On a late summer evening, 1,100 fans crammed into New York City’s Irving Plaza for a sold-out stop on pop-punk icon band Bowling for Soup’s A Hangover You Don’t Deserve tour. Under the diffused glow of purple and yellow stage lights, fans swayed and sang along, some lifting children onto their shoulders. Twenty years after the album’s release, the Wichita Falls–born, Denton-based band is somehow still adding new listeners alongside a base of devotees who’ve grown up with the band’s endearingly zany anthems.
Bowling for Soup (BFS) is also celebrating three decades as a band this year. From the stage, front man Jaret Reddick reflected on the band’s sustainability: “Here we are thirty years in and more people come to our shows than ever, and I think that’s pretty g—damn cool.”
In spite of and perhaps because of its almost-famous standing, BFS might be the most enduring member of the cadre of pop-punk bands whose heyday defined millennial teen angst in the early aughts. Thriving on a mix of humility, sarcasm, and self-awareness, BFS leans into nostalgia but never quite descends into fan service. Reddick has managed to age the music with his original fan base and at the same time draw in just as many teens as came to shows in the aughts.
True to form, “Almost,” Hangover’s first track, was almost the album’s lead single. Bumped by “1985,” the band’s seminal SR-71 cover song, “Almost” took second place, becoming a beloved underdog hit and symbol of the band’s place in music history.
“‘Almost’ is loaded with all the stuff we do,” Reddick says. Built around a cheeky guitar riff and a heavy, poppy drumbeat bass combo, the song is a cautionary tale about a downward spiral, recounted from the comfort of the lovesick narrator’s imagination: “And I almost had you / But I guess that doesn’t cut it / Almost loved you / I almost wish you would’ve loved me too.”
When it was released, “Almost” spoke directly to teens struggling with the big feelings and intense frustrations inherent to growing up. In retrospect, twenty years on, most of those moments were actually no big deal, a realization that pivots the song into an insouciant look back at youth from adulthood.
“I called it punk rock nursery rhymes,” says producer and musician Butch Walker, who produced Hangover and the band’s preceding album, Drunk Enough to Dance, and cowrote some of its biggest hits, including “Almost.” “If you sing these songs without distorted guitars and pounding drums, they would sound like nursery rhymes. That to me is what a lot of the genre sounded like, but in a fun and harmless way.”
Known for classics like “Girl All the Bad Guys Want,” “Ohio (Come Back to Texas),” “High School Never Ends,” “Punk Rock 101,” and, of course, “Almost,” BFS still churns out reliably fun pop-punk music and is selling out bigger venues than ever. Without resorting to the casino circuit, the band still tours regularly and has released six studio albums since Hangover, consistently offering cathartic feel-good music that readily shifted teen angst into adult nostalgia and humor.
Reddick started BFS with original members Chris Burney, Lance Morrill, and Erik Chandler in Wichita Falls in 1994. Playing local venues, it earned fans and a “party-with-your-pants-down” band moniker from the Dallas Observer, and was signed to Jive Records in 1999. Though the band’s members changed over the years—drummer Gary Wiseman replaced Morrill in 1998, and bassist Rob Felicetti took Chandler’s place in 2019—Reddick resisted the siren call to reinvent the band’s sound iteratively. (“We didn’t want to break what wasn’t broken,” Walker says.)
If BFS was ever going to blow up, it would have been with the release of Hangover. Conceived of in the golden glow of the band’s one-and-only Grammy nomination, for unrequited love ballad “Girl All the Bad Guys Want” (it lost to No Doubt’s “Hey Baby”), Hangover is a nineteen-track behemoth of straight bangers. After the band passed the sophomore album test, for its third major-label record Reddick headed into the studio head high, stakes low, and intent on having fun. Released on September 14, 2004, Hangover peaked at number 37 on the Billboard 200 chart and sold half a million copies by May 2005. But the album didn’t launch the band to a meteoric rise so much as it grounded them as a dependable, unpretentious good time.
“We cared about lyrics, and we cared about the way that they were cleverly presented,” Walker says. “There’s a lot of double entendres, a lot of metaphors, a lot of everything, and it’s just two kids in a lyrical candy store at that point, getting to sit down and just be idiots and write this stuff. It’s so fun.”
“Almost” also epitomizes a favorite lyrical move of Reddick’s. “This thing that I do in the bridges where all of a sudden I sort of turn it around, and now our poor little guy who can’t find love is taking control of things and ripping up the song, that’s a trick that I started doing because I didn’t want to put all of my heart out on the table,” he says. “So I would have this serious verse, and then on the bridge I could go, ‘Yeah, just kidding, this song’s funny.’ ” (The bait and switch in “Almost”: “I almost wrote a song about you today / But I tore it all up and then I threw it away.”)
The duo completed the song within the hour and Reddick knew instantly that it was great: “I was like, ‘Oh, well, f— it. It’s over. This song’s a hit.’ ”
Bowling for Soup’s final key to longevity is its spectacularly fun and uplifting live show. Performed live, “Almost” is fast and peppy. At Irving Plaza, Reddick howls lyrics to a blissed-out, bobbing crowd unable to resist roaring every line along with him.
Reckoning with his music’s significance in people’s lives took time. But as Reddick developed and worked through anxiety and depression, he learned to be comfortable with the weight of meaning something to fans, and became an enthusiastic mental health advocate. During the show, he highlights Punk Rock Saves Lives, a health and human rights nonprofit on whose board of directors he serves. “Some days it’s not f—ing easy, ladies and gentlemen,” he tells the crowd. “And I say that because it’s possible there’s somebody here who needs to hear that a guy that looks as happy as me feels that way sometimes.” The result of the band’s casual, genial stage presence is a genuine everyman image that telegraphs both love for its work and fans and its real approachability or, as Reddick puts it, “We’re very serious about not being serious.” For his part, Walker credits the band’s remarkable endurance to a consistent, familiar sound and its members’ humility and humor. “On paper it’s not supposed to work,” he says. “They were just embracing and self-effacing in their normalcy . . . so if you have that conviction and show that pure joy, that you love what you’re doing, it is infectious.”
