Bigger Than Ever

The UK shows kept growing.

Then they became arenas.

Streaming numbers climbed.

Festival billing improved.

People who had disappeared for fifteen years started coming back.

Other people arrived for the first time.

Pop punk itself entered a new period of celebration and rediscovery. Twenty-year album anniversaries happened genre-wide. Vans Warped Tour returned. Phineas and Ferb returned. Blink-182 returned.

Simple Plan and Bowling for Soup kept finding each other too.

The friendship makes sense.

Both bands spent years being slightly outside the definition of “cool.”

Both worked extraordinarily hard.

Both fought their way onto Warped Tour.

Both had huge pop songs while still carrying guitars and drums into radio festivals dominated by other kinds of music and singers performing to tracks.

Bowling for Soup took Simple Plan through Texas and to the UK when Simple Plan was starting out.

Decades later they were still touring together.

In 2025 and 2026, Bowling for Soup joined Simple Plan on the biggest U.S. headline tour of Simple Plan's career.

Jaret regularly joins Simple Plan onstage for “I'm Just a Kid” when the two bands are in the same place!

He also enjoys reminding them that he was the one texting Pierre and Chuck when that song unexpectedly exploded on TikTok nearly 20 years after its original release.

The friendship has lasted because the bands understand each other.

So do their audiences.

Simple Plan is one example of something that has happened throughout Bowling for Soup's career: bands they tour with have a tendency to become family. The tour ends. The friendship often doesn't.

Then came Wembley.

For years, Wembley Arena had existed as one of those possibilities Jaret refused to get excited about.

He had learned too many times that music-industry possibilities are not real until they are real. Opportunities breed disappointment if you let them. So BFS doesn't celebrate until they are on the plane!

But it was real.

And Wembley is one of those words everyone understands.

Musicians, friends, colleagues and hangers-on the band hadn't heard from in years reached out simply to say:

“Dude.”

“Wembley.”

On the night, Bowling for Soup put risers on the stage for roughly 40 friends and family members.

The band's children were there.

Wives were there.

Friends and neighbors were there.

Crew members Dave Kai Piper and his wife Stephanie had even made little versions of the band's mascot, Jerry, for the backstage doors.

It felt official in a way that was actually surreal.

Then Bowling for Soup walked onstage.

Jaret remembers surprisingly little of the actual show.

Afterward, he wondered if he had simply had too much to drink to retain it.

He later mentioned this to his buddy and fellow musician Frank Turner.

Frank told him the first time he played Wembley, the same thing happened.

Sometimes the experience is simply too big for your brain to file correctly.

Jaret remembers the feeling, though.

“How the fuck did we get here?”

It remains one of the greatest nights of all three men's lives.

Then came another number nobody knew quite how to process.

One billion Spotify streams.

Jaret first saw the milestone reported online.

He sent the story to Swin and Sarah.

“Is this real?”

He checked.

It was.

A billion times, on Spotify alone, someone had deliberately put on a Bowling for Soup song.

The band got plaques as a forever reminder.

Chris got one too.

For Jaret, it is one of Bowling for Soup's greatest achievements—not simply because the number is enormous, but because of what it represents.

The songs have lives of their own now.

Some of them will outlive the people who made them.