Bowling For Soup released The Great Burrito Extortion Case in the United States on November 7, 2006. On the cover, four men in suits pose beneath their own version of the Las Vegas welcome sign. In the video for the lead single, “High School Never Ends,” they turn up at a class reunion to get even with the kids who picked on them. The reunion was planned. Having to explain what those Vegas photos had to do with a burrito was entirely their own doing.
Singer Jaret Reddick had a practical reason for taking the band to Las Vegas before they recorded the album. He’d seen finished records held up while somebody waited on photos or artwork. As he recalled in Vulture, this time he wanted the pictures done first. The working title was All My Rowdy Friends Are Still Intoxicated, and the shoot followed the four of them around Vegas. They posed in suits at the sign, got into a swimming pool in tuxedos and wedding dresses, and even squeezed into a bathtub together.
Then they went to Atlanta to make the record. The band would meet at the hotel bar for a beer before heading to the studio. One afternoon the TV was muted, and a news ticker caught their attention with three words: “Burrito Extortion Case.” A man in Michigan had put a dead mouse in his own burrito and tried to get money out of Taco Bell. Reddick told CBS the headline became a running joke until guitarist Chris Burney suggested calling the album The Great Burrito Extortion Case. Reddick called their manager and the label. The title changed. The Vegas pictures went to print.
The title of “High School Never Ends” had spent considerably longer waiting for a song. Reddick had written it in one of his notebooks and couldn’t figure out where to take it. When Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne asked if he had any ideas to work on, Reddick pulled it out. They finished the song that day, casting celebrities as the kids everybody remembers from school. Brad Pitt gets to play quarterback. Bill Gates captains the chess team. Graduation just gives everybody a much bigger pool of people to gossip about.
Schlesinger also changed how Reddick wrote. He made a case for moving the lyrics onto a computer, where the two of them could swap lines and try a different order without copying everything out again. Reddick had kept stacks of notebooks by then. He told Vulture that session was the last time he wrote a song with pen and paper.
When the single was slow to take off, the label moved on to “When We Die,” a ballad Reddick wrote with Butch Walker. Its video cast Lee Majors as a father trying to reconcile with his son. Reddick told The News-Times that Bowling For Soup had always made room for serious songs on their albums. This was the first time they’d picked one for a single. He later told Kerrang! he wished he’d pushed to give “High School Never Ends” more time. Fans kept passing it around online, and it became one of the band’s most downloaded songs.
By the time Bowling For Soup played New York’s Central Park SummerStage in August 2026, Reddick had his introduction down to one line. “You’re all here to see bands who still sing about high school,” he told the crowd. Then they played it.
