DEFEND YOURSELF!: BOUNCING SOULS

The Bouncing Souls sing about John Cusack, toilets, soccer, Maker’s Mark and hundreds of other badass punk bits. In a handful of cities, they’ll be playing all eight of their albums. Boston—you lucky prude!—is one of these cities. Singer Greg Attonito tells us why.

I’ve grown up with the Souls’ albums. Are you ready to play them all?

For years we talked about playing the entire discography. We’d say: “That would be really cool, but a ton of work.” It got started with our “Home for the Holidays” at Asbury Lanes. Last year, we unanimously felt it was time for the discography thing. We had long, intense rehearsals to get back into the songs with no idea what the hell was going on. We had moments of, “What is this? We wrote that? There’s a reason we don’t play this song.” And also, “What? Why don’t we play that?”

Since we worked our asses off trying to relearn this crap, why not take it out?

You’ve played The Middle East before?

Oh, yeah … and their food’s good.

So falafel helped decide venues?

It had an influence. Recently, I’ve been eating primarily raw food.

I guess White Castle’s out.

Ha, definitely.

Any songs you’re excited about?

There’s a bunch on the shelf, like “Ant Brigade” and half of “Hopeless Romantic,” the most unchartered territory. We have 100 other songs that people like to hear and we only play a small handful, usually.