After more than 30 years of fronting Bowling For Soup, would Jaret Reddick change anything about his career trajectory if given the chance to do it all again? Ask the man himself and he will earnestly say no, actually, he would not.
“I think, knowing what I know now, it would be a little bit difficult not to try and [get] myself over some of the hurdles,” Reddick tells me over Zoom, calling from an office bursting with an eclectic collection of guitars and Bowling For Soup memorabilia. “But,” he continues, “not to sound cliché, but I really wouldn’t change anything.”
And the reason why? “Because [of] where we are right now, not only just where Bowling For Soup is 31 years in, but just where we all are in our lives,” says Reddick. “In our careers and the happiness of our children … And so if it meant going through the trials and tribulations both professionally and personally to be here right now, at this point in my life, I would keep everything the same. Because I don’t really look back on anything.”
How Does Bowling For Soup Maintain Their Easy Chemistry?
Sitting transfixed and listening closely, I can recognize when I’m in the presence of someone who is going to tell me some interesting shit. That’s part of the Bowling For Soup experience, after all; banter, antics, and chemistry. Putting on an amazing live show has always been a core part of the band’s identity, but it’s not in theatrics or set design. It’s in good old fashioned rowdy pop-punk and getting along really well with the guys on stage next to you.
That ease of speaking translates naturally into our conversation in a way that pleasantly surprises me. Not because I thought Jaret Reddick of Bowling For freaking Soup would be a difficult person to talk to. The reality is, I’m usually a difficult person to talk to.
But Bowling For Soup has maintained a legacy built on decades of friendship. Later, when I bring up the fact that the founding members of BFS knew each other through adolescence—Reddick has been friends with guitarist Chris Burney since junior high, and met original drummer Lance Morrill in kindergarten—Reddick describes it as being “closer than family.”
What “Closer Than Family” Means
“I always try and explain how that’s a thing,” he says. “How can someone be closer than family?” I learn that one difference is in how fights get resolved, especially when your best friends are also your bandmates. For example, say you have a little sister in possession of the nuclear launch codes for pissing you off. You fight, then go to your corners to cool off. When you come back later, be it a couple hours, days, or even months, all is (usually) forgiven.
“But when you’re in a band with somebody,” says Reddick, “you got to work that out now.” He adds that Bowling For Soup have been lucky, though. “We never had a lot of that,” he says, “but it’s definitely relationships that are super important to me, and I think the rest of the guys too.”
“We Were Our Own Guinea Pigs”
Bowling For Soup formed in 1994 in Wichita Falls, Texas, with a DIY mindset and not a lot of professional direction. They started out making their own flyers for shows, managing themselves, and self-releasing albums. Even when they signed to their first major label, Jive Records, they were still self-managed for a while.
“We were our own guinea pigs,” says Reddick. “I don’t feel like anything was ever handed to us.” Still, he says, “It would be nice to educate young me on a few things, but we survived, and here we are.”
Now, with 31 years of Bowling For Soup behind them and the future looking brighter than ever, Reddick says that he’s in a unique position to give advice to young musicians.
“I feel like I can be one of those guys that tells kids, ‘hey, here’s the deal,’” he explains. “This is a 24-hour job, and that’s if you don’t go and do anything else besides this. It’s like, the minute you start living your life and not doing this full-time, then that’s risking not getting to where you want to get. And that sucks, but that’s the reality of it.
“I feel good about it … I like giving advice,” Reddick continues. “Sometimes the hardest part of giving advice is being honest, because you’re telling people a lot of times what they don’t want to hear. So I am honest, to my detriment sometimes where I’m like ‘hey, you know, the getting in the van thing that you want to do that you saw on TV that a lot of us did, and going around and playing to nobody, it just doesn’t exist anymore. I’m sorry, but you have the Internet, so you have the whole world.’”
Jaret Reddick On Being A Guy With Answers
On the subject of giving advice, Jaret Reddick mentions a conversation he had recently with a young band. They’d been billed with Bowling For Soup, along with a few others, and were sharing a dressing room.
“One of the guys was like, ‘Oh, we don’t mess with social media anymore. We just turned all that off,’” he says. “And I said to him, well that’s great if you really like the number of people that are coming to see your band right now and you never want that to go up.”
It sounds like brutal honesty, but that goes back to the nature of giving advice; telling people things they don’t really want to hear. Really, though, Reddick admits that he enjoys being that guy who younger musicians can go to when they have questions.
“That’s part of the whole thing,” he says, “getting out there and doing that and then being able to give back a little bit at this point in my career.”
Bowling For Soup Prepare FOr Their Biggest Headline Show Ever
On December 13, Bowling For Soup is heading to London to play Wembley Stadium, billed as their biggest headlining show to date. How does Reddick feel about their biggest-ever show happening 31 years later?
“It has the makings of our biggest headline show to date, which is over 10,000,” he says. “This far into our career, [it’s] just crazy.
“Last February we did 9,000 or so in Cardiff, and we did a couple of hockey arenas, and those were the biggest venues that we’ve ever headlined,” he continues. “Obviously we’ve played festivals and things like that where we’ve played to way more people than that. But this is [the biggest show] where people came to see Bowling For Soup.”
Nostalgia: Still Alive And Well
Reddick shares that this ties in with “how everything is feeling right now, there’s a cool nostalgia thing happening.” True, nostalgia is at an all-time high and has been for several years. The people yearn for music they listened to in high school, or college, or when times were better. Revisiting beloved artists is just one way people are recapture the rose-tinted joys of youth.
“I love that people are into not just our band, but the whole genre right now,” says Reddick. “And it looks like it’s got some legs, that it’s going to last for a little while. Because we’ve all been doing it for the last few years, you know, there’s bands like us and New Found Glory that never stopped.
“But there’s so many bands [like] Story Of The Year and Yellowcard … Boys Like Girls is another one, [that are] all sort of back and doing it and it feels good,” Reddick continues. He points out then that this nostalgia feels authentic, not manufactured. “It feels really like, there’s a whole bunch of new people that are getting into this kind of music. And then there’s these people who we were their childhood, and they sort of went on to college and other things. And they’re rediscovering it. That’s really, really so much fun.”
#Hashtag Blessed
“To be cliché yet again, it’s that whole hashtag blessed thing,” Reddick says, uttering a phrase I haven’t heard since 2015. He continues, “I wouldn’t have thought that this is where we were headed. I mean, even five, six years ago, before the pandemic. I felt like I could sort of see the end of the path if we wanted to go out somewhere sort of on top. And now I can’t say that I see that.”
Despite how things have changed in the lives of Bowling For Soup members, Reddick admits this is a positive feeling. For example, the “whole unit” of the band is no longer collectively located in Dallas, which “makes it really strange.” But the overall trajectory the band is on remains “a really good feeling,” says Reddick. “It’s a good thing, yeah.”
Later, I ask about the accomplishments he’s most proud of in the past several years. The upcoming Wembley show will surely fall under this category in a couple of months; but overall, what that show represents is an accomplishment in itself.
“Keeping the momentum,” Reddick says when asked for any stand-out accomplishments. “Being able to go and play these shows, playing bigger shows than we’ve played in years and being able to deliver. You see the comments [of] people going, ‘Bowling For Soup was the highlight of my day.’ That is, in itself, such a big deal to us because we’ve always prided ourselves on the live show.”
Jaret Reddick gets Real About Adapting His Stage Presence To His Age
Bowling For Soup works hard to maintain their momentum, but as the decades inevitably pass, they’ve had to adapt their live show to the limitations of age. I am suddenly trusted with something deeply personal, knowledge that Reddick tells me he hasn’t shared before. Naturally, I am nervous about this responsibility.
“It’s not that crazy,” Reddick laughs when I ask if he wants to go off the record. “But it’s like, being a guy who is a bit older, and I’m not as spry as I once was, and my knees won’t allow me to jump off of shit. And I’ve gained some weight and all of that. I have this worry about the energy of the show … Even though nobody in our genre who’s my age is doing the same stuff that we used to do.
“And so the fact that I hear so much about how energetic our show was, how fun it was, that is something that really means a lot to me. Because it’s something that I have to do with my face and with my voice because I’m sort of tied here to this microphone a lot more than I was back in the day. So I would definitely consider our biggest accomplishment just being able to keep the live show sounding as good and just as fun and energetic as it’s ever been.”
How Is Bowling For Soup Adjusting To Performing Following Chris Burney’s Retirement?
Chris Burney, beloved lead guitarist and core founding member of Bowling For Soup, retired from the band in January 2025. Since then, Jaret Reddick, Gary Wiseman, and Rob Felicetti have been performing as a three-piece. Even at Wembley, they’re not bringing on any guest musicians. As a unit, they made the decision not to find a replacement for Burney; “you cannot replace a legend,” they said.
“He was the face of the band for a long time,” says Reddick when asked how they’ve been adjusting to Burney’s retirement. “In those early 2000s years when we first signed our record deal, he was the one that was on the artwork of things and on some of our posters.
“So, you’ve got to give him that credit of being such a big part of where we were, where we ended up, all of those things. It’s been strange, but it’s been good.”
Reddick reveals that the fans have been good about adjusting to Burney’s retirement as well. “There’s been very little clapback,” he says. “We were adamant about not replacing him, about not bringing in another personality, not bringing in someone else where it felt unnatural, like ‘Who are these guys?’ Now it’s more like, ‘Hey, where did that guy go?’”
Overall, while it’s emotional to lose a founding member and a good friend, Reddick says they’re making the best of it.
“I think it’s all working out the best way that it could,” he says. “Just trying to really take this thing that we created—that’s what I told [Chris] when he retired—to take this thing that he and I created … and really just see can we take it to the next level? How high can we fly this flag? So, I’m anxious to see [that].”
Risking It All To Ask The Forbidden Bowling For Soup Question
As our conversation winds down, I decide on my final question. It’s not anything groundbreaking; it floats around the Internet, emerging from the ether every once in a while. The answer is there, and Google is free. But I have the opportunity to hear it straight from the source. So, I ask the forbidden question: bowling to obtain soup, or bowling on behalf of soup?
It’s a testament to how often Jaret Reddick gets this question that he says, “Most of the time, whenever this is asked of me, I send people to the pinned-up videos on my TikTok.”
I don’t have a TikTok. But what I do have, Reddick says, is the ability to ask “awesome” questions. So, I get my answer:
“I will tell you that, with a bit of reflection,” Reddick starts, “it did become very apparent that we are bowling to obtain soup because it is our job. And so soup being representative of food, money, those things. But,” he added, “if soup were ever in need, we would definitely be there for it.”
Photo by Amy Russell
The post ‘Let’s Do It for Jaret!’: In Conversation With the Bowling For Soup Frontman (Exclusive) appeared first on VICE.
