Culture
Bowling For Soup’s Rob Felicetti talks about 20 years of ‘A Hangover You Don’t Deserve,’ pop-punk kids growing up and the band’s serious commitment to keep having fun
By: Nicholas Kobe
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PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (WOUB) – As ’90s and ’00s nostalgia takes a tighter chokehold over the 2020s by the day, pop punk has risen right alongside it.
Be it celebratory tours from Fall Out Boy, Avril Lavigne, and Green Day, or new music from Blink-182 and Paramore, it’s clear pop punk wasn’t just a phase.
When making the argument for the pure fun of 2000s pop punk, one needs no further example than Bowling For Soup. For 30 years Bowling for Soup has been entertaining beyond measure and pumping out some of the genre’s catchiest tunes, such as The Girl All The Bad Guys Want, High School Never Ends and of course, Today is Gonna Be A Great Day, the theme song for Disney Channel’s Phineas and Ferb.
Many of Bowling for Soups’ most iconic tracks, such as 1985, Almost and Ohio (Come Back To Texas) appear on 2004’s A Hangover You Don’t Deserve, an album that turns 20 years old this month. To celebrate, Bowling for Soup is taking a step away from their normally off-the-cuff shows to play A Hangover You Don’t Deserve in its entirety. While there are still many surprises in store for fans, this tour will allow fans to hear songs from this genre staple that have never been played live before, along with the loaded single lineup of the record.
WOUB’s Nicholas Kobe spoke with bassist Rob Felicetti before the band’s stop at Theatre of the Living Arts (334 South Street) Thursday. Find a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Nicholas Kobe: Alright, so my first question is if you had to describe Bowling for Soup in one sentence, what would you say?
Rob Felicetti: Oh boy. Bowling for Soup in one sentence? I mean, I would just do it in one word. It’s fun, for everybody. I guess it’s a sentence, but fun for us as a band and fun for the audience because that’s exactly what we aim to do is just make a party basically for every show.
Absolutely. Why has that kind of been the decision that you guys have made over all these years through this discography? What keeps you guys focused on just having fun with music?
Felicetti: Well, it predates my existence in the band, but it is basically how we became friends in the first place. I was in a different band and we were touring together and the reason they brought me along for the ride, because we just have fun together and a big thing for Jaret (Reddick), our singer, is just making people happy. So I think that just sort of goes hand in hand. Having fun and staying happy is very intuitive with each other. So as long as we’re having fun, the audience is having fun and everyone’s happy.
Yeah, absolutely. You guys are touring for 20 years of A Hangover You Don’t Deserve. What’s it been like to kind of do this legacy shows where you’re giving that record and really honing in on just that particular album and era of the band?
Felicetti: So it’s definitely different because we generally don’t play with set lists when we play shows. Right before we walk on the stage, we’ll say “we’re going to open with this and close with this,” and everything else in the middle is just how the room feels and what we feel like we should play next. But it’s more or less we just wing it. So having to stick to a set list is different, but it’s actually also kind of fun in its own way because having a list down there and knowing what’s coming up next, you can prepare yourself accordingly. It’s not like it gets stale for us after night after night playing the same songs in the same order. And it never feels like, ironically, it never feels repetitive because each show is still different.
From what you can see, and what you can tell, how have the fans reacted to this kind of a show versus other tours?
Felicetti: I mean, I’d say it’s overall just the same sort of reception because it’s still the same. It’s still a Bowling for Soup show in that there’s still chaos in things that switch it up because sort of towards the second half of the record, we even break it up and we bring someone up on the stage and they spin a prize wheel and it will select a different song from an album that isn’t A Hangover You Don’t Deserve. So it’s just these fun little things that we’ve inserted into the show to keep it interesting, which is very “Bowling for Soup” to do. So I would just say the whole thing is more of an additional experience that we’re doing the album rather than it’s a totally different show because you’re going there and you’re getting the same type of show from us, you’re just hearing an album front to back. Then after we’re still going to play, we still do play a couple of the other hits once the album is done, there’s a few songs we can’t get away with not playing.
What was the inspiration for those segments you’re talking about with the wheel?
Felicetti: Well, something that the band’s always done, “crowd work,” as Jaret calls it, because he’s always really big into comedy and he likes to understand how standup comedy works and he did it for a while and he likes to base the show around the flow of those type of shows. So to him it sort of breaks it up where he brings jokes back around, things like that where he’s always been interested in. So that’s the basis of doing something like this where it’s just basically adding to the show and making it part of the show. We did this in a hometown show outside of Dallas in June, but it was before this whole tour started. It wasn’t really part of the tour, but we did the album front to back because that was one of the shows we did as part of the 30th (anniversary), first big weekend of the band. The one night we did two shows in a row.
One night was just “30 years of Bowling for Soup” and kind of comprehensive. And the second night was A Hangover You Don’t Deserve album. So that was the first time we ever played it, but it was before the tour started. So that was a different show in and of its own because with the tour we have this kind matching shirts that we wear that are themed for it, and the stage is a whole kind of a set for it and everything. But we didn’t really do it at that show because we hadn’t figured out how we wanted to do the tour yet. So during that show, I think we all kind of realized there was this, I mean the lull isn’t the right word because songs, they’re still exciting and fun, but there’s just this block of songs that we’ve never played live before. So a lot of people were getting song after song of stuff they hadn’t heard at a show before. So we thought it’d be a fun way to break that up by sticking this wheel in the middle of it and doing a bit in between it to jump back in. And we found ourselves coming back in more excited after we did that, giving it this other component.
As the band is touring on this record, what do you think about A Hangover You Don’t Deserve that makes it a record that people are excited to come back and see you guys play 20 years later?
Felicetti: I think if it was that record for the band was so important because it was following up Drunk Enough to Dance and Drunk Enough to Dance was kind of what they call the “sophomore effort” to Let’s Do It For Johnny! And that did have a hit on it, Drunk Enough to Dance had The Girl the Bad Guys Want, which was a really successful single for the band. So when they went in to do A Hangover You Don’t Deserve, a lot of pressure was on because you’re following up that and you got to make sure you’re up to the standard that people are expecting at that point, especially 20 years ago.
So there was a lot, as I understand, there was just more… not “work,” definitely it wasn’t more work put in because each record is its own version of a lot of work, but there’s more thought put into making sure that delivering to Jive Records, another really explosive record that fans would really connect with. So then this one ended up bringing the most singles on one album. It had 1985, Almost, Ohio (Come Back To Texas), and just a couple other fan favorites that are on there, Two-Seater and Smoothie King. And so this one just ended up being the record that most people are like, “that was my first.”
A lot of people they say it’s the first album they ever bought that had bad words on it. So it’s just having this album, having the connection it had with fans over 20 years and it being the 20th year of the album makes it kind of special. We see people coming out that were born when it came out, that some of them are coming with their parents, some of them were telling us stories about how they had to hide it from their parents when they bought it because of the bad language and the name hangover, all that stuff. So it’s kind of neat to see it like a generation later, two generations coming out to the show together.
In general, this decade and a little bit of the last decade have had this resurgence with a lot of really big success for a lot of bands kind of in the similar lane to Bowling for Soup. Blink-182 and Fall Out Boy have done a lot of successful touring stuff along with the success you guys are having. Why do you think the 2020s have been favorable to pop-punk in general?
Felicetti: I think it’s the same thing that happened with hair metal 15 years before. Where it had its resurgence after kind of a dip because the fans that were in middle school and high school when it was a big thing are now grown up and have their own families and can live their adult lives now. So they’re going, “oh yeah, I can go to concerts again. My kids are grown up.” So you have this bigger pool of people that are now in their own right, independent, not high school kids living at their parents’ house that have to try and get away to get to a concert. And a lot of ’em are reliving like, “oh my God, this is my high school senior high school year soundtrack.”
And I think that’s a big reason why it’s come back. I think it’s just because the people that were so into it and grew up with that are all grown up now. The years in between they were in college trying to find careers, trying to figure out their lives. Now that they’re established and set it’s “oh wow, I had so much fun going to these shows with my friends when I was in high school. Now I can just go and as an adult with my wife,” and it’s pretty neat how people are doing that now. I think that’s why a lot of the cruises have been working. People that are growing up now, cruises wouldn’t work for kids that, listen, if this were 25 years ago, those are high school kids. They’re not going to go on a rock cruise.
The band has also grown up over the past 20 years. From your time in Bowling for Soup, what kind of changes have you seen so far as the way that Bowling for Soup operates?
Felicetti: Well, other than the fact that we’re down a man right now? No, I’m just kidding. That was a joke about Chris (Burney), but he’s getting better and he’s at home and recovering, so we’re just waiting to see when the doctor clears him to come back basically. But honestly, not much has changed, in a good way. Not much has changed in the years since I’ve been in the band. It was sort of coming on an upswing again when I was starting up to fill in and ended up joining. The band was right around with me. Music was getting its big gusts that we’re riding on right now that’s doing really great. So operationally it was already kind of set and dialed in the way we run things and how we work with our management and how we tour because we have families. We’re not kids anymore, so it’s basically the same, but we’re noticing that we’re growing.
We just did our biggest headlining tour ever in the UK earlier this year. We sold out two arenas, which had never done that before at any point in the band’s career. So it is bigger than ever, which is awesome. We have everybody to thank for that, obviously. But it’s just the fact that we’re pushing ourselves a little bit harder too, I think is a big reason of it. We’re willing to be gone a little bit longer and we’re willing to take a couple more offers for things that earlier on, we may not have wanted to take the risk, like going Australia in December, taking longer trips like that. We know that there’s a demand for it, we want to do it. So it’s pretty awesome to be going out there and staying busier to the level that we can manage, but at the same time, just pushing our limits a little bit harder each time and saying, “we can add a couple more days to the end of this tour and then just give ourselves a couple more days break.”
How does Bowling for Soup plan to carry that momentum into the future? What’s on the horizon for Bowling for Soup?
Felicetti: I mean, we’re going to tour until we physically can’t, and it’s looking great, actually. We’re getting ourselves in better shape. The last couple of tours, we’ve been going to the gym every day and doing stuff we usually don’t do and eating better and really being more aware of it. But that’s just a lifestyle thing. We’re not just doing that to continue the band, obviously we’re doing that for ourselves and it’s just a good habit to be in when you’re traveling and all.
As far as continuing just touring and making different occasions for it and seeming things different, doing this album tour for the rest of the year into the beginning of next year, then I know we’re going to want to be doing a lot of festivals, and that’s always a really fun thing to do for us because we like doing the festival runs because you play for people you have never played for before, and then they might come out the next time you tour through that area. So just kind of going to different places doing that we’re going to be putting out new music and we’re going to be trying some different things and different content to put out there music-wise, and we’re going to just have fun with it. We have been all this time.