The All-American Rejects
WOMPA
July 14, 2025
Last Monday night, the All-American Rejects played a surprise stop in Tulsa on their so-called house party tour in WOMPA’s Machine Shop, a ceiling-less brick warehouse in west Tulsa. An old friend, one from the era when AAR was a genuinely local band that might play a similarly less-than-glamorous venue, sent me a message: “Was it just like the old days last night?”
And you know what? It was.
Following the pattern they’ve used for months elsewhere in the country, AAR has been asking fans to RSVP with their location to find out when pop-up shows in their area will be. Those fans got a couple days’ notice that the show would be in Oklahoma, found out Monday afternoon that it would be in Tulsa, and learned around 4 p.m. on show day if they’d been selected for no-cost, guaranteed entry, with priority given to people who used AAR’s new single in an Instagram or TikTok video. Via text, the band reported 20,000 RSVPs for the state, with 750 spots available. Ticketed fans and hopefuls lined the street outside the WOMPA entry gate hours before the doors opened, with several hundred of them rewarded with the kind of concert you see in teen movies: rock band on the floor with the crowd, minimal gear, minimal frills.
It was a fever dream of an evening, all sweat and intimacy and disbelief and joy, the kind of event that allows you to experience nostalgia for it while it’s happening. This is quite the high-low magic trick for a band that, in the weeks prior to the Tulsa show, announced a tour with the Jonas Brothers and then, in the week following, performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and achieved their first billion-streaming song, 2008’s “Gives You Hell.” That song, like every other AAR single and many of the deeper cuts, is shamelessly catchy, a three-and-a-half minute pop nugget that you can hear once and sing along with for the rest of your life. The band knows this. Their Threads bio reads: “That band who has all those songs from your childhood.”
AAR’s day-one lore feels fantastical now. The band, then still based in Stillwater, produced an EP and mailed it out hoping to sign with a label. It was retrieved from the trash by an intern at Doghouse Records, which signed the band shortly after and released their 2002 self-titled debut, re-released more broadly by DreamWorks the following year. It’s been 23 years and 12 million sold records since then, and 13 years since their last studio album. In between, there have been a few singles and EPs here, an acting appearance by frontman Tyson Ritter there, and now the band is surging back into public consciousness by retracing their steps at hyperspeed. One example of this hopped-up trajectory: the Sunday prior to the Tulsa show, AAR played a skating rink in Fayetteville, where a local Slim Chickens gave away free tenders to fans: nice, cute, local. Two days later, Slim Chickens restaurants nationwide offered a free All-American Rejects deal, which the band reports resulted in 86,000 meals given away.
The adjacency of these things feels absurd, and whatever intense planning goes into orchestrating them has been kept well-hidden. I don’t know who came up with the house party tour idea, and I don’t know how they’re paying for it without charging admission, but I do know it’s straight-up brilliant in terms of publicity, goodwill, and securing lifelong fans who felt like they’ve been given something one-on-one by a band they loved.
Wilderado surprise-opened the show with a 30-minute set, and then the Rejects took the stage around 9 p.m. and played for a white-hot hour or so, pausing often for Ritter’s relentless vamping—I don’t know that I’ve seen any artist who more enjoys being a frontman in a rock band. In Tulsa as elsewhere, he made sure to meet and greet fans in the hours before the show and spent plenty of time mingling with Wilderado while they were performing.
A few had-to-be-there moments include: a stage power outage during “Move Along” where the audience sang most of the song with unamplified drummer Chris Gaylor before the instruments were able to come back in one by one; Danny Boy O’Connor doing a “Jump Around” interlude during “Gives You Hell”; and hundreds of cell phone flashlights waving in the air along with the ballad “It Ends Tonight.” Seeing this made me remember the band’s 2009 music video for “I Wanna,” which features AAR playing a wild house party and plenty of gratuitous sponsored shots of LG cell phones. They’ve never not been playing the game while also doing what they would be doing anyway.
“At first glance, you might be like, ‘Well, that’s a little whorish,’” Ritter told Rolling Stone at the time. Show me any 12-time platinum-selling artist, and I will point you to the corporations who made it possible. “Gives You Hell” came out the same year Ritter had a role in Sony Pictures’ The House Bunny. AAR’s approach feels earnest to me, a full-on skeptic about purity in the arts. Is a little bit of selling out worse than not selling at all?
The band finished its set with “Easy Come, Easy Go,” the viral-hopeful new song fans could use in social media videos to win entry. Ritter called it a comeback, saying this song is “the one that gave us another bite of the fuckin’ apple.” The lead-in to its chorus is prescient: “It goes around, goes around, goes around.”
A suggested donation at the gates raised $1,300 for Tulsa FMAC’s Tulsa On Tour program, and tech startup Bootleg was onsite, offering attendees the chance to purchase access to a recording of the show after it was finished. If you weren’t able to get into this one, you’ll have another chance to catch AAR in October at the city’s other finest warehouse space, the BOK Center, opening for the JoBros.
