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Busy, busy times for Bowling For Soup frontman Jaret Reddick. Not only have the Texan pop-punk legends recorded a new album ‘Pop Drunk Snot Bread’ (set for release April 22nd), but Jaret has also just released his debut solo country album as Jaret Ray Reddick. With Bowling For Soup currently treading the boards on their ‘Crowd Surf the UK’ tour, Jaret was on hand to talk about both albums, and why the time was right to release his long-talked-about country project.
It must be important to you not only that Bowling For Soup creates new music rather than just relying on the legacy, but also the fact that the new music is so strong?
The idea of us going into 2020 when the pandemic hit – I mean, we didn’t really have any plans to make another record anytime soon – we were going to be singles-based because that’s what people are into now, we are back to the short attention span and it’s hard to get people to listen to twelve songs that come out on a day. And I myself am bad at that! When you put a collection of songs together, you want people to hear it the way that you intended it to be heard. The pandemic happens and here we are, just missing each other, and how can we go someplace together and just hang out? Well, how about making an album? And the album was not even close to being written when that decision was made, so I just locked myself in and knocked the songs out, we took a tour bus to the Poconos [mountain range in Pennsylvania], and everyone was quarantined, everyone took a test, we had an Air B&B and a studio, and nobody was allowed in or out that wasn’t us, and we made the record and we had a great time. I think that you can hear where we are as people and as a band on this new record, I really do. There is a happiness factor and an overall sense of us feeling good about where we are that comes along when you listen to this.
Even on a song like ‘Hello Anxiety’, which is perhaps one of the songs on ‘Pop Drunk Snot Bread’ that people will identify with the most, there is a good nature about it; it must be a skillful process to take an important subject matter like that and put it into a fun song, while still getting the message across?
I am very proud of that one. Proud of all of them, but that song I did with Linus our producer who I write a lot of stuff with, and that song I had in my head for a while that I wanted to write it, but I didn’t want it to be dreary. I wanted it to be more like “Okay, here’s the day! Hello!”. You know, like how it actually happens. The juxtaposition of thinking about the fact of where you usually are when the anxiety is happening, but make it sound the complete opposite of that. I think that will probably be the next single, and I do think that you are right and people will likely gravitate toward that song the most when this thing comes out.
‘Getting Old Sucks But Everybody Is Doing It’ is another one that people will identify with…
And no truer statement has ever been said! I mean, everybody is doing it!
For sure! Another highlight of the new album is ‘The Best We Can’, what can you tell us about that one?
I think love songs are important. Sometimes in relationships, we get really caught up in trying to make everything perfect all the time. And not just in love relationships, but also in friendships and sometimes we don‘t take the opportunity to take a look at the small things that are good, and right. So, this song is about that. It’s about all the stuff that we have gone through but let’s stop beating ourselves up because we are doing the absolute best we can. All of the things that come at you in life, there is no possible way that you can navigate them perfectly, so you do the best you can.
The first leg of the tour is happening now, what logistical issues have you had to face as a touring band with things such as the increase in gas prices, and the UK leaving Europe which has meant the return of the dreaded carnets?
It is tough. The flights, for instance, we waited a little too long in booking and now the flights to the UK are so expensive. Gas, as you said, and the carnets, just to get the gear in and out, and it’s so expensive just to ship the gear now…logistically it’s been tough, tougher than it’s been in past years. But at the same time, you have to take a step back and go “Look, this is the way that it is right now, so what’s the alternative?” Keep ourselves locked away? No, let’s get out there and do this thing, and we will worry about things as they happen. It’s been good though, the crew guys are keeping a good attitude about things because the work falls on them for some of this stuff, management is really busy…definitely some obstacles out there! But we are just chugging away!
It must be humbling that extra shows were added to the tour due to high demand?
For sure, I couldn’t be happier with our first tour back in the UK and going to some cities that we have never been to before, and of course, some where we have a long history. I think that there are some people who have been waiting a long time for this tour, some people have had tickets for a year and a half and we are not taking that for granted, we are bringing it…we are bringing one heck of a show!
The UK has always been a really strong territory for Bowling For Soup, what do you put that down to?
You know, from the big song [‘Girl All the Bad Guys Want’] up there has always been a connection that we have with the UK audience, whether it’s been the humor of our band or the realness of the band, or who we are as people…somehow we made that connection and have managed to keep it. I have to give mention the loyalty of our fans. And the press has mostly been nice to us, going back to the channels that played videos, regional radio stations, etc. It all goes back to those first few shows and something struck a chord…we do well in the US also, but the UK was there first. Had the big song not done as well, and taken off so quickly…then I might not be sitting here talking to you now…and I keep that in mind through all the insanity of trying to get over to the UK, I think “You know what, this is where it all started…so let’s do our thing”.
As someone with decades of experience in the industry, was it nerve-wracking putting out a solo country album under your full name Jaret Ray Reddick? No hiding place really if it’s just you!
No, I think that I’ve been doing this long enough…I think that there are other things that are synonymous with me anyway…I feel that my name is so associated with Bowling For Soup, or even with Jaret and Kelly. It honestly just became this thing of using my own name because I had done everything else. I didn’t want to do a country record with Bowling For Soup because I didn’t want people to think that it was a novelty kind of thing…people tend to almost go there anyway.
Using my full name…that was also about trying to use the algorithms on Spotify, the first few days if you tried to type in Jaret Ray Reddick it would be like…”Sounds like Alkaline Trio”! [laughs] I’m hoping that corrects itself and distances itself from the thousands of things that I’ve done as Jaret Reddick. But I’m super proud of this album, and really am so happy with not only the way that it came out but also the reaction to it. Anyone who has given it a chance seems to love it.
“Given it a chance”, that’s hitting the nail squarely on the head. You’ve always been around country music I believe?
It’s funny, my biological father – who I didn’t know who he was until about five years ago – was a lifelong country musician, so there is a little bit of nature versus nurture right there. That I would even go on to be a musician is pretty crazy. I’m from Wichita Falls, Texas, and country is king there. Everywhere that you went it was country music that was playing. My parents in the car, at the house, there was always music playing and that was a lot of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kenny Rodgers, Dolly Parton…even the Eagles, who were huge for me. And that’s really the first music that I remember. And then I got older and started listening to what my brother was listening to; sometimes it was country, sometimes it wasn’t. I think back and remember how big the movie Urban Cowboy was for me when I was a kid! It was a huge movie, and that soundtrack was so great. As I went on to play in metal bands or punk bands, I still never gave up my love for Waylon, Willie, Johnny Cash, and all of that stuff. It’s rooted very early for it to be just now showing its face.
The pandemic gave you the perfect excuse to finally get it recorded?
Yes, my buddy Zac Maloy, who is in the band The Nixons, has been a songwriter in Nashville for about twenty years now and he’s had number one songs with Carrie Underwood, and a bunch of cuts on several big country records. We’ve been talking about this record back and forth for years and I told him that although I wanted to make a country record I didn’t want to make a Nashville poppy country record. I wanted to make a bare-bones, guitar, drums, bass, and occasional fiddle, kind of thing. After the beginning of the second year of the pandemic, it was just a simple phone call one day saying “Let’s just do this, man. We’ve got the time”. It felt right, and that was almost exactly a year ago. We wrote it pretty fast, text messages, audio files back and forth, and then we went and recorded it in a few days. It took shape in about a month. I wanted it to be as real as possible and with Bowling For Soup I have the luxury of being able to hide behind humor, and there is a little bit of humor on the country album. But there is also quite a bit of emotion, quite a bit of experience, of love, and of love that doesn’t exist anymore. It was very, very natural.
Could anything other than ‘Way More Country’ have opened the album?!
[Laughs] No! Not really! That song…Kenny Rodgers had passed away and I had put out this long post about his death because he was such an inspiration to me. His songs and his storytelling. If you listen back to Bowling For Soup and think about me saying that I liked these guys for their stories, then that is what Bowling For Soup songs are: they are stories. And almost all of them have a visual going along with it if you listen to them. So again, with ‘Way More Country’, Zac hit me right after that post and said…”Man, you have got to do this. You have got to write an album as there are all these people around you who don’t realize that you are way more country than they are!” He said, “You are this pop-punk guy from Wichita, Texas and your first car was a pick-up!”. So when that song started to come to life…and we went back and forth on what the first line was going to be, once it became [sings] “I sing in a punk rock band” then we realized that had to be the first thing that people heard when they listened to the record.Uncle Kracker’s outro at the end works really well!
Yeah, and it was cool having him, but when you have someone featuring on an album, then you have to give up the part of the song that you are not going to sing. And I was like “I really want to sing that Kenny Rodgers part, but this is a good song to have Uncle Kracker on”, so it worked out really well and I love that he found humor in the rhyming of “Tesla” with “Wrestler”!
And the lovely Frank Turner pops up on the beautiful ‘As Drunk As It Takes’, how far back does the connection with Frank go?
Probably 2012 or 2014 was the first time that I ever met him. I was just this huge fan of his, and singing his praises on social media all the time, and was constantly bumping him up. I caught him acoustically in a press tent at a festival and introduced myself, and he was like…” No way!”. We had a good little dialog going back and forth over the years and once the pandemic hit we started having an Instagram hang-out every week for a year! It was called “Back To The Metal” and we just talked about whatever came into our heads. I just respect him as a musician, and as a songwriter, and I’m glad that we have gotten to be friends over these years. I think that he is a genius, and when I asked him to play on the album he was really gracious – and I did say to anybody that I approached “Please don’t feel that you have to do this, I want you to do it because you want to do it”. And Frank couldn’t have been nicer, he said “Of course”, and send the song right back with his parts added and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.
You must have been very proud when you heard the album back for the first time?
For sure. With country, you kind of leave it all out there and lay it down in an acoustic version, and then you get these guys to go in and play on your record for you. The band that Zac was able to get together was so great, and then the first time hearing my voice…yeah, man, the first time listening to the songs brought me to tears! Because it was exactly what I wanted the album to sound like.
It’s amazing that after all these years, that music still has that effect on you…
You’re right. Lately, especially, and I don’t think that I was in a rut, but I was putting out music over a ten-year period where so much was crazy in my life; going through changes, kids, going through a divorce and custody battles, band member changes…things like that. I found myself in a place where doing this new Bowling For Soup record, doing this country record, everything just felt so good, and even listening to this new BFS record I’m just so happy with it and I think that it came out so good. So yeah, music is a funny thing…it’s so cool. It brings forth emotions, and feelings, that I don’t think anything else has the ability to do. I know for me that songs can bring a feeling that I hadn’t had since the last time that I heard that song. It could be a classic or a new song that sparks memories in me of who I was with at the time, a smell, or even what I was driving at the time… it’s history. Music is stronger than imagination. It can take you back to that time.
The album sleeve is very cool and very simple. Was it quite important to you that you had a physical version of the album out there for fans to hold in their hands?
Yeah, well that’s the thing, you really don’t know these days. I mean, I don’t even have a CD player so I was like “Do I still do these?”, but more than anything, I did them because I wanted to be able to hand people something. I have to give credit to my artist Dave Pearson for just bringing it to life, it looks so perfect in that packaging. I’m excited for the vinyl to come out, I know people are waiting on that, hopefully, we will have it out on vinyl sometime this fall.
Why do you think that country music is so divisive? There seems to be no middle ground – it’s either love it or hate it…
I’ve actually been talking about this a lot since the album came out, because predominantly the response to my stuff is either “Oh my God I love it, I love country!” or, “I haven’t listened to country in 20 years, and this is great”, OR, it’s “Sorry, dude, I hate country”. And that got me to thinking …and I’m glad that you asked this question…because I got thinking about what is this blanket of hate that we put over a certain genre? Here’s the thing: most of those people who say I.HATE.COUNTRY. – you could say to them “You don’t like Johnny Cash?” and chances are they would reply “Well, yeah I like Johnny Cash, and a little bit of this here and that there”, and I’m guilty of that because I have said since I can remember that I hate the blues. And I do not like most of the blues artists that most people like! [laughs] However, I love John Mayer and he’s obviously a blues guy, I like the Black Crowes and that is for sure a blues band. So I’ve had to go back and say “Well, I guess that I don’t hate the blues”, so I’ve been preaching that. I’m choosing my words more carefully now when I talk about that! Social Distortion’s Mike Ness has a few country records out, so you’re not going to give Mike Ness a chance?! That seems crazy because you don’t get more punk than Mike Ness!
There’s nothing more punk than the legendary black and white image of Johnny Cash giving the finger to the camera…
Nothing more punk than that. The similarities between punk rock and country are so vast; the arrangements, the topics of conversation, and I get why people might say “Oh my God, he’s singing about his tractor!” But that’s not the majority of what it’s all about. You’ve got to think back to Willie Nelson and George Jones duetting on ‘I Gotta Get Drunk’ with [starts to sing] “Well, I gotta get drunk and I sure do dread it, ‘Cause I know just what I’m gonna do”! I mean, how punk is that?! [laughs]
Catch Bowling For Soup on tour in the UK now, all tour dates can be found below.
Bowling For Soup Crowdsurf The UK – April 2022 Tour Dates
15th – Scarborough Spa, Scarborough
16th – O2 Academy, Birmingham*
17th – O2 Academy, Bournemouth
18th – O2 Academy, Bristol (New Show)
19th – Swansea Bragwyn Hall, Swansea
21st – De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill
22nd – Margate Winter Gardens, Margate
23rd – O2 Brixton Academy, London*
* Extra shows added due to huge demand
‘Pop Drunk Snot Bread’ is available April 22nd, more information here.
‘Just Woke Up’ is available here.
Interview – Dave
Live images – Rob Wilkins
