Being nominated for a Grammy hasn’t changed the boys of Bowling for Soup. At all.
The pop-punk foursome are up to their old tricks on a just reissued version of their 2002 breakthrough, Drunk Enough to Dance. The album, which spawned the Best Pop Performance Grammy-nominated single “Girl All the Bad Guys Want” and sold nearly 200,000 copies, has been augmented with a typically tongue-in-cheek take on A Flock of Seagulls’ new wave staple “I Ran (So Far Away)” as well as the new tracks “Punk Rock 101” and “Star Song.”
“We thought we were working on the follow-up to Drunk Enough to Dance,” singer Jaret Reddick said of the tracks he wrote earlier this year. “We had a few songs done and we wanted to release an EP because it’s coming up on a year that [Drunk was released], but the label didn’t want us to do a new record until next year. We had an option to not release anything until then or to put some new songs on this one.”
The 19-track reissue features the Wichita Falls, Texas, band’s signature irreverent take on life. Reddick described the new material and the album’s latest single, “Punk Rock 101,” as being about “pretty much the same things we always talk about: chick stuff.” The boys lampoon the entire pop-punk genre in “Punk Rock 101,” employing all of the musical tricks that have made their peers famous, from Blink-182’s tales of teenage angst to Sum 41’s snide attitude and Good Charlotte’s hip-hop-inspired breakdowns. What else would you expect from a song that features the hook “Same song, different chorus?”
As for the grunged-up A Flock of Seagulls cover, that was just a tip of the hat to one of the band’s favorite tunes from the ’80s, but don’t think that it signals they’ve run out of material.
“I’ve got four notebooks full of stuff, and by the end of the summer I’ll have most of the songs demoed and we’ll be ready to hit the studio,” said Reddick, 31, who hopes to begin recording in November and have an album out by April.
He described one of his new, as-yet-untitled tracks as “an angry song that talks about how a few years ago, if you heard a band on the radio everyone would say they sounded like Pearl Jam, and now they say it sounds like Blink-182. That’s such an easy, non-music-lover thing to say, and it’s so untrue,” Reddick said. “There’s lots of bands right now with similar styles, but that’s what’s happening in music right now. Besides, we don’t sound like Blink-182 at all… we sound like Green Day.”
As for the perks of being a Grammy nominee, Reddick would only say it hasn’t changed their lives much, other than a few mentions in Entertainment Weekly and a bizarre visit to “Live With Regis and Kelly.” The singer is married and found out about the nomination as his wife was about to give birth to their first child, so the Grammy hasn’t meant increased groupie action. Besides, he explained, “just being in a band gets you laid. There is something about being able to look like you know what you’re doing when you pick up a guitar that people love.”
