Music
Looking Back
Bowling For Soup talk 20 years of A Hangover You Don’t Deserve
The pop-punk legends reflect on the unexpected success of their seminal album ahead of a 2025 tour celebrating its 20th anniversary
Many have certainly tried, but it’s hard to argue the case for pop-punk being a ‘cool’ genre.
Taking the essence of punk’s rebellious spirit and filtering it through a hook-filled lens of humour, sarcasm and chaos, the offshoot of the genre’s snarl has often been penned the lame little brother of punk. Balancing the emotion and attitude with adolescent gags and playful self-deprecation, the 90s saw the sillier sides of pop-punk mocked and maligned by many, but at the onset of the millennium a monumental shift was brewing.
When blink-182 dropped their fast-paced third album, Enema Of The State, in 1999 you could turn on any television set across the United States and see blink-182’s three members running naked through the streets of Los Angeles. The music video for ‘What’s My Age Again?’ joining a horde of goofy, polished punk songs being championed by MTV and international radio made pop-punk impossible to avoid.
“I don’t think any of us ever expected to be on the radio,” Bowling For Soup frontman Jaret Reddick laughs.
“You would turn on a station where people were listening to *NSYNC and Britney Spears, and suddenly you’d hear a New Found Glory song, a Sum 41 song and a Good Charlotte song. It was strange, but before anyone knew it all those bands were on the cover of magazines and being invited to award shows.”
The unexpected rise of pop-punk couldn’t have come at a better time for Bowling For Soup. Though their 2000 debut album, Let’s Do It For Johnny!, failed to bring the success they had hoped for, its follow-up, Drunk Enough To Dance (2002), shuffled the band in amongst the scene’s darlings. Their dreaded ‘sophomore slump’ was met with huge praise from fans, and a GRAMMY nomination in 2003 for Best Pop Performance by a Group or Duo for their single ‘Girl All The Bad Guys Want’.
“We never expected it to get this far, so from that point onwards we just wanted to enjoy every minute. It could be over tomorrow, so we treated everything like it was the last thing we were ever going to do,” Reddick shrugs.
“With Drunk Enough To Dance being such a success, suddenly, we had money to spend on a third record. We could do whatever we wanted, and even the label was like, ‘I can’t believe these guys are pulling this off’. We were on a label with Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC… we were the only artists like us. We were this adorable little animal that they had bought, and occasionally, they’d throw us some food. We didn’t cost them a lot of money, and we didn’t ask for a lot, but it became this little engine that surprised everyone… even ourselves.”
Heading back into the studio, the restraints were off for Bowling For Soup to truly have fun with it. With Drunk Enough To Dance producer Butch Walker suddenly in much higher demand, the plan was to write and record three new songs with their previous collaborator and see how things went. Reddick and Walker sat down together to produce ‘Almost’, ‘Trucker Hat’ and ‘Last Call Casualty’.
“We decided that Butch would do pre-production with us, and then we’d stay with his engineer Russ-T Cobb (Avril Lavigne, The All-American Rejects) and do the record ourselves. We took everything we had learned from Butch on the last record, used all the tools at our disposal, and it became the best decision we ever made.”
With ‘Almost’ intended to be the first single, the plans were lain for the band’s next chapter… until a call from Walker’s manager Jonathan Daniel came in. “Mitch Allan from SR-71 was discussing his next move with Jonathan and had sent him over some stuff that he had written. One of those things happened to be the song ‘1985’,” Reddick explains.
“Jonathan listened to it and noticed that it didn’t sound like an SR-71 song… it sounded like a Bowling For Soup song. Mitch sent it to me, and I got what he was saying, but they’re a different band to ours lyrically. They’re a lot more in your face, and some of the lyrics were things that I wouldn’t say. Our decision to give it a shot was dependent on Mitch letting me make it a Bowling For Soup song, and he was amazingly gracious. He let me do whatever I wanted to it, and we put it out as the album’s first single.”
The result of perfect timing and a solid understanding of their band’s identity, Bowling For Soup’s revised version of the track ended up becoming their biggest hit to date. Reddick and his bandmates just days away from leaving Georgia, a decision to take a chance ended up changing their lives, thrusting them firmly into the still-glowing pop-punk spotlight.
Telling the story of a middle-aged woman stuck in the 1980s due to a denial at how fast life has passed her by, the band teamed up with powerhouse director duo Smith n’ Borin for the music video. Taking place on an unassuming street in a suburban American neighbourhood, the character of Debbie – played by actress Joey House – is distracted from her mundane responsibilities by the Texan band’s performance in a nearby garage.
“With our band, we don’t separate. The four of us, and our crew, are always together. We eat together, we go to bed at the same time, and we’re like a walking cartoon,” Reddick smiles.
“When it came to our music videos, we wanted to get that idea across. We didn’t need to look cool, because there would always be other bands that looked cooler than us. It was so important to show that light-heartedness, but they also had to be smart. Each video has its own little story, and they’re timeless. It’s important that both the song and the video put something memorable into people’s heads, and we’re lucky that we were able to do that.”
Watch any Bowling For Soup music video, or any footage of them onstage, and one thing becomes abundantly clear: they were having the time of their lives. It’s easy to see how their spirit connected with so many, but Reddick is keen to point out that, even back then, for every lover of their antics – there was always a hater.
“When you’re 30 years in and you’ve sold millions of records… the relevance of those people grows smaller and smaller,” he shrugs.
“We were the crowned princes of pop-punk, but people were also calling us one of the stupidest bands in history. You weather that though, and you come out on the other side. Now, when we release new music, what do you say to a band that’s been around for 30 years? We still do what we do, and we do it better than anybody on the planet. After a certain point, it becomes complicated to hate on it.”
It’s all subjective, of course, but when Reddick looks at his wall and sees a display of awards, golden discs, and magazine covers, he can be sure he’s done something right. Bringing the 20th anniversary tour of A Hangover You Don’t Deserve to the UK in 2025 for a whole host of singalongs and fun, two decades on – there’s no denying their impact on the genre.
Playing all the hits alongside some album deep cuts yet to be played in front of a live audience, it’s a chance to celebrate a story that Reddick and his bandmates never anticipated they’d still be a part of.
“It seems crazy that we started the way we started, and that we are where we are. We lived in a small town, and there was a lot of trouble to get into. We weren’t big drinkers at the time, and partying wasn’t really on the agenda, so we just got together every night and played music,” he finishes.
“As we grew, we kept waiting for someone to say, ‘Alright guys, that was fun, but it’s over’. To have been able to make a career out of this is a testament to our relationship as a band, but also the niche that we found with the people who love our songs. People allowed us to be a part of their childhoods, and whilst A Hangover You Don’t Deserve may not be a record that you put on every week, every so often it comes on your playlist, and it feels good. To this day, people come to see our band and they leave with their face hurting from smiling… I don’t know that there are a lot of bands who can say that.”
