Room Thirteen recently had the opportunity to have a backstage chat with Bowling For Soup frontman Jaret Reddick before their show at Norwich UEA on 17th October. This ended up being a pretty long interview, so it has been split into two parts.
R13: Thanks for sparing some of your time.
Jaret Reddick: Of course, man. Thank you.
R13: I'd ask how the tour was going, but you haven't really done much of it yet!
JR: (Laughs) We've been out for a few days. We started in Russia. It was a cool experience to be in Moscow.
R13: Had you been there before?
JR: No, but it's one of those things where, you know, when we were kids no one was ever gonna go to Russia. We all grew up during the Cold war and all that so, just to be in that square and being able to see where Lenin's tomb is, it's one of those moments where you're just like 'we have really gotten to do a lot of cool stuff!' The show was great, and the fans were awesome.
This is only the second show of this tour, but I can honestly say it's a little bit different for us in that we're playing all of the singles we've released. Being tied to a group of songs is different for us because I like to change the show every night, but it's been really fun and we've got a bar onstage, so it can't be all bad.
R13: That sounds good to me. What's the playlist on the tour bus at the moment?
JR: We just got a bunch of new movies. We watched this movie yesterday...I can't remember what it's called. It's, um, hold on...(asks Gary what the movie's called) it's called 'Tucker and Dale vs. Evil' and it was just this brilliant movie. I think we'll probably watch that thing fifteen times this tour.
We don't really listen to a lot of music except for sitting around chatting; right now we have a playlist going in the dressing room that's all old country songs and stuff. After the show we'll drink and watch movies. There's also some sports stuff going on; the Texas Rangers are in the World Series so when they're playing we have to stay up really late and watch that.
R13: Your support bands for the tour; you've got Suburban Legends, who seem to come over every time Reel Big Fish tour...
JR: Yeah, they're good buddies with those guys.
R13: ...and you've got Orange. When choosing support bands do you go for bands you like personally, or who you think is going to go down best with the fans?
JR: Kind of both. We're pretty lucky in that our fans are very accepting of all different kinds of music. We're sort of known as the band who brings good support bands when we're in the UK or The States. I always want to bring the best show possible, but the vibe of the tour is very important to me, and that means backstage and the interaction with the bands and all of that. So, we definitely bring people that I like as people and as bands.
I chose well this time because we've know Suburban Legends for a long time and played a few one-off shows, but never have gotten to tour. Making that happen was great, and I met Joe from Orange because he was living in LA for a while and he had sent me their album a long, long time ago. I think they were still trying to figure out what they were going to do band-wise. We got to be friends over email and hung out a few times.
R13: What about dream support acts, or if you could support anyone, who would they be?
JR: We would love to open up for Green Day. I think it would be great for us fan-wise, but just to be able to see them every night because they're so freakin' great. That would be awesome. We'd also love to tour with the Foo Fighters. Selfishly, I'd like to do something with Frank Turner, but he's just blowing up so big now I don't think that's gonna happen. I think I met him a little too late, we've gotten to be somewhat friendly now, but he's just getting so huge. I just went and saw him in my hometown, Dallas, a couple of weeks ago and it was an amazing show. I'd love to be able to see him every night.
R13: You've managed to keep a stable line-up for the past 17 years, well, bar a drummer, which doesn't really count. How did you manage that? Shouldn't there have been more instances of irreconcilable musical differences?
JR: (Laughs) Y'know, even with the one drummer switch, it wasn't that it was a big, dramatic 'thing', it was just that with our original drummer touring wasn't his thing; he wanted to be home and have a family and a 'normal' life. He's a very normal dude, and we're very friendly with him. That switch saved the band because we were gone a lot and he was miserable.
For us, keeping it together hasn't been hard because we're pretty good about communicating. We stay out of each other's way when it's necessary. We're always there for one another, we're still best friends, we make each other laugh all day, every day. We've been lucky enough not to have a guy get too messed up on drugs or anything like that and we've all stayed out of prison, which is a good thing.
R13: That helps.
JR: Just having a common goal helps. It was pretty early on when we decided we were going to give this a shot and I was pretty open about 'guys, I think I've got this figured out, I think I know how we go about this and, if you'll just trust me, I think we can do this', and they did. The rest of the band put an amazing amount of trust in me because I basically steer where their lives are going. I'm very blessed to have found the four guys who can live with that because, hanging around with other bands, and seeing their inner turmoil it's crazy- I'm like 'you guys are fucking awful communicators, you need to sit down and have a conversation'. We have a very large lack of ego, there's no ego here. There's no one rock-star. Bowling For Soup is the sum of its parts. I get, probably, more attention than everybody because I'm the voice. Chris probably gets more than the other two because of the way he looks. That's just something we all accept, we don't have jealousy or anything like that.
R13: So you're not going to need a shrink for the band in the near future.
JR: I don't think we're going to have to go to therapy as a band. I think we probably all need it individually, but we'll deal with that on our own. (Laughs)
R13: You have a couple of projects; Jarinus and People On Vacation. Tell us a bit about those.
JR: Jarinus is sort of like this all-encompassing thing. It's basically me and my closest friend outside of Bowling For Soup, his name is Linus Of Hollywood. We met because I was a fan of his band, Size 14. I was a huge fan of his writing and his solo stuff. I met him over the internet, went out to LA and we were literally instant best friends. We have so many things in common it's crazy. Jarinus is our umbrella where we write songs together for BFS or other bands, and we are gonna do a Jarinus album. We also produce bands. That is definitely way on the side. A lot of it is just for fun. He and I also have Crappy Records together, so we've got tons going on.
My other band, People On Vacation, is sort of this accidental thing that started with a guy named Ryan Hamilton (Smile Smile). It's the total opposite of BFS; very serious, but I love the way that he writes and I love their (Smile Smile) songs. He has this way of communicating a song that is just brilliant. We got together to just write songs to see what would happen if we took my pop thing and his indie thing and put it together, and it worked brilliantly. It went from us trying to write songs for other people, for film and TV, to being 'maybe we should give this a shot', and we're really doing it, we're taking it pretty serious. I don't think it'll ever be what BFS is in terms of a machine; I'm tired, I'm old, and starting over with getting in the van and slugging it out on tour doesn't appeal to me as much as it did. We are releasing an EP of the first six songs we wrote on November 24th. and we're gonna release a full-length album and we'll tour some. We will play major cities in the States and we plan on coming to the UK next year.
There's definitely a lot going on. I guess I am kind of workaholic-y. I stay really busy, but I'm pretty good at balancing it out; I have a wife and kids at home and I'm pretty good at turning it off at 5 o'clock when I'm home and spending my evening with them and making my weekends laid-back. Fortunately for me my manager has young kids at home too, so we balance it fairly well to try to make sure we're not constantly working 24 hours a day, but my mind tends to be constantly on the go. Even when I'm finishing something I'm thinking about what it is I'm gonna do next. It gets a little nutty. I can't sleep sometimes!
R13: You're certainly making everyone else look lazy!
JR: (Laughs) The bottom line is; I don't really ever half-ass anything. It's like, I have a friend who has a video production company in Wichita, Kansas, which is a few hours away from me, and he was like 'we should get together and collaborate on making some music videos', so we started this thing called 'Built By Ninjas', and now we're making videos. I love anything that's creative. I wish there were things I could do; I wish I was a good artist. I wish I could draw or do graphic design. My head loves things that are visual, I just don't have that talent in those areas, so to do music videos and to be on the other side after some many years is a blast. I can't really call it work, but it's good. I just think, in this day and age it's hard to just do one thing. Whatever you think about the music industry and downloading and all that, it's very, very tough for a musician to just play music for a living. It's hard, and many things contribute to that, but you've got to get out there and cast as many lines in the water as you can.
R13: You're getting on a bit now; does it ever feel weird singing catchy pop-punk songs about High School and girls?
JR: I do think about that sometimes and only a few times has it come up where I couldn't make it make sense in my head. One of them was when we went and wrote a song with Mitch Allan (SR-71), who I wrote '1985' with. We wrote this song called 'Dear Megan Fox', and it's an amazing song, it really is, I think it's a hit. Then, as we got down to recording the album, I couldn't bring myself to do it because it felt weird, me being almost 40 years old singing about a 23-year-old girl. Everyone around me was like 'dude, it's fine, it's what you do, blah blah blah', like Fountains Of Wayne doing 'Stacy's Mom'- they're singing the song from the perspective of a little kid - but I just couldn't do it. So we recorded it, and it's a B-side and people are like 'why didn't you release this?!' and that's the God's honest truth; It's like it was getting creepy.
It's easier for me with 'High School Never Ends' and stuff like that, because I've always equated that time in my life to being pretty much the most important as far as shaping me as a person. Television was huge and movies were so dynamic and crazy and they explored all of these feelings that we were actually having. You almost can't get away with that these days. It's interesting, like, if John Hughes was making movies now I wonder what they'd be like. They would be completely different.
Music was also such a huge part of our lives then, so it's easy to go back and revisit that time and play any of those kinds of songs. I don't think there's any place for us to do anything else; if we did a political album people would just think we were trying to be funny anyway. I think we'll just stay the course now (laughs).