, but if you live in Tennessee, there’s a pull to the beach. At the end of the day, for us who live in the South, there comes a season when we must go to the water, and the water will hold us.”

Among the songs that made the cut were the exquisite ballad “House on a Beach,” and “Flip Flops,” a tune about a stumbling, dancing drunk walk home from a bar, a song that Kristian says he couldn’t let go of, even though it didn’t initially get much radio traction.

“I still laugh every time I sing the song, even though I know what’s coming!” he chuckles. “So I thought if this song is bringing me so much joy, I have to keep sharing it with people.” The desire to keep “Flip Flops” flipping, combined with the fact he’d also fallen in love with a song he’d written called “Bar with a Pool In It,” gave rise to his 2019 EP Summertime Six Pack, half dozen tunes perfect for the salt water playlist, with titles like “Coppertone and Chlorine,” “Everybody Needs Their Beach,” and “Dashboard Hula Girl.” Originally he’d planned to make the summertime six pack an annual release, but the pandemic threw that plan off track. Fortunately, Kristian has learned, sometimes “off track” is exactly where we are supposed to be. After releasing Troubadour, a collection of songs he wrote for a play of the same name, Kristian released four full albums of new music in a single year ending in early 2023. The project totaling 52 tracks, titled 52, in honor of his 52nd birthday. When you consider the quantity of the music, you conclude that Kristian is one of the most prolific music makers of our time. When you listen to the songs - clever, poignant, universal - you realize he’s among the best. The collection is as fun and uplifting as it is voluminous.

Through all the ups and downs, Kristian Bush’s seemingly uncompromisingly optimistic approach to life and art is one thing that hasn’t changed.

“One of the great joys of being an artist is performing when everyone in the room is feeling the same thing at the same time,” he says. It’s easier to do, he adds, when sadness is the emotion. “Sad songs are easy to come by,” he says, “but I’m the kind of artist that will always attach myself to positivity. And that’s actually a difficult set of songs to write, because most of the time,” he laughs, “you sound like an idiot when you try to write a happy song.”

But when you pull it off and that audience is feeling collective joy rather than misery, “you can take a shared moment to a whole different level.”