Writer: Chris Ahrens | Photos: Lou Mora
Country music legends are supposed to live hard, die young, and leave nice portraits, bad memories, and loyal fans who spend the majority of their adult lives watching tribute bands, attending memorial concerts, and trying to decipher every cryptic word. It’s been that way since before Hank Williams and after Townes Van Zandt. Anyone can see that it’s not that good of a life, clearing the wreckage of an Appalachian-size hangover to accommodate more ruin. Yet somehow the damage looks attractive enough for droves of teens to sign up for the ride as they line up to burn bright for thirty-some years, taking the trail all the way to the wall.
    Kristian Bush is well on his way to becoming a country legend. But what can you say about a country boy weaned on Black Flag who never desired to pay the ultimate price for success? Bush just wants to play good music with people he loves, enjoy life, and hang out with friends and family. What could possibly be wrong with him?

Kristian Bush: Tell me about this magazine; I don’t know anything about it.
Risen Magazine: Essentially we interview people on their spirituality, or lack of it. We like to say that we’re more concerned with the soul than the shoe.
KB: Nicely done. I like that tag.

RM: Okay, so what do you want to talk about?
KB: [Laughs] That depends on what’s going on in your world today.
RM: I was thinking how playing authentic country music nearly requires a person to be a mess.
KB: [Laughs hard] I think it’s a popular notion that to succeed in country music, you can’t be a mess anymore. What makes you bring that up?
RM: I was wondering what keeps you personally from being a mess, and if it was ever attractive to stumble on stage and forget things, like your guitar. [Laughs] You know, the things legends are made of.
KB: [Laughs] I don’t know. I think there was a time when I kind of romanticized The Replacements. I might have been nineteen or twenty, but I learned pretty quickly that that not sucking as a singer and a songwriter is more important than being cool.
RM: Well put.
KB: As I’ve gotten older I’ve found that being cool isn’t really worth it.
RM: Alice Cooper told me that all of his friends—Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix—died trying to live their image and then he nearly died trying to be Alice Cooper.
KB: That makes sense. This is a second life for both of us [including Kristian’s musical partner Jennifer Nettles]. We have this hindsight and a strange second life to apply it. I had a record deal out of college with Atlantic Records in a band called Billy Pilgrim. We made of number of records and toured the world.

RM: Did you ever think you would do something else if music didn’t work out?
KB: Yeah, I guess everybody feels that way from time to time. It’s kind of the way you deal with failure. Dealing with success—that’s the lesson I’m now learning in Sugarland. I felt that if music didn’t work out, I’d still do it, I just wouldn’t get paid for it and have to find something else to pay me. But hanging up the guitar just wasn’t an option.
RM: So, how do you deal with failure?
KB: [Takes a deep breath] If something doesn’t work out, it just means that something else will work out. We’ve had enough successful creative decisions at this point that people keep asking us to make decisions. I’m sure as long as we don’t step off the deep end, they’ll just keep letting us go.
RM: That must feel good.
KB: Yeah, and the thing that keeps me from going off the deep end is having a creative partner. Jennifer and I work this thing together. At least one of us at all times is going, Huh, do you think that rolling around in a huge ball is a great idea? [Laughs] When there’s nobody around to tell, you know, you don’t know when you’re on the edge.

RM: There’s a Proverb that says pride comes before a fall. What keeps you from being prideful?
KB: Realizing I don’t know everything. That’s the great thing of age—the older you get, whether on an instrument or in life, I’ve always found that the more I know, the more I’m aware of how much I don’t know. As soon as that kinda clicks in, anything’s possible.

RM: Describe the emotional difference between having kids, writing a hit song, and winning a Grammy.
KB: That’s interesting. Something like a Grammy is a joy of an accomplishment where, I didn’t think this was possible and it just came true. It’s a joy that has some sort of faith in it. Being a father is a completely different type of joy. It’s like, Oh my gosh, I now understand that my purpose on this planet is to make sure this kid survives. You have a certain amount of joy in that awareness, that you’re small. You’re no longer large. You’re no longer so important. The other joy is the joy of creating, right? That’s the one that has probably the most mystery and the most payoffs. It makes me completely aware that something else is happening, and that if I just hold still long enough, it will keep happening. It’s like you’re kinda channeling a little bit, and it’s an accomplishment as a writer.
    When Jennifer and I work together, we’re really trying to encapsulate something about the human condition. So, you’re really not workin’ for you, you’re workin’ for everyone else. You don’t realize it at the time; you’re not really thinkin’ like that. But it seems like magic. It’s like what happens when a golfer hits a golf ball. It’s like you swing with a certain amount of strength and speed and it goes ten times further than you should have hit it. It’s the same thing when you’re writing a song. You feel like you’re creating this thing, but it takes on a life of its own.

RM: Einstein said he felt that ideas came from outside of him. Do you think that ideas kind of float around and creative people kind of catch them? We often hear of people having the same idea, 5,000 miles apart.
KB: Yeah, I think that’s kind of the Jungian collective unconscious and a healthy dose of pop culture. In different times and places you see different movements happen. Once you train yourself to stay open to all that, then you’re gonna catch some. I think that most of it is personal experience. We’re really aware that what we say is being heard. A lot of bands are in genres where what you say is not as important as how it’s said. A lot of other genres depend more on the style and the substance. In country music you just can’t get away with any of that. You have to write a song that communicates to people ac