One of the longest-lived and most prolific bands of the “alt-rock” generation is set to blast through Oklahoma next month as Bush hits the Lucky Star stage with a tour built around the unapologetically heavy and electronically-charged new album “I Beat Loneliness.”
The rockers are set to crash the Lucky Star Amphitheater Sunday, September 7th as part of KATTFest alongside Staind, Candlebox, and Fuel.
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Even after ten albums and three decades with the band, Bush frontman, leader, and primary songwriter Gavin Rossdale feels like the songs on this new album are among the most open and vulnerable that he’s ever penned, and he wants the live show to reflect that same raw power.
“I think you should be as naked as possible,” Rossdale told me over Zoom from a tour stop in Cleveland. “There’s this sort of strength in vulnerability. There’s no strength in going out on stage in fourteen overcoats and having that kind of separation from the crowd.”
After spending 2024 celebrating the 30th anniversary of their breakout debut “Sixteen Stone” with a tour focused on their greatest hits, Rossdale and Bush are leaning heavily on “I Beat Loneliness” this time out. And that means leaning also into the same vulnerabilities and bristling emotions that spawned the new tracks, songs that Rossdale said are sometimes so pointedly honest and open that he’s surprised he even wrote them.
“I mean, if I can be so bold, I think it’s a super vital record, you know?” he said. “It’s honest and gripping and raw and dripping with life. It’s like ‘this is tough, this sucks,’ or it’s like ‘it’s gonna be okay, we’re gonna be okay.’ But it’s always triumphant. I’m not a doom and gloom person. I always believe things come around.”
And come around they do.
Of all the bands that broke big in the wake of the dreary, fuzz-drenched grunge wave of the early 90s, it was Bush that arguably felt the most urgent and primed for the world stage.
With a heavy dose of 70s glam dropped into their power-chorded alt-rock and a welcome bit of English cheekiness that was largely eluding the more dour and spiky American scene, Bush carved out an overwhelmingly successful niche with “Sixteen Stone” and 1996’s follow-up “Razorblade Suitcase.”
But as the 90s began to wind down and trends began to shift, the band – led by the often outspoken, sometimes controversial, and seemingly always impassioned Rossdale – pivoted from the easy hard-rock constraints and leaned into a more heavily textured, deconstructed, and electronic sound with 99’s “The Science of Things.”
At a time when arena rock, nu-metal, and detached, NYC-led post-punk were coming to dominate rock charts, Bush committed instead to incorporating elements of EDM and Industrial.
“We probably would’ve been more successful if we’d just stuck to being a four-piece thing,” Rossdale admitted, “but from ‘The Science of Things’ on, I was really into making it more textured and more interesting and was really inspired by bands who had more luscious sounds as well as the rough and the grain.”
But that’s exactly what’s afforded Bush their longevity and brought them back around.
It’s that insistence on experimenting and incorporating new and unexpected sounds and influences that has kept Bush’s output fresh and prevented the band from becoming another stale relic of their generation.
And that’s the energy that allows for Rossdale to keep finding new ways to connect with the audience on stage, and new moments of communal connection with the audience each night.
“I think that’s the responsibility of anyone on stage,” he said. “I’m always trying to think ‘how do you connect with all these people at once? What is the magic? What’s the source that’s going to galvanize people?’ And I come to the conclusion that it’s the energy, effort, and, to a sense, the showmanship. It’s a sort of agreement with yourself to be real and to be open.”
That’s even the inspiration for how Rossdale is opening the shows on this tour, with the extended, electronic intro of lead-off track “Scars,” featuring little more than a pulsing synth bass and his own lone, human voice.
“I even thought, ‘my god, my ego is really fragile, maybe I should reconsider it,’ but it has this really mesmerizing effect,” he told me. “It’s a wild thing to have this dream, this hope in an isolated room on my own, about how something could work and could transfer to 20,000 people, and then to really do it.”
That’s exactly the kind of tightrope Rossdale and the band want to walk every night, embracing that kind of raw, individual vulnerability as a way to better connect to the crowd, and to connect the crowd to one another as well.
That’s how Rossdale hopes to “beat loneliness,” so to speak.
“All the bands I like, they all come with that energy,” he said. “You have to challenge yourself. If you’re not challenging yourself, if you’re not carrying a heavy weight and walking with that weight in real time, then what are you even doing?”
Bush takes the stage at the Lucky Star Amphitheater as part of KATTFest Sunday, September 7th.
For more, visit luckystarcasino.org/concerts and bushofficial.com.
You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.
Brett Fieldcamp is our Arts and Entertainment Editor. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for 15+ years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
