Interview: Bowling For Soup's Jaret Reddick on Playing Cover Songs, Re-Recording Their Music, And Touring With Simple Plan
You would be hard-pressed to find any album Bowling For Soup hasn’t done: eleven albums worth of original material, live records, an album of songs that appeared only in movies called Goes To The Movies, another album of cover songs titled Don’t Mind If We Do, two albums worth of re-recorded songs called Songs People Actually Liked, even two albums worth of piano versions of their own songs called A Nice Night For An Evening. In twenty-five years, Bowling For Soup has nearly done it all, and they’ve never shown signs of slowing down.
The Wichita Falls, Texas pop-punk act formed in the 1990s and broke through into the rock mainstream in the early 2000s with energetic, humorous songs like “Punk Rock 101” and “Girl All The Bad Guys Want” (Drunk Enough To Dance), “1985” (A Hangover You Don’t Deserve), and “High School Never Ends” (The Great Burrito Extortion Case). Even with a lineup that has changed over the last few decades (longtime guitarist Chris Burney officially stepped down from the band last year, leaving vocalist Jaret Reddick as the sole original member), they have never faltered in their recording output, time on the road, or quality of live performance.
This summer, the band will be returning to the road to open for Simple Plan on the second leg of their “The Bigger Than You Think Tour: The Sequel!”, along with friends 3OH!3. Ahead of the tour kick off, with a date planned for next Tuesday at San Jose’s Civic Auditorium, we spoke with Reddick about the band’s love of cover songs, why they chose to re-record a bunch of their songs from the first two decades of their career, and what fans can expect when seeing them on the pop-punk tour of the summer.
Main Photo: Bowling For Soup / Jaime Schultz
Alright. Here is my first hard-hitting journalist question. Why, on Apple Music, after all of these years, is A Hangover You Don’t Deserve listed as a compilation, not an album?
I’ll bet it has the B-sides on there. That’s my guess. I don’t know the actual answer, because that’s weird. It might not even be all of the B-sides; it might be their [Apple Music’s] B-sides. This is a pretty good question that we’ve stumbled into, because people might not know this. Back then, in like the early 2000s, when you made a record, you also did B-sides. They’re called B-sides because, well…that doesn’t matter. Google it. But you would do special songs for territories and stores. So when we would go make a record, you’d go record the songs that you’re doing. But then, you’d have to do two songs that were exclusive for the UK, one song for Japan, you’d have to do something for Wal-Mart, you’d have to do something for Best Buy, then Apple Music became a thing. You could do Napster exclusives at some point. It was crazy. We’d almost have a whole second EP or album with songs that only people in certain territories or certain stores would hear.
I’ve always wanted to do a B-sides album. The problem is that we were on Jive Records at the time. Sony owns all of that, and they’re not the easiest to work with. It’s just so hard to get anything done. The fact that we got to release A Hangover You Don’t Deserve on vinyl is a freaking miracle.
I always knew that bands would have those region-exclusive tracks, but I never thought that putting all of those tracks together would count as a compilation version of the album.
I bet that’s what it is. It might even just be their [Apple Music’s] bonus songs. That’s gotta be it. We didn’t re-release that record or anything. That’s gotta be it.
In all seriousness, I’ve loved your discography for years. I want to ask you about cover songs. In the middle of all of the original albums you put out, the live albums, the re-recordings of Bowling for Soup songs, you guys consistently put out cover songs. You recently covered Sum 41’s “In Too Deep”, Simple Plan’s “I’m Just A Kid”, Blink-182’s “The Rock Show”, to name a few. What is it that has always drawn you guys to incorporate cover songs into your recording output?
Well, thank you for the question and thank you for the kind words. I’ll tell you this: it’s in our DNA as a band. I don’t mean that in some sort of mystical sense or trying to make it sound deeper than it is. It was out of necessity. When we started Bowling For Soup, for us to get gigs in towns like Wichita Falls, TX (where we’re from) or Abilene, TX, we were having a hard time getting into Dallas and the music scene before we moved to Denton. To get shows, you needed to be able to do three or four sets. So what we did was we started learning cover songs, but we would learn them in the style that we were. So you would hear us do an Elvis, Beach Boys, Elton John, or Bryan Adams song, but it sounded like pop-punk before pop-punk was a thing. It sounded like Bowling For Soup playing it.
When we did start to break into the Dallas music scene and start to do shows where we were only playing one set of all originals, a bit part of our show was people going, “Hey man, that Bowling For Soup band pulls a different cover out of their ass every time we go see them.” It became part of the lure to go see us. “What the hell could they possibly play tonight?” Like, now we’re doing (Dion DiMucci’s) “Runaround Sue”. Next thing, we’re doing “You Really Got Me” by Van Halen.
To answer your question, it started really early for us. When we put out Let’s Do It For Johnny, it came down to two songs: “Summer of ’69” (which ended up on the album) and “You Give Love A Bad Name” by Bon Jovi. The label thought we sounded too much like Bon Jovi. I grew up in the 80s; I sound like a metal singer whenever we play metal. All I do is impersonate everybody I grew up on.
I’ll tell you another thing that people probably don’t know! And I tell bands this all the time. Here’s what’s great about cover songs now. In the past, when you did a cover song, if you sold it and put it on an album, you had to do all that paperwork. You had to pay the writer and the publisher and all that stuff. What people might not know is, and the reason why we do covers like crazy all the time, is that you don’t do that anymore. The streaming services do it. So we can put out a cover, and we don’t have to do shit. We get the plays and all that, but they still pay the writer and publisher. Bands that aren’t doing cover songs are sort of just missing an opportunity. You can do it, and you can do it for free. You don’t have to ask anybody. There are a lot of elements to it. Plus, we just like doing it, and we’re good at it. We actually released a collection of cover songs on Spotify called Don’t Mind If We Do. If you wanna go hear a bunch of our covers, it’s really, really random.
You guys did a Hanson cover of “Where’s the Love”. They’re the first band I ever listened to when I was a kid. It had been a long time since I’d listened to that song, and I was like “holy shit, this hits!” And you got them to do it with you, too.
We got them to do it with us too, yeah! Exactly! A Hanson cover featuring Hanson! With those pop-punk covers you referenced, we’re actually doing an album of pop-punk covers. We’re just playing the songs as they are. We’re not adding anything or changing anything; we’re just paying tribute to all of our friends in the genre. All of those songs that you mentioned, those are the first three songs that will be on that collection of cover songs.
I was also so curious about your decision to re-record songs for the Songs People Actually Liked series you completed over the last decade. You re-recorded the first entry back in 2015 before something that Taylor Swift made popular, which was going back and re-recording all of your old songs. From my perspective, I always thought those songs turned out really well. What was it that made you guys want to go back and revisit them, line by line?
We were so popular in the UK, and people in the UK do not like to be taken advantage of. You do not try to sell them a bag of dumb shit. You have to be very deliberate and careful in the way that you market and do things over there. Since Taylor Swift had not educated the public about this yet, we had [re-recorded] the first nine years or something like that [on Songs People Actually Liked, Vol. 1]. We could say, “hey, we just wanted to revisit these and make them sonically better,” and quite frankly we did. They do sound better, not that there’s anything wrong with the original recordings. The original recordings hold up to everything at that time. But we live in a different time now. I’m a better singer now than I was back then, and I’m better at playing [guitar].
The real answer is we wanted versions that we owned. And then Taylor Swift came out and educated everybody when she did it. When we released Songs People Actually Liked, Vol. 2, we were able to go, “Yeah, that’s why we’re doing it, but we didn’t really know how to explain it to you guys before.” Taylor Swift did the entire music industry another service. She does so much cool shit, and that’s one of the coolest things; she educated the masses on the fact that we don’t own our music. Even if it’s something that we recorded twenty-five years ago, we don’t have any control or ownership over it, and that sucks. After ten years, you can go and re-record it, and then you own that recording of it. So that’s what we did.
I’ve noticed a lot of bands starting to do that over the last few years. It definitely became more talked about when Taylor Swift started doing it. Bring Me The Horizon did a whole re-recording and release of their first record, Count Your Blessings. It’s interesting to see bands updating the recordings for a new time. It’s not taking anything away from the old record, but updating it for a new audience.
There’s a lot of things that go into it. So all of those big records of ours are owned by Sony. The fact that we got to put A Hangover You Don’t Deserve out on vinyl is a miracle. But we’re never gonna be able to put Drunk Enough to Dance, The Great Burrito Extortion Case, Sorry For Partyin’, or any other big records out on vinyl because they own it and they will not allow you to make any money on it. The only way we’ll be able to do that - and this is being talked about - is if we go back and re-record the album and put it out on vinyl.
For example, when we did all of the [re-recordings], we kept everything intact. We didn’t change anything. The only thing that we did was we raised the key of “The Bitch Song” by a half step, and we sped it up a little bit. Everything else is the same. And I changed the words to “Ohio (Come Back To Texas)”. I put different Texas people in there. It’s about being able to do what you want with your music. I understand that some people have a negative attitude towards Taylor Swift, and I don’t really understand it. I think she’s great. But if you’re a musician and you’re not looking at her going, “man, she’s doing a lot of really cool shit for us”, then you’re fucking crazy. She’s doing a lot of really cool shit for us.
From your 1994 debut to 2022’s Pop Drunk Snot Bread, you guys have always managed to blend punk songwriting about serious material with tongue-in-cheek, comedic delivery. Where did your comedic sensibilities come about, and how did you work that into your songwriting as time went on?
For sure. The comedic aspect of it is natural. I write like I talk, and I wanted to be a stand-up comedian when I was a kid. Bowling For Soup sort of allows me to do both.
Yeah, your live show is like a comedy show with music. It always has been.
It is! Thank you for saying that. And none of it’s rehearsed; whatever happens, happens. Some jokes land and some jokes don’t. That’s why it’s awesome to be able to do that, because sometimes I like to make the audience a little uncomfortable and then make them laugh. That’s an experience; we all like that. As I started to write the songs, I wasn’t super confident in my lyric writing. What I would do is, if I were approaching something serious, I would put a funny spin on it so it protected me. I wouldn’t be like “hey, I’m writing about my feelings!” That caught on.
What I started to realize was that I could write smart, funny songs, not silly, funny songs. I don’t want to write lines like “cum stains on your pillow”. That, to me, is hee-hee funny. I want to be able to write a song that, ten years after you’ve listened to it for the first time, and then hear a line and go, “oh shit, I didn’t pick up on that before”. But honestly, lyrics just kinda pour out of me. As I said, I write like I talk. Sometimes it’s from the heart, sometimes it’s from other people’s experiences, sometimes it’s out of thin air.
But yeah, I like making people smile. I think a lot of bands started out that way. Even our peers, Sum 41, Blink-182, and Green Day all had sort of a funny-leaning thing at one point. Those three bands in particular chose to go more serious and put out some great music. But I’ve always said, the last band you want a political statement from is Bowling For Soup. We’re here to save you from all that shit. We’re anti-that. And not that we’re not fans of [that music], not that I don’t understand where that is coming from. It’s all great, I love my friends, and I love the music that they make. But that’s not me. Even if you’re just hanging around with me, you’re never just gonna hear me go off on something politically or anything like that. It’s just not who I am as a person. I write like I talk; I write about things that I find interesting, or things that people would find interesting, and I love to tell stories. That comes from growing up listening to Waylon (Jennings) and Willie (Nelson), Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton with my parents. The Eagles taught me to harmonize, but I’ve always loved how you can picture their songs like you’re reading a book.
It was never lost on me as a kid that everybody probably had a different vision of it, just like you’re reading a book. I picture “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers way differently than you do. I think it’d be cool to do a case study where you let people listen to “Coward of the County” or “Two Doors Down” by Dolly Parton and then you have them describe what it looks like. Everybody is going to see something totally different, and that’s what I love about music. I mean “1985”, right? We all have a vision of what Debbie looks like, but mine is probably way different than yours.
I think there’s something really interesting you said earlier about not being totally confident with your lyrics and having to soften the edge with the comedic delivery. If you go back to the song “Down For The Count” on A Hangover You Don’t Deserve, that opens with a mock wrestling or boxing match of you introducing your ex, which then goes into a more serious breakup song.
That’s a really good example. That’s one of those songs where I think about the opening. That opening joke is me going, “In this corner, weighing in at 128 pounds - I’m sorry, correction: 116 pounds!” (laughs) To me, that joke is so good. It’s like a timeless freaking joke. And everybody knows why I do it. They’re like, “Oh, she looked at him side-eyed, you know, and he’s correcting himself.” That song too has a line, “It holds the picture in the heart-shaped frame we bought at Target” - like, you can picture that sitting on the shelf at Target, right? But I love that I can paint those pictures for people! It’s my favorite thing about being able to do that as a songwriter.
Your tour with Simple Plan kicks off on July 24th in Las Vegas, and you’ll be heading through Northern California on July 28th at San Jose Civic. Any big surprises fans can expect?
Here’s what I can tell you: it’s such an energetic, fun night. With 3OH!3, they’re never not fun to watch. A lot of people come to this tour not knowing that they know every 3OH!3 song. Then they start playing, and you go, “Jesus Christ, I know every single song!” They’re so much fun, and they’re such great dudes. They’ve always got a surprise in store for you.
Our show is loose and fun and interactive, and your face will probably hurt from smiling. I gotta tell you, Simple Plan are firing on all cylinders right now. They’ve got bangers, man. It’s three bands that all had hits at the same time. It’s this crazy dose of both nostalgia and everybody being current. Every band has something currently going on. Phineas and Ferb is back, Simple Plan is killing it, 3OH!3 are killing it on TikTok right now. It’s a really, really great night.
I was gonna say, are you and Simple Plan gonna switch songs with each other? You play “I’m Just a Kid”, they play “1985”?
(laughs) You know what, that’s been talked about. Unlike us, they’re very, very professional when it comes to these shows. So their show is very rehearsed and regimented. I’m not saying it’s the same show every night; it’s the same set, but their talking is different. There are no surprises there in terms of what songs they’re gonna play.
