EXCLUSIVE: Sugarland's Kristian Bush Will Make You Want to Fall in Love With 'Light Me Up' Lyric Video
You know his songs, but you may have never heard his voice.
Sugarland's guitarist and primary songwriter Kristian Bush is making a new splash in country music with his debut solo album, Southern Gravity, out now. On the heels of his wildly successful debut single "Trailer Hitch," Bush challenges you not to fall in love with his follow up, "Light Me Up."
The song is just begging to be a first dance wedding staple, and only ET has your first look at the "Light Me Up" lyric video created by the brother-sister team of Cy Abdelnour and Maria Abdelnour. Watch it below and get ready to embrace your inner romantic.
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You'd never know it from his sunny melodies, but "Light Me Up" and the rest of Southern Gravity was written during a particularly dark period in Bush's life. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Bush opened up about creating an unapologetically feel-good album in the wake of Sugarland's deadly Indiana stage collapse and a divorce from his wife of 12 years.
So how does one write such a moving love song while his own relationship was falling apart?
"I've always tried to write songs as if they were wishes," Bush tells ET. "When I write a love song, sometimes it's a wish. I'm wishing for a love song to appear."
For Bush, "Light Me Up" also represented a new page in his songwriting career (he's already a GRAMMY, ACM and BMI award winner), allowing him to speak freely from his own perspective.
"I spent 10 years, probably, writing songs that I knew were going to be sung by my partner [Sugarland's Jennifer Nettles], so it was gonna be from a woman," he says. "It's a very interesting thing as a man to write those songs, and then I realized that I wanted to write a love song just from me as a man to his woman, and 'Light Me Up' is that."
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If sappy love songs aren't your thing, Southern Gravity also boasts a fair share of get-up-and-dance tunes. And for that, we can thank Bush's kids.
Asked how he narrowed down nearly 300 songs to the album's final 12, he says: "I like to trust my kids... My kids vote for anything that makes them dance which is good because that's a lot of the music that I write."