Sugarland’s Kristian Bush shares life in TV special

Kristian Bush continues lighting up his year with large strides.

The male half of the country duo Sugarland invites fans to watch “Walk Tall: The Journey of Sugarland’s Kristian Bush.” This nationwide debut documentary from Cumulus Nash TV Films series with Sinclair Broadcast Group, airs locally 7-8 p.m. Sunday on WWMB-TV 23, the Myrtle Beach affiliate for The CW.

Calling Sept. 1 from home in Atlanta, Bush said he watched the chronicle for the first time the previous night.

“It’s very humbling to watch your life go by in a television show,” he said. “It also puts together a lot of the pieces of the puzzle that people didn’t understand or didn’t know.”

The show covers chapters of his life the past two decades, including his music career begun in another duo, Billy Pilgrim, going through divorce, and the crash of a stage in 2011 at the Indiana State Fair in 2011 before a Sugarland concert.

“You may or may not know all of these things that brought me to where I am in front of you,” Bush said, “and if you have challenges, you might hopefully be inspired.”

During this Sugarland hiatus – with Jennifer Nettles also in solo ventures such as her “That Girl” CD and playing Roxie Hart in “Chicago” on Broadway – Streamsound Records released Bush’s debut solo album in April, “Southern Gravity,” prefaced by the single “Trailer Hitch.” Bush said many people, upon first hearing it last year, didn’t realize his voice behind it, which suited him fine for sheer serendipity.

“The way you discover music,” Bush said, “is you should hear the song and go, ‘Who’s that?’ ... I love that people discovered it.”

Extra exposure for Goodwill

Goodwill Industries Inc. also has reaped the benefit of that song through promotion, including the catch line of lyrics, “Never seen a hearse with a trailer hitch.”

Bush, who loves sending a message through music, asked frankly, “Why do we have so much stuff?”

This number, co-written with younger brother Brandon Bush and Tim Owens, “hopefully does it in a way that’s not very preachy,” Bush said.

“I knew from the beginning that the song was going to need an answer,” he said. “You can’t just hang a question like that out there. Goodwill provided such a great answer to that question.”

Bush reminded people if they have items no longer needed or used, to bring them to a Goodwill store “in your own community” where those goods are sold to raise funding to train individuals for other jobs locally.

A local connection also illuminates Bush’s new single, “Light Me Up,” a shared composition with Conway native Jesse Rice, a co-writer on Florida Georgia Line’s breakthrough smash, “Cruise.”

The pairing for “Light Me Up” became a jackpot begun in Las Vegas.

“That one happened totally at random,” said Bush, remembering meeting Rice at a roulette table and his being “kind of down and out” because “Cruise” missed winning at an awards show.

“I had a different hat on, so he didn’t really recognize me,” Bush said, who enjoyed chatting with Rice, who relayed “what was going on in his life.”

When asked “What do you do?” Bush told him about being “in a band,” Sugarland.

“I watched his head go up so quickly,” Bush said. “We didn’t assume anything about each other. I said, ‘We should write a song together,’ and he said ‘OK,’” later resulting in a rendezvous in Atlanta, with one half done then, and the other half completed long distance.

“It really resonated his grasp of melody and lyrics,” Bush said.

Layering on songwriting, skating

Years spent with Nettles in Sugarland let Bush finally have time “in the country music genre” after more than a decade in “pop/rock,” Bush said, because “I didn’t understand the extra challenges and hurdles you have to pile on top of it all when it’s a country song.”

The same pop/rock song has “to be conversational, but connect with everybody, not just some people,” so the recording provides moments to relate to “something completely honest and true in your own life.”

So, through joining with Nettles in the studio and on stage, Bush said he got to “layer on” his foundation for songwriting.

Bush also will add another level of performing Oct. 18 for the taping of “Musselman’s Apple Sauce Family Skating Tribute” in Oklahoma City, Okla. With 1992 Olympic champion Kristi Yamaguchi and two-time world bronze medalist Michael Weiss as co-hosts, Bush and his band will supply the skating music for Olympic winners Ekaterina Gordeeva (1988 and 1994 in pairs with her late husband, Sergei Grinkov), Scott Hamilton (’84) and IIia Kulik (’98), among a cast of parents and past Olympians including Todd Eldredge, Irina Slutskaya and Paul Wylie. The show will air 4-6 p.m. Nov. 15 and Dec. 6 on ABC (WPDE-TV 15 of Myrtle Beach, WCIV-TV 4 of Charleston, and WWAY-TV 3 of Wilmington).

Invited to take part, Bush said “I can’t wait” to play selections from Sugarland’s and his own catalog. Don’t look for him to lace up any skates, for he’s happy to jam on his own stage next to the skaters gliding on theirs.

“I’m from eastern Tennessee,” he said, “and the only time I skated, my friends were trying to teach me to play ice hockey. I told them, ‘You don’t really want me to this.’”

This story was originally published September 8, 2015 at 6:18 AM with the headline "Sugarland’s Kristian Bush shares life in TV special."