Sugarland comes straight from the heart—again
After Taylor Swift co-wrote and sang on Sugarland’s recent song “Babe,” the pop megastar reached out to singers Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush and said, “OK, we’re going to do a video for this, right?” They responded, “Sure.” Swift had an idea. “Her idea email was an entire treatment,” Bush says with a laugh, by phone from his Atlanta home.
“I remember my response being two things,” he continues. “One: ‘If you ever quit your day job, you should do this for a living.’ And two: ‘I have a crazy idea. How about if I play every character outside the (main) characters?’ And she was like, ‘This is genius.’ “
Thus did Bush, in his beard, hat and glasses, wind up making Alfred Hitchcocklike cameos as a TV reporter, bartender and a man walking a dog. The video is about a love triangle between Nettles, her husband and Swift as a homewrecker, and Bush appears for a total of about 10 seconds, but he connected with the roles. He has been a mostly anonymous guy in the band with the colorful and charismatic Nettles since 2002.
“It’s so funny how this goes, in many ways, with me in bands—culturally, (fans) know I’m standing there, they’re just not quite sure what I do,” says the 48-yearold singer, guitarist and songwriter. “It’s a really fun way to play with that reality.”
Sugarland is the rare country duo where the singers consistently sound like they’re thrilled to be with each other—although they formed in 2002 with a third member, Kristen Hall, it was Nettles and Bush who established the instant musical chemistry. Nettles had a gospel and soul background and had been in a band called Soul Miner’s Daughter; Bush had been in a folkie band, Billy Pilgrim, which had a major record deal.
In 2012, Nettles decided to raise a family and put out a solo album. Bush focused on producing other artists, releasing his own album (2015’s “Southern Gravity”) and creating a musical called “Troubadour” for Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre. Then Nettles called again, and they found themselves back in the studio, writing for the first time in five years.