The Truth Behind the Joke
jaret-reddick
Jaret understands why people think of Bowling For Soup as funny.
He is funny.
The band is funny.
The songs often contain jokes, references and lines designed to land immediately.
What people sometimes miss is how difficult it is to write a funny song that still matters after the punchline is no longer new.
A disposable comedy song can make someone laugh once. A lasting Jaret Reddick song has to do something more. It needs a melody people want to hear again, characters they recognize, and enough truth underneath the joke that it continues to mean something years later.
His songs are about relationships, embarrassment, resentment, hope, aging, friendship, nostalgia, sex, insecurity, parenthood, and the gap between the person someone hoped to become and the person staring back from the mirror.
The humor opens the door.
The truth is why people stay.
That balance is one reason Jaret loves playing “Girl All the Bad Guys Want.” Some artists become irritated by the songs their audiences most want to hear. Jaret feels the opposite. When the opening riff begins and thousands of people recognize it within two notes, he gets to watch joy travel through a room in real time.
Why would he resent that?
“High School Never Ends” offers another kind of satisfaction. Some people in the industry dismissed it as an attempt to repeat “1985,” and it was never treated like a major hit. It nevertheless became one of the band’s most-streamed and most dependable live songs because listeners decided it belonged to them.
Those moments reinforce Jaret’s fundamental belief about Bowling For Soup fans: they never needed the band to chase every trend. They wanted Bowling For Soup to remain Bowling For Soup.
The band stayed the course.
The fans did too.
