'All My Dreams Have Come True': Bowling For Soup's Jaret Reddick on Legacy, Nostalgia and Wembley
Wednesday, 29 January 2025
Written by Emma Wilkes
For most bands, 30 years in the game means you’re firmly settled into the twilight of things. But Bowling For Soup are still out here bucking trends. Things are rather sunny in their world right now — they’re regularly perched on festival main stages and frontman Jaret Reddick can still see the crowds getting bigger. They’re still packing out rooms night after night, with the fans who grew up with the Texan pop-punks’ music now bringing their children along. This doesn’t usually happen.
But just as history repeats itself, so do musical cycles. The sounds of Bowling For Soup’s early 2000s heyday are very much enjoying an uptick in excitement thanks to a wave of cosy nostalgia at an otherwise grim moment in history. “The world’s a crazy place right now, and I think we’re a comfort blanket,” Jaret considers, dialling in over Zoom from a room bedecked with guitars and posters. “With Bowling For Soup, you can come back and know what you’re going to get. We’re going to have a laugh, we’re going to take the piss out of ourselves and cheer you up. I feel like that’s what we were put on this planet to do.”
They’re going to continue to do that on their upcoming lap of the UK in celebration of their 2004 album ‘A Hangover You Don’t Deserve’, which they’ll blast through front to back with some bonus hits thrown in. But they’ll be working through their own stuff while they do. The one thing blighting Bowling For Soup’s 2024 was the absence of guitarist Chris Burney due to medical problems. He has subsequently retired from the band and, since his presence was valued so much by his bandmates, Bowling For Soup won’t be replacing him.
They played the main stage of Download last June as a trio after Burney unexpectedly fell ill in Italy and, although they pulled off a glorious Sunday afternoon showing, Jaret’s attempts to joke his way through Chris’s absence belied his unmistakable sadness at not having him to his right on stage like normal. It’ll take some getting used to, but they’ll have a few thousand helping hands when the tour gets underway in Blackpool on February 5.
Joining the full album tour club makes sense for Bowling For Soup at this stage in their tenure but, as popular as anniversary runs are right now, Jaret was loath to do so at first. “I always felt like doing a whole album leaves out so many people, because I feel like people get into our band at different phases,” he says. But everything just lined up too perfectly – the 30th anniversary of the band and the 20th anniversary of the album. So, maybe, he thought, it deserved the same celebration that other bands were giving records that came out at a similar time.
Bowling For Soup have already done a leg of the tour in the US and one of its greatest joys was watching fans sing along to lesser-known songs. “I’m not really a deep cut guy, I always liked the radio songs and the hits,” Jaret ponders. “I think my assumption is that when you’re doing the deep cuts, you’re alienating somebody, but we always have people shouting out for the deep cuts. That’s been a big eye-opener for me.”
Funnily enough, even though he’s more of a singles guy, Jaret’s own favourite track from ‘A Hangover You Don’t Deserve’ is the album track Last Call Casualty, which has been able to get its due properly at last. Elsewhere, the tour’s also helped him get on board with another relative curio he’s never been a fan of. “I always hated the song Next Ex Girlfriend,” he says. “I really couldn’t stand it but it was one of the ones that made sense to put on the record and the guys liked it. But I developed this love for it from playing it every night on tour. Now I get it!”
The opening run of songs the band plays on the tour – Almost, Trucker Hat and their cover of SR-71’s 1985 that they have truly made their own – speaks volumes about what a huge album ‘A Hangover You Don’t Deserve’ was. It sprang to life in an era of sizzling summers on Warped Tour and their pop-punk peers in Good Charlotte and Simple Plan blaring on radios. In some ways, Bowling For Soup were the odd ones out. They were jovial, jokey, and Texan. “Nobody else was from Texas,” Jaret notes.
On top of this, they were on a major label with some very different labelmates, including Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. “We definitely didn’t feel like we were part of the club,” Jaret remembers. “But I guess the thing is there are lots of people who felt that way. It’s funny, it sort of feels like the odd men out, so to speak, are the ones that are still around.”
And Bowling For Soup aren’t just still around. They’re maybe bigger than they’ve ever been. It won’t be long before they plant their feet on UK soil again for a gigantic pre-Christmas party in December, playing their grandest show in the UK to date at the OVO Arena Wembley. Thanks to the rush of later-career adulation they’ve had, the timing couldn’t be better. “It’s sort of this exclamation point on the years of building this, and a 25 year relationship with the UK,” Jaret says.
It’s the sort of thing he might have wanted to go back and tell his 2013 self about. After all, Bowling For Soup almost didn’t make it to this point, having started preparing to split up around that time. Once they’d got back on stage, however, Jaret had a change of heart. He needed the band, especially after a trying period personally in which he’d just finalised a divorce and began taking anti-anxiety medication.
“I’m just glad that we’re still able to do this,” he says. “I don't really have a bucket list anymore, because I feel like all my dreams have come true, and it'd be selfish for me to ask for more. If there was one, certainly headlining Wembley would be on there. I'm just over the moon to be doing it.”
Tickets for Bowling For Soup at the OVO Arena Wembley are on general sale at 10am on January 31. Click here for more info.
Bowling For Soup Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Wed February 05 2025 - BLACKPOOL Empress Ballroom
Thu February 06 2025 - EDINBURGH O2 Academy Edinburgh
Fri February 07 2025 - STOCKTON Globe
Sat February 08 2025 - MANCHESTER Aviva Studios
Sun February 09 2025 - WOLVERHAMPTON Civic at the Halls
Tue February 11 2025 - PLYMOUTH Pavilions
Wed February 12 2025 - SWANSEA Arena
Thu February 13 2025 - NOTTINGHAM Motorpoint Arena
Fri February 14 2025 - BRIGHTON Centre
Sat February 15 2025 - BOURNEMOUTH BIC
Sat December 13 2025 - LONDON OVO Arena Wembley
We don't run any advertising! Our editorial content is solely funded by lovely people like yourself using Stereoboard's listings when buying tickets for live events. To keep supporting us, next time you're looking for concert, festival, sport or theatre tickets, please search for "Stereoboard". It costs you nothing, you may find a better price than the usual outlets, and save yourself from waiting in an endless queue on Friday mornings as we list ALL available sellers!