The Creators of Bowling for Soup’s ‘1985’ Look Back: The Power of Nostalgia & Why Debbie Gets the Last Laugh

This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2004 Week continues here with the story behind Bowling for Soup’s “1985,” a ruefully nostalgic top 40 hit that has taken on a different meaning for its creators now that it’s been longer since its release than it was since the mid-’80s at the time.

Like many songs, “1985” started with nothing but a wordless hook. It first came to former SR-71 frontman Mitch Allan while he was driving, after which he temporarily added in some filler to start with: “She’s a, she’s a, she’s a roller coaster.”

His decision to later swap it out for “19, 19, 1985” was just as random. The reason it stuck? “Honestly, it sang fantastic,” he recalls to Billboard over 20 years later.

Later, the world would agree. Bowling for Soup had a No. 23 hit with the nostalgic earworm on the Billboard Hot 100 and a No. 10 peak on the Pop Airplay chart, propelling the band’s record A Hangover You Don’t Deserve to a career high of No. 37 on the Billboard 200. In the two decades since, the track has amassed over 372.7 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate, and folks who weren’t even alive in the title year continue to gleefully sing along when it comes on the radio or plays at a party, as it still frequently does.

But before it was an era-defining legacy hit for BFS, Allan had buried his original version on SR-71’s final album Here We Go Again, which was only released in Japan (until 2010, when it was finally made available in the U.S.). He’d pieced together the rest of the track on a trip to Machu Picchu, asking fellow tourists in his hiking group to shout out their favorite ‘80s references — “Springsteen!” “Madonna!” — and weaving them into an admittedly cynical takedown of a Prozac-dependent suburban housewife named Debbie with some help from his drummer, John Allen.

If not for producer Butch Walker, “1985” would’ve never been widely heard in the U.S., much less become an enduring smash for generations. But Walker had worked with Allan and SR-71 in the past, and at the suggestion of his manager, Jonathan Daniel, he decided that the track deserved a second life – something the guys of Bowling for Soup, fresh off their first Grammy nomination for pop-punk radio hit “Girl All the Bad Guys Want” in 2003, could give it.

“The song was good, but it wasn’t great yet,” Walker recalls. “It’s all about who’s presenting it. I think we realized that maybe the presentation of it originally was wrong.”

First things came first. Led by frontman Jaret Reddick and bandmates Chris Burney, Gary Wiseman, and Rob Felicetti, the tongue-wagging Bowling for Soup had made a name off not taking itself too seriously, specializing in the creation of meme songs before memes were even a thing. That meant that some of the more sardonic lines about condoms breaking and George Michael’s sexuality needed to go.

“That’s the difference between the humor in SR-71 and us,” says Reddick. “Their songs had that grit in their comedy – it’s more snarky. Our stuff is just blatantly funny.”

He and Walker sat in a room together dissecting “1985” line by line, subbing in lyrics about Duran Duran and Ozzy Osbourne to coincide more with the personal tastes of Reddick, who was a teenager during the titular time period. The frontman gave the tune a peppier delivery, and Walker made it so that the song’s sunny “woo-hoo-hoo” hook was the very first thing listeners heard when pressing “play.”

“It was a collaborative effort,” Reddick says. “Had I heard the song by SR-71, I’m certain I would’ve liked it, ’cause I’m a fan of that band. But I don’t think it gives me the same visual at all.”

Allan, now an L.A.-based writer-producer who’s worked with Bebe Rexha and Demi Lovato, agrees. “[Reddick] took this sad woman who we were making fun of and turned her into the hero of the story,” he marvels. “She’s suddenly celebrating that she got to live in 1985 and that we, the listener, didn’t. Life was so much better then, and she got to experience it.

“[The original] version in my brain has been replaced by Bowling for Soup’s,” he concludes.

Released as the lead single off Hangover, “1985” made BFS a staple of the early 2000s pop-punk movement. The band cosplayed as Robert Palmer, Run-DMC and Limp Bizkit in the track’s music video (which Reddick says he’s especially proud of), complete with a Tawny Kitaen lookalike and a cameo from Allan.

They embarked on a tour, and then another one and another one, discovering that their fans across the world never tired of mocking Debbie night after night – because, let’s face it: “The song’s kind of mean,” Reddick admits. “We made it nicer, for sure. But there’s still a bit of hopelessness to it.”

The guys didn’t get sick of playing it, either. “The fact that it’s something our band does that makes people happy – that’s the thing that never gets old,” Reddick continues. “Right from the first two chords, they know what it is. Every phone comes up during that song. People still laugh at ‘When did Mötley Crüe become classic rock?’”

But something peculiar happened right around the time Bowling for Soup’s version of the song came out – Reddick became a parent. So did Allan. Their first-born kids are now 21 and 20, respectively, almost the exact number of years between 1985 and 2004 as 2004 and 2024. As time went by, a song about nostalgia became nostalgic in and of itself, and its creators realized that they were beginning to identify more with Debbie than her proverbial two kids in high school. In 2021, Bowling for Soup put out a track titled “Getting Old Sucks (But Everybody’s Doing It).”

“I started to see it really quickly,” remembers Reddick, now a father of three. “It wasn’t lost on me that that was actually happening in my life. When they’re really little, they still think all your jokes are funny. Then they go through this time where they don’t think you’re funny, then they think you’re funny again but roll their eyes. My kids’ teachers tell them, ‘I heard your dad on the radio today,’ and they’re just like, ‘Okay, great. He also mowed the lawn today, and there’s a heap of dishes to get done.’”

Allan relates: “I’m Dad – I’m not cool.”

Luckily for them both, as well as all the former cool kids-turned-Debbies, things have a way of coming back into fashion. Debbie herself — who, as Reddick points out, is probably a grandma now — would be overjoyed that her precious Springsteen and Madonna are both on arena tours in 2024, while U2 is on the heels of a successful Las Vegas residency. And modern pop stars have been in the midst of a pop-punk renaissance for most of the decade now, replicating the sounds popularized by Bowling for Soup and their peers.

“Everybody’s trying to make records sound like [“1985”] now,” Walker says with a chuckle. “It’s ironic that that’s where we’re at. I guess I’ve been alive that f–king long … I can’t believe we’re already back at recycling the emo era and the pop punk era, sound-wise.”

“All my kids went through a pop-punk phase,” adds Allan. “It takes them a minute. They discover bands, and then they discover my band. I get texts from my oldest who’s at UCSB, and she’ll be at a party and there’s a band playing, and they’ll be playing ‘1985.’ She’s like, ‘Oh my god, my dad wrote that!’”

Meanwhile, “1985” has demonstrated an impressive longevity. It was certified double platinum in 2019, and Reddick and Allan still enjoy sending each other young musicians’ updated covers of the song with references to the early ’00s and 2010s – which, ironically, sometimes go over the now-52-year-old Reddick’s head.

“I’m Debbie!” he proclaims, mystified. “People come up to us like, ‘I am Debbie.’ She’s probably now looking back at her kids, and they’re the Debbies of the world. And she’s like, ‘You see?’”

But just as Debbie gets the last laugh in her story, so does he: Reddick remembers a time when his daughter called him from science class in disbelief, asking if he knew just how many Spotify listeners his band had. “I was like, ‘I don’t know, 2 million monthly?’ She goes, ‘Dad, that’s a lot!’ I go ‘Yeah, I’ve been trying to tell you that.’” (For the record, BFS has nearly 4 million monthly listeners on the platform at press time.)

Reddick, Allan and Walker are all living in real time the reason they believe “1985” has had such a lasting resonance across generations. Aging and nostalgia are some of the only truly universal human experiences, which means that the song, unlike some of the dated ‘80s tropes it pokes fun at, will probably never go out of style.

But “1985” also speaks to the power of leaving egos at the door in service of collaboration. The project wouldn’t have been a success story without Allan being open to having his creation improved upon, or Bowling for Soup’s willingness to stand behind a song that they hadn’t written originally.

“I’m super glad this song has had such a good run,” Reddick says. “I’m not sure that we wouldn’t be where we are today [without it], but I certainly am thankful we are.”

“You hope a song goes on the charts, let alone enters the top 10, let alone is around a year later,” Allan remarks. “It takes a village. But I’m so happy to live in that village, you know?”

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