How Busbee Went From Jazz Scholar to Country Innovator
If there’s one word to describe Mike Busbee’s songwriting ability, it’s “elasticity.” In 2014, the California native helped craft Little Big Town’s “Quit Breakin’ Up With Me,” slapstick honky tonk with a dash of Sugar Ray, and 5 Seconds Of Summer’s “Don’t Look Down,” a full-throttle zap of punk. Last year, he was more audacious, earning a credit on “Said No One Ever,” a catchy, rope-a-dope single from Jana Kramer, and “Don’t Look,” an Usher/Martin Garrix collaboration that represented the R&B singer’s latest conquering of the dance world.
Though busbee (he most commonly goes by his last name, without capitalization) has been bouncing between country and pop for years – his first major placement came in 2007 with Rascal Flatts’ “Better Now” – 2016 has brought a new surge of success. You’ll find him listed on several blockbuster projects emerging from Nashville this year, with three writing credits on Keith Urban‘s Ripcord, an album that exists blithely free of genre, and four more on Maren Morris’s intrepid debut, Hero, due next month. (He also produced or co-produced the whole album.) In addition, busbee co-wrote Florida Georgia Line’s new single, “H.O.L.Y.,” which recently made the third greatest jump in the history of Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, hurdling from No. 39 to No. 1.
The ease with which busbee navigates Nashville and L.A. is more surprising when you consider his unorthodox background. “I was totally on the jazz trajectory,” he tells Rolling Stone Country. “That was my paradigm for all things music.” His sister’s hair metal CDs and his father’s country classics (Willie Nelson, Hank Williams) gurgled in the background, but busbee’s own interests led him to study jazz at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. “At the time, it was one of the top jazz schools in the world,” says busbee, whose collaborators in school included acclaimed trombonists Conrad Herwig, Steve Turre and Robin Eubanks.
busbee didn’t graduate from William Paterson, instead returning home to the Bay Area and landing a job at a studio. That’s where his non-jazz musical education began in earnest – starting with Stevie Wonder and Sting. “That typical teenage period of going through all music and figuring out what you like and eating it up, that happened 10 years later,” he explains. The delay was beneficial: “At this point, because it wasn’t as attached to my identity, I could listen to whatever I wanted to listen to and just eat it up. I spent that period just studying and studying and listening and listening.”
Along with his rabid musical consumption, busbee began picking up more instruments: guitar, bass, “kind of” the drums. He describes his approach in this period as no holds barred. “Whatever you need to do to get the thing done – you find the program, you figure out how to play, get your friend to play, find a sample.”
After stints assisting in L.A. studios, he ventured out on his own. “What do you need?” busbee says. “I’ll make you a record. Co-write? Great. Produce, mix, engineer, whatever.” By his estimate, he did this for at least five years, working six days a week, 12 hours a day.