Kristian Bush Becomes the ‘Troubadour’ of Theater
“I understand storytelling now in another way and I think that’s the corner of everything we do," Bush tells us.
Most people know Kristian Bush from the duo Sugarland with Jennifer Nettles or from his charitable contributions throughout many campaigns in country music. But the long-time country singer and songwriter has spent the past months lending a hand toward a new dimension in his career: the theater.
After meeting one year at CMA Fest, Bush decided to take the plunge into the stage life by teaming up with playwright Janece Shaffer to create original songs for her play, Troubadour. After working together song by song, the process became organic and natural for Bush and he fell in tune to the adaptation of creating tracks for characters that strung together to tell one big story.
“What I do every day is talk to characters—human beings—and they tell me their story,” Bush explained to Sounds Like Nashville. “ I write that song for them and I hope that they fall in love with it and put it on their record and that everybody on the radio also likes it. In this case though, people can’t talk back but Jenece tells me what they think and what they feel. She knows these characters as if you’re asking your friend, ‘Tell me about your friend.’ Her response is so clear that writing a song is simple when I thought it would be very, very difficult.”
With Troubadour though, Bush didn’t have to stretch all the way into a new genre of music. The play is based in 1950s Nashville and focuses on the son of a country music star who is following in the legacy his dad laid out. With a little romance and comedy involved, it’s no wonder that Bush’s music fit perfectly along with the lighthearted storyline.
As a songwriter, Bush was on top of the arrangements and figuring out how to create songs that matched the emotion of each scene. But since this is Bush’s first time composing for a theater production, it was the terminology of the craft that sometimes got the better of him.
“The thing that’s probably the most different [laughs] is every time that I’m faced with the challenge of something that has the vernacular of theater like, ‘Hey, how about a curtain call?’ They’re laughing because they asked for this and then I went back and it was the thing I avoided the most every morning. I would get up and I would do all sorts of chores around the house besides think about writing that curtain call ‘cause what the hell do I know about writing a curtain call? The closer I got to it and the more I kinda just jumped into the water, the better it felt,” he admitted.
Thankfully, the team behind the whole production is supportive of every idea laid out on the table. The time together has led to Bush’s pursued interest in theater overall and he hopes to continue on in the making of musicals for years to come.
“It’s one of those things: if this is the way you write a song and we just wrote this creation akin to a song or an album, I want to make like four more of these,” Bush said. “You never know. They say don’t judge yourself for the first hundred songs and so I would love to learn this skill. It is truly a skill. I mean I think there’s art in it, but it is a skill.”
At the end of the day, Bush is all about the storytelling element that goes into all music production, from the studio to the stage. With Troubadour, he’s able to experience a new side of his passion.
“I understand storytelling now in another way and I think that’s the corner of everything we do, whether it’s acting or writing or musicals. I think it’s all about storytelling,” said Bush.
Troubadour will be playing at the Alliance Theatre as a part of the Alliance Stage Series in Atlanta from January 18 to February 12, 2017. Tickets are available for the show on the theatre’s website HERE.
