Bowling For Soup on Music, Friendship, and Nostalgia at Warped Tour with Pipeman

0:04 Hey, you're listening to The Adventure and I'm Pudlin on W4CY Radio. This is the Pipe Man here on The Adventure's Pipe Man W4CY Radio and I'm here with Gary. And Rob from Bowling for Soup. Man, he did that great. That was amazing. I thought for a second you might forget your band name, but.. We've been known to do that. You did good. You did good. And I really love... I want to talk right off the bat about your t-shirts, both of you. First of all, White Castle. I'm a Jersey boy. And when I see the movies Harold and Kumar, that was my life, man.

0:50 Getting... Partying all night and finding the White Castle. Oh, yeah, I've done it. I grew up in the Poconos, so me and my stupid friends used to drive into Jersey or New York just to get White Castle when we were in high school. Exactly. Some of the highlights of this tour have been the White Castle nights. Nice. Any good stories of those White Castle nights? The food's great, and we loved it. And then your shirt, I have two versions. I have the Punk Rock Saves Lives, but then I'm in South Florida, and there's actually a South Florida version. So I have a South Florida Punk Rock Saves Lives. So like half of our wardrobe, all of us, is Punk Rock Saves Lives t-shirt because they've been on tour with us like the past two or three summers. And Rob from Punk Rock saves lives. Every time we see him, he just gives us a new t-shirt. And all their shirts are red.

1:37 They are, totally. And it is true. I firmly believe Punk Rock saves lives, man. This scene, this community that we have here, especially at Warped Tour, this is where we can escape the world and get some good therapy. Yeah, and everyone has a spot, right? Everyone kind of belongs in there. Exactly. There's no gatekeeping here. That's what I love about Warped Tour. No gatekeeping. Even when you read, like if you're attending and you read, it's like they do not tolerate in any way, shape, or form. And I'm all for that. This is where we should all love each other and just have fun with music and forget. The rest of the bullshit.

2:18 That's exactly how it should be. Right, right. So how does it feel that Warped Tour is back, you know, and back with a vengeance, and here we are in Montreal. Like, did you ever think Warped would come back? Would I think it would come back? I had no idea. You know, there was no guess on it. I just, when we did the final one in 2018 and then did that, The next year they did the 25-year festival, which was fun, and then nothing happened for a while, and then we just heard it was coming back. I wasn't shocked because I figured it could happen, but I was excited because we loved it. I'd say the main difference is there's fewer consecutive days without showers. Yes.

3:02 I think during that time where we weren't sure, we all had our speculations. And, you know, some of the other bands we're friends with, whenever we'd see them on tour or whatever, we all kind of talked about how is it going to come back? Is it going to come back? What's it going to look like? So to Rob's point, like, no one was surprised, but we just didn't know how or when. Yeah. But it's great that it is because it's like, you know, it's like coming back to summer camp and getting to hang out with all our friends that we haven't seen for a while. That is what Warped Tour is like. And now we have MySpace coming back. Like, so, look. I did not see that one coming. Right? Like, I want to know if Tom's still my friend. Yeah. When you create your profile, he's your first friend. Exactly. I hope he's still my friend.

3:42 He's got to be, right? With the same profile picture and everything. Can you imagine now MySpace comes back and then you have a MySpace Warped Tour 90s type. Of thing going on? Bro, I'm in. Right? The 90s were great. The fact that we're bringing back all this stuff that relates to that I think that'll bring us to better human beings in the future because that's what music does for us, and that's why punk rock saves lives. I hope so. I hope you're right. We're along for that journey, if so. That was a nice little tie-in. I like that, how you completed it. See that? Like that?

4:23 So what else for Bowling for Soup? What else could you guys possibly accomplish? We've accomplished a whole bunch of other stuff, but I know what we're going to do. Let's hear it. The next thing is for us after today, this is the end of a month out on the road with Simple Plan. So we're ending it here in Montreal Warped Tour. And then we're going to go home for a little bit, do Mexico City Warped Tour, and then do our own tour in the U.S. And it's just kind of like that for the rest of the year. We're figuring out what. we want to do with it, with this new record we, we made that hasn't been put out there yet at all. And we're planning that out. And then, then we're going to take over the world again.

5:05 Yeah. So it's kind of a weird, uh, holding pattern, if you will, right now for next year, because we're all super excited about it. We're talking about booking the next tour for next year and, uh, kind of trying to time it up with new record release. Nice. And, What's it like after all this time to write new music? How does that feel? What's the difference of writing new music now opposed to when you first start? Well, I mean, it was really organic. We had kind of thought that we were kind of done doing records. We were just going to record a song, put it out there, kind of just do the single thing. Because that's just kind of what we thought the world was going towards. And that's just where our head was. And then we got asked to go do a song for this SSL release. They released this new board strip. I don't remember. What's it called?

5:53 The Revival 4000. Bingo. Nice. And so they asked us to go into the studio and record a song for them, and so we wrote a new song, and whenever we got in there with this one song, we're like, this feels really good. Maybe it's time to do a new record. I love it. And with the best person you could do a record with, because it's Dan Malsh at Sound Mind in Pennsylvania, and he's worked with a lot of awesome things. He's mixed a lot of records with Andy Wallace, and he did the last Ghost record and Avenged Sevenfold, and it's kind of stuff outside of what we normally do which made it even more fun and cool and his mixing style and it was great. His engineering attitude, the way he like runs the studio and the environment there was like made it, that helped make the record as good as it is, I think.

6:34 See, I love hearing that stuff because I think people don't realize like the fans don't realize that it does make a difference who's mixing it and producing it for you and like there's a whole team involved that makes that final product great. Yeah, And like I said, again, it was real organic. And we kind of just were nose to the grindstone and the vibe with everything of the studio and where we were. It's the only record we've ever done while we were recording. We never went and did anything. We just went and did a record. We didn't go to the bar after being done at night. We just went, woke up, started recording, went until we were done at night, and we're very focused. That's amazing. Well, you guys rock.

7:16 I've been seeing you at every festival that I'm doing, which really is killer, and I'm glad you're here at Warped Tour Montreal. Thanks for being on the Adventures of Pipe Man. Thanks for having us. It's great. Awesome, man. Thank you. Thank you for listening to The Adventures of Pikeman on W4CY Radio.