56 | Rolling Stone | February 2020
KEN^ SCHLE
S/
THE^ LIFEIMAGESC
OLLE
CTION/
GETTY^ IMAGESAnd this month, 30 years into their career, Green Day
will unveil an exciting new sound on their 13th album,
Father of All... Armstrong says it comes from going on
a soul kick — Motown, Prince, Amy Winehouse, and
others — and “putting it through the Green Day filter.”
On the title track, he sings in falsetto while drummer
Tré Cool pounds out a wild, Mitch Mitchell-style beat
that Armstrong calls “one of the most insane things
he’s ever played.”
“Billie was pushing himself to get to a newer
place,” bassist Mike Dirnt says. “And we had to chase
that down. Which is par for the course, because no-
body digs deeper than Billie.”
In conversation, Armstrong is friendly, but also a
little reserved, taking long pauses between answers
about his process. “I don’t want to sound like a ba-
boon,” he says, stopping himself at one point. Cool,
his bandmate and friend of three decades, once de-
scribed him as “gifted and tormented. Billie’s brain
is like 18 tape recorders playing simultaneously in
a circle. Then he tries to have a conversation... and
he’ll be looking you in the eye going, ‘Huh?’ ”
“Fuck him!” Armstrong says now, with a laugh,
after hearing that quote. “What does he know?” But
Armstrong admits that he’s not quite sure how his
brain works when it comes to songwriting. As many
songs as he’s written, he still gets anxious when he
hasn’t written one in a while. “You feel like, ‘Oh, my
God, am I ever going to write another song again?’
Then, all of a sudden, something pops up and you go
from feeling like a loser to king of the world.”
409 in Your Coffeemaker
SLAPPY EP, 1990
I’d just dropped out of high school, and I was feel-
ing really lost — like a daydreamer who was being
left behind. I didn’t know what life was going to be.
I think that’s when I’m at my most honest as a song-
writer, when I’m feeling lost. So I took this sad feel-
ing and turned it into something that felt more em-
powering: “My interests are longing to break through
these chains/These chains that control my future’s
aims.” My songs were about infatuation up until that
point. This one felt like a different version of who I
am. I remember when we first started playing it, peo-
ple were really receptive to it, especially the punks
that were on the scene at the time. We had put out
our first album and an EP, but this is where I felt like
I had really found my rhythm as a songwriter. I was
18 years old.
2000 Light Years Away
KERPLUNK, 1992
The first tour that Green Day ever went on, I met my
wife, Adrienne, at a house party in Minneapolis. She
asked for an address because we had run out of our
vinyl. Then we started corresponding and kind of be-
came pen pals, and having these long talks, running
up phone bills.
Then Green Day booked this mini-tour. We drove
from California all the way out to Minnesota. Nobody
really knew why we were driving all the way to Wis-
consin and Minnesota to just play, like, four shows,
but I was really just going back to see her. On the way
back, I wrote “2000 Light Years Away.” The song just
wrote itself. I put it down on an acoustic guitar and
sent her a cassette of it. When you write a song for a
person that you’re falling for, you don’t know what
the response is going to be. The last thing you want
is for someone to go, “Oh, you’re a stalker!” But it’s
been a staple in our set ever since, and it led into
many, many, many songs I’ve been writing about her
for the next almost 30 years.Welcome to Paradise
KERPLUNK, 1992 ; DOOKIE, 1994
I had moved out of my house in the suburbs to West
Oakland, into a warehouse that was rat-infested and
in a really fucked-up neighborhood, with a lot of
crazy punks and friends. I was paying $50 a month
for rent, which was great, because, being in a band,
you got paid a couple hundred bucks here and there
— so it was easy to pay for rent, eat Top Ramen, and
buy weed.
It was an eye-opening experience. Suddenly, I was
on my own, smack out in one of the gnarliest neigh-
borhoods in Oakland. You look around and you see
cracked streets and broken homes and ghetto neigh-
borhoods, and you’re in the middle of it. You’re
scared, thinking, “How do I get out of here?” Then
suddenly it starts to feel like home. There is a sort of
empathy that you have for your surroundings when
you’re around junkies and homelessness and gang
warfare. “A gunshot rings out at the station/Another
urchin snaps and left dead on his own” — I was de-
scribing exactly what my surroundings were. There’s
not a part of that song that isn’t true. It’s a great
live song to crank into. I think the musicality of the
[bridge] is a foreshadowing of what things were to
come for us in the future, whether we knew it or not.She
DOOKIE, 1994
I had a girlfriend named Amanda, this Cal stu-
dent. I learned a lot about feminism through her.
She gave me an education that I think was very
timely for me. I was just a dumb kid, high school
dropout. She was telling
me about the way women
have been objectified for
so many years, and I was
just listening. I wrote this
as a love song to her, but
it was also about learning
about her activism. When
it says “Scream at me until
my ears bleed,” I was kind of
going, “I’m here to listen.”
With any kind of activism,
the first thing you need to
do is be a good listener. The
song becomes about an un-
derstanding. That song just
feels so good to sing. I’m
really proud of it; it’s very
stripped down, simple,
three chords. It’s kind of a
cult hero. It’s one of those
songs that wasn’t a single,
but it had a life of its own.
Those are the special kinds
of songs.Longview
DOOKIE, 1994
I really loved the song by the Pretenders called “Mes-
sage of Love,” and wanted to write a song like that,
but we needed a bass line. We are all living in this
house in Richmond, California, and I think I went to
a movie. Everybody back at the house had dropped
acid. So I came home and Mike is sitting on the floor
in the kitchen tripping balls, and he had his bass on,
and he goes, “I figured it out, man! I figured it out.”
He played the bass line for me for the first time right
there. I didn’t know what to think about it, because I
was like, “Well, he’s on acid, so I can’t tell if he’s even
going to remember it.” Then we ended up playing
it the next day, and it just stuck. The lyrics to it are
about feeling like a loser, watching television, jerk-
ing off, and feeling lonely. I was pretty frightened at
the time. I was in limbo. I didn’t have a girlfriend —
it took, like, four years for me and Adrienne to get
together, from like ’90 until ’94. We had signed to a
major label, and there was a backlash at the time be-
cause we had been this underground band. Things
felt out of my control, and it felt like a make-or-break
deal. It’s such a unique-sounding song, when you
really look at it. Nobody was playing rhythms that
swing, or that kind of power in the choruses. Grunge
had turned into something that was bastardized by
lameness, and I think we were coming from a place
that felt a little harder and more upbeat. And it was
super-danceable and got people to go crazy.Brain Stew
INSOMNIAC, 1995
This song is such a dark horse. I had just gotten some
recording equipment, and I came up with the riff
when I was experimenting with it for the first time:
“Oh, this is cool. It almost sounds like a harder Beat-
les song, like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’ ” The
song is about methamphetamine, not being able to
sleep, and staying up all night. It was something that
was creeping into our punk scene at the time, and I
definitely did my experimenting with it. It’s just such
an evil drug.THREE
MUSKETEERS
Cool, Armstrong,
and Dirnt in New
Senior music editor PATRICK DOYLE interviewed York circa 1994
Lana Del Rey and Elton John in November.
Billie Joe Armstrong