Kristian Bush

“I've always tried to put a little message in my music.”

“Music is supposed to make you less lonely - that's the whole idea.”

“I'm not necessarily in a vocation where I'm at risk; it's not like I'm a police officer. I'm a musician, so when I leave home, my family expects me to come back.”

“It's hard not to go back and look at my songwriting catalog and go, 'Look, there are 600 to 700 songs here.'”

“My voice has a lot of character and kind of doesn't sound like a lot of people's.”

“I believe that melody is such a lost part of music and country music. People are either scared of it or not using all the colors that are available.”

“My father was an officer in the Army, and my grandfather served in World War II, and I am so proud of their service. I'll always do whatever I can to support our troops.”

“It's a great place to be as an artist: if you confuse your label, you're doing your job.”

“There's a social piece to what's going on in the Sugarland world, but we've never been a band that's political, and I maintain that.”

“You will do things in private and sing in private and make choices in private that you wouldn't make if you were observed.”

“As a promoter, of course, you'd really want the people who pay for the tickets to come into your venue to really be even more connected with the band.”

“I try to spend a lot of time thinking of what it is I want to say, and how I want to say it. Mainly because I know what it's like as a fan to hear music that is just exactly what I needed.”

“I don't remember consciously not being able to play an instrument. It's been kind of like a language for me.”

“The most inspiring thing as an artist is when someone says, 'I believe in you'; sometimes that works even better than Grammys.”

“I come from a food family, so you would think that I would be great at making baked beans or something, but I'm not.”

“Billy Pilgrim music is very emotional. It's one part the craft we learned from people like the Indigo Girls and R.E.M., and one part the Tom Waits craft, where you're trying to create a moment.”

“Each kind of generation of bands forgets how they got here. Waylon Jennings came out and they're like, 'That's not Patsy Cline.' And everyone panicked, like, 'I don't know what happened to country music, but this isn't it.'”

“There is a misconception that I've experienced in my life about people that live in the South. I got sent away to school in Connecticut in the late Eighties, and kids were honestly asking me, 'Do people there wear shoes?'”

“As soon as I saw tattoos as a way to tell your story, I thought, 'Oh my gosh, I totally get it.' So I got my first tattoo a couple of years ago, and it's the word 'hope' on my left arm. It has a couple of dots at the end for each of my kids.”

“I love writing music for film and TV, but putting it into a video game is twice as fun because it needs to be repeatable and joyous.”