After Bush broke up in 2002, frontman Gavin Rossdale formed a band called Institute and released the album Distort Yourself in 2005. Five years later, Bush got back together, and Distort Yourself remains the one and only Institute album.
Speaking with ABC Audio, Rossdale calls Institute “one of my … proudest achievements, aesthetically,” but feels that it only reached a “pretty small audience.”
“It just kinda came and went,” Rossdale says. “No one heard it.”
With Bush working on new music to follow their 2022 album, The Art of Survival, Rossdale’s become interested in revisiting that Institute material to record with his main gig.
“I said, ‘Can I just take a song off of there, can I just cover one of those songs and do it in Bush?'” Rossdale says. “[My management] were like, ‘Yeah, of course you can. It’s your song.'”
In addition to bringing new light to music he feels may be underappreciated, Rossdale feels like he’d be following in the footsteps of a few music legends in rerecording an Institute song.
“You’d see that specifically with [Bob] Dylan and with Neil Young, where they’d have one song that would appear 10 years later on a different recording or a different thing,” Rossdale says. “I was like, ‘Why don’t I do that?'”
Bush put out a new song, “Nowhere to Go but Everywhere,” on their 2023 greatest hits compilation, Loaded. They’re launching a greatest hits tour in July.