The British rock band will play an outdoor show at Kewadin Casino St. Ignace on Saturday, July 18

For Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, the only way that he can justify the sacrifices made while touring is delivering on stage night after night.

And in less than two weeks, fans of the Grammy-nominated rock band will have the chance to see Bush take the stage at Kewadin Casino in St. Ignace, Mich. with opening act Candlebox as part of the band’s North American tour.

Rossdale says Bush is “playing better than ever” these days, armed with a catalogue of rock anthems spanning four decades — including fan favourites like Comedown, Machinehead and Swallowed.

“I sort of see it as this wild opportunity to mesmerize people and to just get lost in music,” said Rossdale, who was taking part in media interviews from his home in Los Angeles.

“If you want them to get lost in music — if you want them to lose their minds — you have to act accordingly.

“So for me, whether it’s 200 people or 200,000, it’s the same intention and the same vibe.”

Rossdale says that while Bush didn’t play the “same set twice” during the band’s recent shows in Canada and the United States, there will always be a “core” of roughly a dozen songs the British band will always play for fans live. 

“You can’t really have more than two mellow songs, I feel,” Rossdale quipped at one point. 

“I could be completely wrong, but I just feel that if you start getting into two, three, four mellow songs in a row, people start going to the bar faster than you can say Canada.”

It’s fair to say that Bush has had somewhat of a unique relationship with Canada: in 1994, the band was forced to release its first two albums under the moniker ‘Bush X’ in Canada because of an intellectual property dispute between Bush’s lawyers and Domenic Troiano of the Canadian 70s rock band Bush.

“I literally put the ‘X’ as the smallest change possible,” Rossdale said.

The parties eventually reconciled their differences in a “ceremony,” according to Rossdale, leading to Bush being able to drop the ‘X’ in its band name.

“He’d been approached in the wrong way, I think,” Rossdale recalled of the lawyers’ interactions with Troiano.

“He’d been approached a bit aggressively, and had he been asked nicely, I think it would have been fine — but I think they just were a bit short with him.”

When Bush released its debut album Sixteen Stone back in 1994, rock music was a vastly different landscape, with the ‘grunge’ tag being applied to bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots.

That same tag was also applied to Bush. 

“My European roots were denied in that phrase. I think there were the elements of it in there, of course,” said Rossdale. “It is an easy reduction, but it didn’t last very long — and suddenly, grunge was dead.

“For me, it’s just rock music. I make rock music.”

Fast forward 40-some years, and Bush continues to release albums and perform live for audiences around the world.

Rossdale attributes the band’s longevity to “passion and intent and desire.”

“You fight as long as you want to fight. It’s not easy writing records, it’s not easy playing shows night after night. It’s not easy being away from your life — forfeiting your life.

“I mean, to be in music properly, you have to be prepared pretty much to sacrifice your life. You just have to be prepared.

“If you’re not, it doesn’t really work. It’s quite a wild sacrifice,” he said.

But the sacrifice has seemingly paid off: Rossdale has noticed a new generation of Bush fans at shows — primarily younger people in their early 20s — as well as parents bringing their kids to see Bush perform live.

“I think that for a band to get a multi-generational audience is immediately the sign that you did something right,” Rossdale said.

Bush’s July 18 show in St. Ignace is taking place outdoors on the lawn of Kewadin Casino.

“It doesn’t matter to me where I play,” Rossdale said. “What matters to me is how we play and the intention behind it.”

Tickets can be purchased on the Kewadin Casino website.