'MOM JOKES NEVER GET OLD'
Wit & Wisdom From 20 Years Of Bouncing Souls

The Bouncing Souls enjoyed the two albums-per-night theme of this past year’s Home for The Holidays so much that they decided to take that show on the road. The "For All The Unheard" tour has the Souls playing all eight of their full length albums over four nights in different cities around the country. Once the tour had hit the first four cities, bassist Bryan Kienlen and guitarist Pete Steinkopf were nice enough to sit down with me at New York City’s beautiful High Line walk in the Meatpacking District overlooking the Hudson. Despite having gotten down well into the night with fellow bands and concertgoers at the previous night’s afterparty, Bryan and Pete managed to come up with some cool stories about their career. Two out of the three of us chose to keep our shades on.

Since Jersey Beat has been covering the Bouncing Souls since the band started, we didn't want this to be just another interview. Their manager Kate and I had the idea of looking back at all of the albums that the band had just played around the country.

The For All The Unheard tour resumes in August with stops in London, Vienna, Denver, and Los Angeles.

Q: Alright, so dudes: You just passed twenty years, and some bands don’t even make the ten-year mark. How do you hold shit together when it wants to fall apart?

Bryan: It hasn’t really been that difficult, because we’re having fun, you know? To be honest.

Pete: Yeah. It’s too much fun to be so mad about something; to get so pissed that you’re like “I’m gonna quit” (pounds fist to demonstrate.) “Why would you do that?”


Bryan: Yeah; you’ve got to always keep one eye on the fun aspect.

Q: Has it ever happened? Has somebody quit and then been like “You know what? No.”

Pete: Sorta, not really.

Bryan: Kinda…nothing real, no real quitting.

Q: Do you fight about stupid shit? Is it like a marriage?

Pete: (nodding) Sometimes.

Q: Like what’s the dumbest fight you ever had?


The Pete, Jersey Beat's Deb Draisin, and Bryan


Bryan: I think we communicate the issues we have with each other by making fun of each other, and then a couple of jokes later, you’re laughing the whole time, and you’ve somehow made a point in there.

Q: That’s what I do with my friends too (looking into the camera at said friends) Just in case you weren’t paying attention, I still think you’re an asshole for doing that, thank you. Yeah, so Greg lives in the middle of fucking nowhere; ever get tempted to put on like a badass secret show there?

Bryan: We did once! We played on the side of a mountain.

Q: Did anyone come?

Pete: Locals; we played like a ski lodge.

Bryan: People would ski by us as we were playing.

Pete: It was cool!

Q: (laughing) That’s amazing.

Bryan: We started a pretty serious snowball fight; it was a bad idea. I think I picked the snowball fight with the crowd, so we got fucked up.

Pete: We got smoked by snowballs, it was awesome.

Bryan: Out there, people know how to throw snowballs!

Q: Of course! It’s not like us in Jersey, where none of us know what we’re doing.
Whatever happened to that snowball fight we were supposed to have, anyway? We all bailed (I’m referring to this past December, when Home for the Holidays IV had to be postponed to February due to a severe snowstorm which crippled the city.)

Bryan: There’s always this winter…

Q: True. Let’s hope we don’t get snowed in this time. I mean, it was cool though.

Bryan: That was really exciting, but it was kind of a bummer.

Q: Kind of yeah, especially when trekking to the fucking bar took us three hours. So, where’s the writing process at right now? Do you have anything in the can?

Pete: Yeah, we have about ten songs in the process.

Q: Awesome!

Bryan: We have six or seven really good ones ones and then some others that we want to rework. Then we’re gonna write some more.

Pete: Yeah, we’re getting there.

Q: That’s awesome; is the record developing a feel or a theme to it?

Pete: It’s just going to be twelve songs that are like, kickass.

Q: Like a slam to the face?

Pete: Yeah, getting right to the point.

Bryan: Yeah, we learned a bunch of stuff while we were with producers, but at the same time, I personally felt like we kinda lost a little something along the way, and this record is sort of a return to just the pure bam! Get into the basement and write, fuck overthinking it and just like, shooting from the heart. We’re going after some like, serious fun.

Warped Tour

Q: Sounds great. You guys DIY’d Ghosts, actually, did you like that process better or were there things that you’d change about it?

Pete: It was cool to do something different creatively. These days, you kind of have to make your own rules. People don’t buy records anymore, so you’ve got to find something creative to do.

Q: Absolutely, you gotta change it up. Well, fans buy merch though, they’re pretty good about that, right? (both agree.) Does the band have a slogan this year? When we spoke in 2009, it was “Crush it.”

Pete: “Crush it!” (Pete chuckles.) It might still be “Crush it.” It’s a great slogan.

Bryan: I don’t know if that’s really a slogan. “We love fun,” let’s make that our new slogan.

Q: “We love fun,” there you go. That’s going to be the new tee shirt design.

Bryan: We might’ve had a little too much fun last night.

Pete: There might be a song in there…

Q: Ooh, new song idea brewing…

Bryan: Maybe it’s already brewed…

Pete: It might actually be boiling over.

Bryan: It’s actually a song, I’m just going to come right out and say it.

Q: You all heard it here first, “We Love Fun.” So, inspired by the really excellent “Storytellers” that the Foos did this year, I’ve started asking my interviewees to do mini versions of that. With this year’s full album nights that you guys are doing, I think we should just go album by album? Maybe share a joke or a memory about each one?

Bryan: One story per record? That’s a lot of stories. I don’t know that we can boil a whole record down to one story.

Q: An anecdote, maybe the last time you played it, this happened?

Pete: I don’t know if we can do it with every record.

Q: Well, let’s start with Argyle and see if we have anything.

Bryan: Alright. “I Like Your Mom” was written in high school, and we carried it over into The Bouncing Souls.

Q: Wow, so that’s technically the first Bouncing Souls song you guys ever wrote.

Bryan: It was kind of inspired by Greg’s mom.

Q: Greg’s mom! We always thought it was Pete’s mom, because she turns up in so many other songs.

Bryan: It’s more like Mom jokes; we would be telling them back and forth.

Q: Mom jokes never get old. Okay, Maniacal.

Pete: We wrote half that record in like three days, in Shawn Stern’s practice room.

Q: Three days?!

Bryan: Yeah, he had, like, signed us on, kinda, and we were like “Yeah, we’ve got a great record, it’s cool!” We were on tour, you know? We had like five songs, that was it, Dude.

Pete: Yeah, we had just three songs, yet we were still recording in a week, and he was like “What are you doing?

Bryan: (joining in the impression by putting a deep, disapproving voice) “What are you doing?”

Pete: “What are you doing? You can’t put out a three-song EP, get to work!” and he, like, locked us in backstage in a room.

Q: He actually barricaded you in there and wouldn’t let you out!

Bryan: We wrote “Lamar Vannoy” then.

Q: Oh!

Pete: All we had was ice cream.

Bryan: Yeah, we ate all his ice cream. He didn’t really give it to us, we just ate it.

Pete: “Come out, you guys, have some ice cream!”

Greg in 1991

Q: So that is actually the record that comes out when somebody subsists on ice cream for weeks on end.

Bryan: Yep.

Pete: Self-Titled we wrote… (sweeping an arm over our heads and across)

Bryan: (indicating as well) In a building that’s no longer there; it was like a block from here. I had a space in a squat on the Lower East Side. The guys would come over and tweak it out on acoustics, then we’d ride our BMX bikes across town and plug in and get loud over here in our practice space. (nodding) Self-Titled.

Q: That’s awesome.

Pete: “Hopeless Romantic” we recorded in Sausalito, California, and while we were there, we lived on a houseboat. We didn’t go anywhere, but it was still a boat.

Q: That was written on a houseboat?

Bryan: Yes.

Pete: For the last few weeks, yeah.

Q: That’s badass!

Bryan: People were throwing money around at that time. The early Epitaph Records, Brett Gurewitz was like, high (points up, to indicate that he means above and not, you know, wasted.) He was like “Here’s a bunch of money” and we were like “Alright, let’s go get a fancy studio.” We finally got a little piece of that action, you know?

Pete: That was back in the time when people really sold records, you know?

Bryan: Yeah, people were giving us record advances and shit.

Q: You were like “What’s this?!”

Bryan: We were psyched. We went from nothing to we making a record and everyone being like “Have five thousand bucks.”

Q: You guys were pretty ingenious, though. You made your own scene; a lot of bands do not know how to do that. How do you start a scene when there’s nothing where you are?

Pete: You just have to work with what’s around you. You’re here, I’m here, he’s here.

Bryan: Exactly.

Pete: “Summer Vacation” was the first record with McDermott, so we spent like four weeks learning all of our songs with him and spent the rest of the summer writing with McDermott, which was very inspiring.

Bryan: Fuck yeah. We wrote that at our practice space in Brooklyn. Except for McDermott, we all lived in the city at the time. Me and Pete lived nearby each other in the East Village, and we’d meet up and ride our BMX bikes over the Brooklyn Bridge all the way to practice. The chorus of “True Believers,” me and Pete wrote that. I wanna say I had the chorus in my head while riding my bike over the Brooklyn Bridge. That whole verse, Pete had that written, and I just came in with that chorus and it unified the whole thing.

Pete: I remember that Johnny X had been getting a new band together and we were throwing around band names: what about this, what about that? What about True Believers? And we went, “Oh that’s awesome!” but he didn’t like it.

Bryan: (chuckling) Yeah, that is where we got “True Believers” from.

Pete: We were like “That’d be a great song title, you know?”

Q: True Believers was supposed to be Johnny X’s band.

Bryan: Yeah, we would be nowhere had Johnny X loved that band name.

Pete: Thanks Man!

Bryan: Thanks for the big $200 check, asshole.

Q: (giggling) Alright, and my favorite, “Anchors.” That’s all you, Bry, hey? A lot of it.

Bryan: A big breakup I went through inspired a lot of those words, and somehow, the band being the cohesive, singular-minded unit that we really are, everyone was on the same sort of wavelength. All the songs that everyone wrote had a slightly darker feel. I think we kind of realized somewhere along the way that we were onto making a sort of darker record and kind of like went with it. It’s kind of cool; after “Summer Vacation,” nobody saw that coming. Nobody saw “Anchors Aweigh” coming, and a hush fell over the fanbase. We were like “Wow, nobody likes it. Nobody likes it! What a dud!” and I think it took a solid year or two to catch on.

Q: And it’s Dave Hause’s favorite…

Bryan: And it’s Dave Hause’s favorite!

Q: So you have that.

Pete: I remember someone…I think it was someone at Epitaph, telling us “Well, we don’t think the album cover is punk enough.” (Bryan cracks up.) I was like “This is so gay.”

Bryan: SO gay.

Pete: Why can’t people be smart?

Q: And then we’re onto “Gold,” which, that’s a departure too.

Bryan: Yeah, I think part of what was behind “The Gold Record” was, in a way, a reaction to “Anchors Aweigh.” Like, we needed to put that dark thing to bed and have a bright sunrise kind of record, and the cover kind of reflects what’s inside. We wanted to come in just hitting hard and fast, with songs like “The Gold Song.”

Q: I think for everybody in Jersey, that’s a song they can relate to. “So Jersey, maybe, there’s something about it, you’re thinking about like growing up.

Pete: We wrote most of those songs in Asbury Park for the very first time.

Bryan: So it was a return to Jersey, literally, for the band.

Pete: We kind of took on all of the smells and tastes of where we were.

Q: And that brings us to “Ghosts,” which is clearly about Asbury.

Bryan: Yeah, it’s the most Jerseyish.

Pete: And we had the idea of releasing one a month.

Q: That was really cool, by the way. I think everyone really liked getting those songs every month.

Bryan: It was something different. I think of that record almost as more of a collection of those songs than an actual record.

Q: Yeah, that’s the feel that it has, but it’s still cohesive.

Pete: I’m not sure…

Bryan: I don’t know, I’m still getting used to it. I don’t know how I feel about it. I really like “Never Say Die/When You’re Young,” “Gasoline” absolutely, and I like “Badass.” I like three or four of those songs.

Q: I think “Gasoline” is a collective favorite. What about you, Pete?

Pete: I like “Ghosts on the Boardwalk.” I like “Never Say Die,” and “We All Sing Along” is cool. We were kind of all over the place for that one. This time around, we’re gonna try and like (demonstrates focusing.)

Q: Do you guys have favorites already?

Pete: I don’t think it’s evolved yet.

Bryan: Too early to say.

Q: Fair enough.

Pete: (solemnly) We’d have to kill you if we told you.

Q: Ah shit, and there’s a fucking river right there, Man, they’d never find me. Can we please talk about Greg’s epic crowd surf, because when’s the last time he did something like that? Probably felt like ten years ago to you guys, huh?

Pete: That was pretty rad.

Q: He went around the whole crowd, and came up and tackled you (to Bryan.)

Bryan: Yes.

Q: And kicked over some mic stands.

Pete: He did!



Q: What was going on last night?

Pete: Something set him off in there.

Bryan: Yeah, I think something jarred him out of his like…there was so much chaos onstage, with all the kids and stuff, I think it liked shocked Greg and he came out of his weird mellow state, or something.

Q: He like, woke up.

Bryan: Yeah, something like smacked his soul or something and cracked him out.

Pete: Soul-smacked!

Q: Soul-smacked, in the Bouncing Souls (all laugh.)

Pete: Nothing like getting smacked by your soul to wake you up.

Q: Shannon wanted me to ask you guys: you ‘d been skipping some songs off the albums; was there any particular reason for that? Was it time, or you just didn’t feel like playing them?

Pete: I think there were some songs of the newer record where we were just like “Let’s just do it one step, do some weirder shit.”

Bryan: Yeah, we were like “If we have a little time to do some, let’s.”

Pete: After that, I think there were only three or four songs in the entire catalog that we kind of just took the liberty of leaving out.

Q: Do you think you’ll keep any of them in the rotation, now that you’ve had the chance to play them again?

Bryan: Yeah, I think that was one of the good things that came out of this, was that we realized that there were a bunch of songs that were really pretty good.

Q: So which ones are you guys liking, can we know?

Bryan: I think “It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity” has made it back into the rotation, maybe “Monday Morning Ant Brigade” made it back into rotation.

Pete: I like to throw in some oddballs, now that we know them, you know?

For upcoming shows and news, visit bouncingsouls.com