Showbox Presents
Getting Old Sucks Tour
Bowling for Soup
with Mest, Authority Zero

Event Information
With their thirty year anniversary as a band on the horizon in 2024, Texas’ favourite punk rock export Bowling For Soup continue to grow their global fanbase and expand their success year on year. Also dubbed the crown princes of pop punk, Bowling For Soup - frontman and guitarist Jaret Reddick, fellow guitarist Chris Burney, drummer Gary Wiseman and bassist Rob Felicetti have proved that nothing, not even a global pandemic, has slowed the demand for their unique, humour filled live shows and upbeat, heartfelt anthems.
Songs such as High School Never Ends, Punk Rock 101, 1985 and of course the Grammy nominated Girl All The Bad Guys Want resonate as much today as when they were written and are proving extremely popular in the modern streaming world. Their 2022 album, Pop Drunk Snot Bread, a play on the cultural reference “pop punk’s not dead”, was heralded by fans and critics alike as the band’s best release in fifteen years. Millions of streams and YouTube views for songs like Getting Old Sucks (But Everybody’s Doing It), I Wanna Be Brad Pitt and the global smash Alexa Bliss (dedicated to WWE’s own multi-time world wrestling women’s champion) show that Bowling For Soup can still run rings (and riffs) around their younger contemporaries. The album also features songs like The Best We Can, Wouldn’t Change A Thing and the positive mental health anthem Hello Anxiety, where Bowling For Soup show they can do both serious and reflective, with a BFS heart at the core.
It's a testament to the bands' enduring appeal and a fanbase that continues to grow day after day - evidenced by their 100 million streams on Spotify in the year 2020 alone. Finding their niche back in the 1990's would be tough when the musical climate was in serious shift. "We were just the stereotypical, small town guys with nothing else to do - starting a band to keep ourselves out of trouble" recalls frontman Jaret Reddick looking back. There was certainly no trend to follow, every other band seemed to be genre jumping to try and catch "the next big thing" without knowing what "the next big thing was", leaving the members of Bowling For Soup with no option to just go out and have fun. Brought up on a heady diet of 80's John Hughes Movies, LA Hair Metal, Steve Martin comedy routines (which spawned the band's name) and hook laden punk rock, BFS hit the ground running on the simple blueprint - have a good time and pretty soon, everyone else will join in!
Bowling For Soup are a band who've proven time and again that they can move with the times throughout a period of turbulence for the music industry. From their DIY roots, through to being on a major record label for many years (Jive Records) and being very successfully independent with their own label for over a decade, they are a band who've found success in every way. ‘We're in control of everything now. If we decide we wanna do something, we just do it - we don't need to ask anyone’s permission. It also makes you feel super proud when you do something yourself and it’s a success’, reveals Reddick.
Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, Bowling For Soup were playing to the biggest crowds of their career. Over 20,000 people witnessed their sold out 2020 UK tour with Simple Plan and they've sold out arenas alongside Steel Panther. Headline appearances at recent editions of UK festivals like Slam Dunk and Reading and Leeds have gone down a storm. At Reading Festival 2019 the crowd overflowed out of the stage with fans peering for a glimpse of "BFS", while their appearances at the final editions of the US Vans Warped Tour brought enormous crowds to every show, no matter what time of day the band were performing.
With the world experiencing live music again following COVID in 2022, Bowling For Soup’s enduring live appeal saw fans return in droves for huge tours in both the UK and US, many making a “BFS” show their first taste of live music since the pandemic. Whether it was huge theatre shows with Lit and The Dollyrots (UK), Less Than Jake and The Aquabats (US) or the sold out UK singalong with Jaret and Rob acoustic tour, the demand to see Bowling For Soup live in the flesh is bigger than it ever has been. 2023 sees the band return to play festivals and shows in mainland Europe for the first time in many years, alongside huge slots at the UK Slam Dunk Festival, while multiple US tours are in the pipeline. A Second chapter of their greatest hits, Songs People Actually Like Volume 2, is due to land late this Summer. Frontman Jaret Ray Reddick is also enjoying new adventures with his journey in the world of Red Dirt Country Music with his debut solo album Just Woke Up.
While the music industry and the world at large is ever evolving, Bowling For Soup have prided themselves on moving with the times, keeping up with the latest ways to stay in touch with their fans (Jaret is now a huge star on TikTok) and get their music out there to as many people as possible. For generations of fans, there has always been a Bowling For Soup song for every occasion. They’re the band who make you smile and they’re the band who will pick you up when you are down, and as their song says, they wouldn’t change a thing.
Artist Information
Talking with Bowling for Soup singer Jaret Reddick, you may not immediately get the sense that this affable, down-to-earth Texan fronts a Grammy- and Emmy-nominated pop/punk band with over a million album sales to their credit. "If you compare our first album to our 10th one, you could be like, 'Let's see... Well, their voices finally changed, and they got a lot better musically, but they still sound like the same guys to me," Reddick says, the grin audible in his North Texas drawl. "Man, I would hope we're still the same guys! Can you imagine what a bummer it'd be if we weren't?" Frankly, we can't-and on their 10th studio album, Sorry for Partyin', Bowling for Soup prove that no matter what lame new trends may lurk outside their studio walls, they've got the hits, fits, shits and giggles to keep coming out ahead.
From side-splittingly funny double entendres (the I-can't-believe-they-got-away-with-that lead single "My Wena") to call-and-response jams you'll undoubtedly be hearing in high schools worldwide ("No Hablo Ingles"), Sorry for Partyin' features some of the funniest, most infectious songs of BFS' 15-year career. Of course, the album also packs some of the strongest, most confident songwriting in BFS' catalog, proving once again that these guys are masters of their craft. "We've created our niche, and our niche is us," says Reddick, who formed Bowling for Soup in 1994 and today rounds out the Denton, Texas-based quartet with guitarist Chris Burney, bassist Erik Chandler and drummer Gary Wiseman. "We know there are lots of people out there who think guys in their 30s shouldn't be writing about stuff like their 'Wena' and farts and beers and chicks." (Incidentally, you'll find all of the above on Sorry for Partyin'.) "But I say why not? What should guys in their 30s be writing about? The economy? War? Organic food versus non-organic? We like funny movies, and we like to drink beer and talk smack about each other's moms. There's nothing contrived about it--this is who we are."
For anyone else who thinks humor doesn't belong in music, let's also remember that this is who BFS are: A worldwide phenomenon with a string of hit singles (including 2006's "High School Never Ends" and the 2004 MTV and radio smash "1985") to their credit. A fan-favorite live act whose chemistry is so innate they've never had to prepare a set list. And a TV and movie-soundtrack juggernaut whose Emmy-nominated contribution to Disney's Phineas and Ferb is literally the most widely heard cartoon theme song on the planet. Quite a step up from the salad days when they were handing out demos in Warped Tour parking lots--even if the motives behind the music have stayed pure since then. "There was nobody in Texas that sounded like us in 1994," Reddick remembers. "Obviously you had the Orange County, Calif., explosion that we felt a part of, because we were all ripping off the same bands. But as all the bands from that era started finding success, people started getting super-serious and making these really dreary or angry records. I'm not saying I don't like that stuff, but for us it's always been a case of 'Let's never do that!' We want to be that point of somebody's day where they can get off work and put us in and think, 'Okay, yeah: Everything else sucks, but this is awesome."
Fittingly, "awesome" was an operative word during the Sorry for Partyin' sessions. Working with producer Linus of Hollywood (also Reddick's partner in the year-old Crappy Records label), BFS cut the album in a whirlwind 24 days at Wire Recording Studio in Austin, Texas, where the ideas flowed as readily as... Well-let's just say there's a reason they titled one of Sorry's singles "Hooray for Beer." "We had close to a two-year break between the last record (2006's The Great Burrito Extortion Case) and writing for this one," Reddick says, "so we were ready to have some fun." The anything-goes atmosphere lent itself to some interesting collaborations, too: After discovering that one of their musical heroes, former ALL vocalist Scott Reynolds, lived just blocks from the studio, BFS rang him up to make a cameo on "America (Wake up Amy)." Fastball's Tony Scalzo, another Austin native and band friend, ended up collaborating on the rollicking kiss-off to an ex "I Don't Wish You Were Dead Anymore." And, even if he originally dropped by just to hang out with his friends, Nerf Herder frontman/YouTube mega-star Parry Gripp also wound up making a cameo on vocals. "It literally felt like more of a party than work, and I think that shows up throughout the record," Reddick remembers. "People are gonna hear this and be like, 'Okay, well, it sounds like they had just a little bit of fun." Of course, they also got serious-or as serious as you can when your album's lead single is a wiener joke. "I think a song like 'My Wena' is a perfect example of us being like, 'Okay, whatever people think is as far as we're gonna take it, we'll just keep pushing things to the next level,'" Reddick explains. "But there are a handful of songs on this record that really mean a lot, too. I think that was also a part of the studio environment--whether we were goofing around or wearing our hearts on our sleeves, we weren't afraid to go for it."
Considering how long they've been a band, it's no small wonder that Bowling for Soup still find new ways to go for it in the niche they've carved out for themselves. But as Reddick notes, that sense of abandon is just the thing that's allowed BFS to tackle Sorry for Partyin' as if it were their first record, not their 10th. "We've always said that the day it's not fun anymore, we're just not gonna do it anymore," he concludes. "So why focus on the down side? Let's keep doing what we do best. Let's keep having fun."
- Tue, October 17, 2023
- The Showbox
- 8:00 PM
- $35.00
- All Ages to Enter, 21 & Over to Drink
- Buy Tickets