Nineties folk/rock fave Billy Pilgrim re-emerges with lost album

Photo credit: Michael McLaughlin

Billy Pilgrim, the 1990s folk/rock band composed of Kristian Bush (Sugarland) and Andrew Hyra, have announced the release of a new album coming this fall, titled In The Time Machine. It features unreleased tracks from the vault, including the new single “Call It Even,” out now.

Nearly two decades ago, Billy Pilgrim recorded this collection of songs, set to be their third studio album release, but the master tapes burned in a fire in late 2000 at Nickel & Dime Studio near Decatur, GA.

Fortunately or not, one copy remained, and from it, about 500 CDs were pressed and sold at a 2001 performance at Eddie’s Attic, the Atlanta haven for acoustic music. Following that concert, Billy Pilgrim’s members went their separate ways – never disbanding, but also never speaking for the next 15 years.

“I remember thinking to myself, man, this band isn’t finished,” Bush says. Fast forward to 2020, during the worldwide pandemic, Bush discovered the lone copy while cleaning out his home during quarantine. This fall, that collection of music will finally receive the attention it deserves, as it becomes available to fans on all streaming platforms.

Along with Bush and Hyra, the musicians featured on In The Time Machine are Brandon Bush (Sugarland, Train) on keyboards; David LaBruyere on bass; Joey Craig on guitar; and Sigadore Birkis, Marcus Petruska and Travis McNabb (Better Than Ezra) on drums. Producer/engineer Don McCollister, who owned Nickel & Dime Studio, co-produced the album along with the Bush brothers and Hyra.

A '90s cult classic, Billy Pilgrim’s music was featured as the soundtrack to television dramas like Melrose Place and My So-Called Life.

About “Call It Even,” Hyra says, "It’s quite a thing to sabotage your opportunities. As you get older, It’s quite a bit more of a thing to realize that you sabotaged others. I’ve always loved this recording and song for as grounded as it is in forgiveness. Forgiving oneself and everyone in your life is such a profound expression of love and this song represents that sentiment so well."

As much as the reunion commemorates Billy Pilgrim’s creative past, it also looks towards a collaborative reunion for the future.

"This is a very honest way to re-approach this album. We left off in this moment,” says Bush, “and this is the moment we want to start back with again.”

ABOUT BILLY PILGRIM:

Billy Pilgrim – originally named for a character in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” a shared favorite novel of the pair – was the first band for Bush, who would later become half of multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning country duo Sugarland, as well a producer, playwright and solo artist.

He met Hyra in Bush’s hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., in 1990 at an open mic night hosted by Hyra and his sister, Annie. As Bush prepared to move to Atlanta to attend Emory University, he persuaded the siblings to also move to the city, where a bustling acoustic scene was unfolding.

Their first major-label effort – the critically acclaimed Billy Pilgrim - arrived in 1994 and spawned the college and Triple-A radio hits, “Get Me Out Of Here” and “Insomniac.” The follow-up, 1995’s “Bloom,” hit No. 37 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. 

Billy Pilgrim’s videos regularly rotated on VH1 and the band opened for Melissa Etheridge, the Cowboy Junkies, Matthew Sweet and Hootie & The Blowfish.

Following their release from Atlantic Records in 1996, Billy Pilgrim began working on what would eventually become “In the Time Machine.” Nearly five years later, the album received its only public outing at the Eddie’s Attic performance that ended with Bush and Hyra following diverging paths.