Stereoboard Speaks To Bowling For Soup At Download Festival 2011 (Interview)
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
Written by Heather McDaid
Seventeen years and as full of life and fun as ever before, Bowling For Soup returned once more to the UK to cause a stir, a whole lot of laughter and try bring out the smiles amidst a downpour at Download Festival. In a slightly drier vicinity, Erik and Chris spoke about their excitement of being back in Donington.
“We think it’s one of the coolest festivals you could ever be a part of. It’s always good to be back,” says Erik. “When you’re on stage you can’t even get the full scope of what’s happening because you can only take in so much at one time. Afterwards, when you look at pictures, you realise how big it was.”
“The time goes by really fast too,” adds Chris.
For Erik, this isn’t his first UK jaunt with Bowling For Soup of 2011. In April he and Jaret, along with their respective side-projects, treated fans to a nationwide acoustic tour. “It’s just a completely different vibe,” he remarks. “Acoustic tours are all very laid back and chilled. There’s not very much, logistically, that goes on and there’s not too much commotion. It’s just a higher amplitude of playing when it’s the full band together. It’s a bucket full of rock,” he says, noting how he’d describe seeing his band live with Chris adding, “You just can’t top that.”
Following their acoustic performances, the full band released their eleventh studio album ‘Fishin’ For Woos’ to what appears to be – and rightly so – an overwhelmingly positive response. “It’s been really good and surprisingly, for us, it’s the first time that everywhere we actually seem to be getting good reviews,” remarks Erik. “People who have traditionally not been very kind to us have been very kind this time around. So it’s great. I don’t know if we’ve finally beaten everyone into submission!”
“I think this one was a little different,” begins Chris, touching on the recording process itself. “We were a lot closer to home. We usually go off somewhere and just take a couple of months, and take proper time out for it. This time we’d spend a day doing something and at the end we’d get to go home.”
“By design, we didn’t allow ourselves any time to over-think this recording process,” continues Erik. “We booked our studio times for the album before we’d even really finished writing and we gave ourselves only two weeks in the studio, so we were like ‘We’ve got these 14 days to do 15 songs.’ We wanted to get back to a more ‘two guitars, drums and bass’ sound on this album and we just didn’t allow ourselves any time to get caught up in a lot of studio fanciness and I think it worked to our advantage.”
“We usually have one song on each record where we’re trying to go for that power ballad, so it’s not some kind of crazy departure from what we normally do or what we’ve done in the past,” Chris says, touching on their latest single ‘Turbulence’. “This one has caught on faster than any of the others though. We’ve done ‘When We Die’ and there’s so many other rock power ballads that we’ve done but this is the one to catch on.”
The band recently took the decision to leave their management, leaving them to tackle their latest releases independently. For a band so longstanding, was it nice to have a new challenge? “One of the coolest things about when we left Jive is that the first thing on our minds was, ‘We gotta get in the studio right now and just make a new album’,” begins Erik, explaining it all to be a very positive experience. “We got to do it on our own. This is the first time ever that outside of the band and producer no one at all had any kind of input or say whatsoever as to what was going on in the studio. A lot of times you’re recording and the label wants to have a day where everybody comes in and takes a listen before giving their opinions and whatnot but this time it wasn’t like that. One of our managers came by the studio one day and didn’t even go past the lounge. He didn’t care to. He was just like, “I’m here to say hello and I’ll let you guys do your thing.” It was really cool not to have to worry about trying to sell anybody on songs that aren’t even finished yet."
Continuing in the vein of the band being thoroughly established, what is left for Bowling For Soup to achieve? “You know, things like that are hard to say because we’ve done so much and we’ve been super thankful for everything that we’ve accomplished,” says Erik thoughtfully. “If there is something else that we will ‘accomplish’ along the way, then that’s going to be great but we’re still here like we were 17 years ago and we’re still enjoying the ride.”
“I want boat money,” adds Chris. “We should all have boat money. We can get... not even boats, I want yachts. We should all have yacht money. I could see us at a yacht club. Yachting it up with our yacht buddies. Yachting it up. I want a yacht!”
As for Bowling For Soup’s greatest accomplishment to date, Erik simply states, “It’s the fact that we’ve managed to stay together for 17 years and still remain friends. Ask anyone in a band and that is quite possibly the biggest accomplishment most could find.”
Missed their acoustic tour? Missed their Download set? Fear not. The fun-loving foursome will be returning later this year to bring fun, frolics and ‘Fishin’ For Woos’ back to their UK audience with their usual gusto and high-energy shows!
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“By design, we didn’t allow ourselves any time to over-think this recording process,” continues Erik. “We booked our studio times for the album before we’d even really finished writing and we gave ourselves only two weeks in the studio, so we were like ‘We’ve got these 14 days to do 15 songs.’ We wanted to get back to a more ‘two guitars, drums and bass’ sound on this album and we just didn’t allow ourselves any time to get caught up in a lot of studio fanciness and I think it worked to our advantage.”
