When playwright Janece Shaffer and artist and songwriter Kristian Bush first met for breakfast to discuss potentially collaborating on Shaffer’s new play Troubadour, the connection was immediate. “If you sit with me long enough I’ll pull my phone out and start singing something into it,” Bush says. It’s a Monday morning in Nashville a little over a year later, and the creative forces behind Troubadour have assembled to audition for the play’s major roles. “In the middle of [breakfast] I did, and wrote a song almost that day for it.”
“It’s a very compelling story – sometimes when you hear [something], or when you meet an artist and they’re looking for a song you’re like, ‘Okay I’ve got it, you just need to hold still real quick,'” Bush continues. “So that happened and then after that it was just a series of, ‘Well, do you think there’s space for another one?'”
“The request was something I was interested in,” Bush says, “which is country music: where did it come from, how did it get here, what did it sound like, and when did it sound like it? I already know the other parts, which is when things happen in your life, how they end up in your songs.”
Bush, a native on East Tennessee, drew on inspiration like the melodies of mountain music, which play heavily in country’s history. Contrary to the Nashville standard of scheduled co-writing sessions, Bush’s creations were solo writes. Once he’d sit down to write, it came easily: none of the songs in Troubadour took Bush more than 45 minutes to write.
“When Kristian’s music happens it’s like the air changes a little bit,” Shaffer says. “There’s a moment where you watch two character sit on a bench late at night in the dark in Nashville and they’re writing music. They fall in love over the course of this one song that Kristian wrote, and the first time that I heard it I just started bawling. I was like, ‘There’s no way they’re not going to fall in love, it’s so inevitable.'”
Troubadour marks the first time Bush has written music for theatre – though writing songs that will be performed on a stage is Bush’s bread and butter, one imagines that writing for a character is a different experience.
“I don’t know yet ’cause I haven’t quite seen it come true,” Bush says. Once auditions wrap, Troubadour comes to life in Atlanta, running from January 18 to February 12 of next year. “But I will say that when I write for another artist or when I write for the band, for Jennifer’s voice, it is very very difficult to escape the fact that if you squint one eye, it’s about me. If you want to go back and pull back some of those old songs apart, you’ll go, ‘Oh.’ If you flip the gender on “Want To” and you put the real truths together they are about me and my ex-wife. It’s just there was a girl singing it.”
“I think I’m buried in everything I’m doing, I just don’t think that it’s easy to see,” he continues. “It’s probably easier to see in the Billy character here; those songs were a little easier to write cause he’s at the end of his career saying goodbye and I’m not, I’m kind of in the middle of my career, but I was closer to that anxiety than I had anticipated.”
With the central characters all connected to music, it’d be easy to imagine that bits of Bush’s experience would show through in each in distinct ways.
“Absolutely,” Bush says. “The brand new little songwriter, that’s something I can touch because I’ve been there and kind of still am there. Then the young kid that’s moving country music forward against maybe that convention, that was Sugarland. Then the older man, he’s the king of country music, his sort of special skill is that songs just drop out of him. No matter how twisted his life is, still the songs drop out of him. There are a lot of people in this town like that, like you look at them and they will literally drive their lives into telephone poles, but that doesn’t mean that tomorrow this beautiful song doesn’t drop out of them and you’re like how does that happen? How are you such a troubled soul and such beautiful things come from it?”
As casting hopefuls line the hallways outside, strumming guitars and singing to themselves or rehearsing with others auditioning, the excitement around Troubadour grows.
“I haven’t been involved with something that feels like this before, except at the very beginning of making a band,” Bush says. “It feels like the thing has more energy than I put in it. Sometimes you put in four quarters and you get out four quarters; sometimes you put in four quarters and you pull it and you get out like three hundred quarters. In this case, [we’re] putting in this much energy and then watching that the art piece is that much bigger. When we wrote “Baby Girl” and went out and started playing it, it was like gasoline was being poured on matches everywhere. By the end of the song a complete room of strangers is singing it. That’s what I think’s going to happen. That’s my wish.”
Learn more about Troubadour here.