Castaways, Part 2
From each Green Day album, I choose the best song that wasn't issued as a single
In my last post, I chose the best Green Day tracks from Dookie (1994) through 21st Century Breakdown (2009) that weren’t selected as singles. Today, I work my way through the band’s remaining six albums, 2012’s ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré! through to this year’s Saviors.
¡Uno! (2012)
singles: “Oh Love,” “Kill The DJ,” “Let Yourself Go”
Album track: “Stay the Night.”
After the sprawl of American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown and two worldwide tours, Green Day regrouped and scaled things back considerably, though releasing a triple album in installments hardly feels minimal.
The result, as I wrote a bit about here, was underwhelming. Armstrong has remarked that the band had hoped with ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré! to make a Power Pop version of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, but there are too many average-to-good songs on the albums to justify the excess. The singles chosen from ¡Uno! are solid (though “Kill The DJ” feels ironic, if uninterestingly so). The tunes are solid, but suffer from the albums’ generally tame guitar sound and light bottom end (an issue thrown into stark relief when listening the album’s rawer demos which were issued on Demolicious in 2014).
“Stay The Night” is a gem, a pop rockin’ ode to the one who got away who the singer now wants to hold on to, at least for the night. (Amanda pops up again. See yesterday’s post, and below.) ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré! are stuffed with really dirty songs and more explicitly sexual imagery than Green Day usually traffics in. (“Fuck Time” anyone?) Yet “Stay the Night” benefits from sweetness, of the last-call variety. The song’s in a genuinely good mood; it wants to get laid, but it’s gonna be charming, not crude, about it. That’s what the grinning music says, but Armstrong, goofing around in the perverse mood the albums created, can’t resist singing that he also wants to break her heart until her stomach churns. So…I don’t know. A joke?
Pay no mind—the lyrics on ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré! , with some exceptions, are not among Armstrong’s strongest. Pulling back from the previous albums’ narrative empathy and cinematic sensibility, he sounds like now he just wants to party, yet half the time he strikes me as kind of a shallow guy I wouldn’t want to hang with for long. “Stay the Night” ignores that vibe, mostly. And when the singer begs her to stay with him to count the circles around his eyes, he’s even sympathetic (a vulnerability particularly evident on the demo). Anyway, as they said in ancient times, it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.
¡Dos! (2012)
The single: “Stray Heart”
Album track: “Lazy Bones.”
The single chosen for ¡Dos! was another commercially-minded bopper, but the far more affecting “Lazy Bones” is a standout track on the album (along with “Amy,” Armstrong’s poignant tribute to Amy Winehouse, who died a year earlier). Another ode to disaffection and ennui, “Lazy Bones” embraces one of rock and roll’s truisms, that a song about depression can be delivered with music that elevates.
The singer’s plight is familiar. He’s too tired to be bored, but the problem is that the reverse of that equation works, too. His mind is addled, and he can’t sleep. Everyone around him’s odious, and they won’t shut the fuck up, especially when they’re lying. The chorus makes things explicitly clear, and makes a demand, too: he doesn’t want my compassion, and he sure as hell doesn’t want my candor. He wants to be left alone, out of arm’s reach of those well-meaning but empty gestures. But where does that put him?
Some redemption arrives via the music and arrangement, which is Green Day at its power pop finest. Armstrong sings a sweet melody over eighth notes on his guitar and a tight rhythm laid down by Dirnt and Cool. The poignant, ascending/descending melody in the chorus invites a singalong, and do the lines’ defiant sentiments are kept at bay, or submersed, or more authentically felt—however rock and roll works for you. Deposit “Lazy Bones” into the bulging file, “Fun Songs About Sad Stuff.”
¡Tré! (2012)
The single: “X-Kid”
Album track: “Amanda.”
“I had a girlfriend named Amanda, this Cal student.” This is Billie Joe Armstrong. “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 [“She”] as a love song to her, but it was also about learning about her activism.”
Armstrong’s oft-visiting muse gets her name in lights on this exceptional track, one of Armstrong’s more candid songs about his own inadequacies and emotional growth. In an amiable, ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré!-styled arrangement, the band marries an upbeat melody with bright pop changes as Armstrong sings about the occasional fog he wanders into when thinking about Amanda, who after all of these years is still bruising his heart “like a battering-ram.” The song’s cleverest conceit allows Armstrong to acknowledge both that he’s grown emotionally and intellectually since he and Amanda were kids banging around together in Berkley, and that growth itself is wildly unpredictable, and hardly something to depend on (“I was a different man from five seconds ago”…“I was a different kid from fifteen years ago”). He couldn’t be her man then, and she’s a different woman now: an eternal calculus that frustrates how many kids a day, an hour?
The chorus muddies things up in an interesting way, Armstrong wondering if their love is something that only hate can understand. This argument perplexes me a bit. I could chalk it up to lazy writing, but coming in the chorus the sentiment feels essential. What is it that hate can reckon better than any another emotion? Can loathing itself clarify things? Perhaps the singer had to hate Amanda—or himself in her wake—before regarding her as the lost opportunity she was, and the teacher she remains.
Revolution Radio (2016)
The singles: “Bang Bang,” “Still Breathing,” “Revolution Radio”
Album track: “Forever Now.”
As was widely reported, Armstrong bottomed out on drink and drugs in the Fall of 2012, requiring that the band halt promotion of ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré! and delay the supporting tour until the following year. Green Day returned four years later with an album that Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic pretty accurately described as “a consolidation, a way for the band to shake off all distractions and get back to basics.” Pressing re-set, the band holed up and produced Revolution Radio themselves, happily turning the power chord guitar noise way up while delivering a sturdy set of tunes.
The singles were well chosen— “Bang Bang” and “Still Breathing” are among the band’s strongest—but “Forever Now” is, I feel, the album’s great track, and one of the best that the band has written. At nearly seven minutes, it’s Green Day in epic mode again, and here the stakes are high and the ambition feels not only right but inevitable. Along with the moving “Still Breathing,” “Forever Now” explores Armstrong’s addictions and shaky recovery. “How do you deal with dealing with yourself? Before it was, I’ll have a beer,” he remarked to Rolling Stone at the time. “Now, you have to sort of learn how to breathe a little bit more.” He added, “I have never been good at boredom. I never know what to do when it’s, like, you and you’re alone with yourself.”
The song begins with Armstrong, against a nervous guitar line, singing—stating—his name and that he’s “freaking out,” an AA-styled introduction that Armstrong has acknowledged is the most honest thing he’d ever written. What follows is a churning, three-part essay on having, losing, and gaining, the song both forging ahead and calling back to the album’s opener, “Somewhere Now.”
Armstrong’s trying to make sense of his addictions the best way he knows how, with pen and guitar in hand and his band behind him, but the moving parts are tough to corral, even when blessed with the clarity of recovery. A bracing chord change into the chorus finds the singer fighting off chills—from a comedown? an epiphany?—as he’s poised “at the edge of the world,” landing at the song’s most succinct phrase, “burning lights and blackouts,” a damn stark reduction of his problems: the rock and roll stage and the collapse afterward. A discovery in the song’s second section adds a layer to all of it: if this is the so-called good life, the singer wants a “better way to die.”
The third section reprises “Somewhere Now,” with a killer admission from the singer that he’s running late to a joint he doesn’t even want to go to (“My favorite beginning of a record that we’ve ever had,” Armstrong said at the time. “I think it’s so relatable, whether it’s going to your job or going to the dentist”) and the song concludes with a layering of the second section on top, a grand studio idea that might’ve muddied up things, but here graphically evokes the fucked-up noise inside the singer’s head, where compulsion and rehabilitation need, somehow, to coexist.
“Forever Now” is a song I could listen to a thousand times and it will never fail to move me in its poignancy and honesty, a tricky emotional place made triumphant, and possibly even redeemed, by the band’s big and loud attack. Green Day at their ambitious best.
Father of All Motherfuckers (2020)
The singles: “Father of All…,” “Oh Yeah!”
Album track: “Junkies on a High.”
I was close to choosing the frenzied, riff-tastic “Fire, Ready, Aim” because it so fully embodies the nutty mood of this nutty album. Father of All Motherfuckers arrived a few months before the COVID lockdown, and, because the band couldn’t tour or promote the album, it remains adrift in a strange, sealed-off place. Add to that that it’s the least Green Day-sounding Green Day album—processed guitars and drums, synth handclaps, falsetto vocals—and Father of All Motherfuckers will likely remain a curio to the committed and casual fan alike. (And the online hatred for the album is truly something to behold.) Over in about a half hour, the album gives the impression of a fizzy sugar rush that attacks, crests, and vanishes about as quickly as it arrived. It’s a great party record, and not much else. Fairly noble acclaim in my book, actually.
“Graffitia,” the album’s strong closer, a righteous anthem to the disenfranchised, is one of the few songs that doesn’t play to a cartoony sound or sentiment. Yet I seem to be inadvertently following a through-line on this list: “Junkies on a High,” with its forlorn descending melody and druggy, lethargic pace, is another of Armstrong’s songs about the lures and dangers of self-medicated oblivion. The song opens with the singer being reminded of some advice from Mom not to bow to your enemies. But he may be, to quote his band, his own worst enemy, the next rock and roll tragedy, like any addict, hiding in the shadows. Pride is his “pornography” (a nice way to evoke the corrosive nature of addiction) and he urges you not to follow him down. The song’s the sonic equivalent of a user nodding off. It wearily raises its head for the the chorus and its terrific image of “subdivision smiles,” but it’s hard to notice with the world in flames.
“Junkies on a High,” to my ears, neither romanticizes nor judges addiction. It simply describes. Songs can’t save the world, said Dylan.
Saviors (2024)
The singles: “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” “Look Ma, No Brains!,” “Dilemma,” “One Eyed Bastard,” “Bobby Sox”
Album track: “Living in the ‘20s.”
The five singles released from Saviors did a commendable job in summarizing the album, a playing-to-strengths record following the surface-level spectacle of Father of All Motherfuckers. Songs echo earlier Green Day songs, and their styles neatly cover what’s in the band’s range. “I think that Green Day is now comfortable with what they are,” I wrote in January. “They are, by necessity as much by choice, a band that creates an enormous spectacle on stage and so writes big songs to match.”
If the theatrical breadth of their music since American Idiot sacrifices personal details for communal universals, if those songs can feel formally plain rather than exquisitely arranged, tread in cliché more than once, so be it. They sound big and great live as well as in your car.
We’re still pretty close to Saviors, yet the song I most connected with when I first played the whole thing still sends me. A riff-driven anthem for diminishing returns, “Living in the ‘20s” finds Armstrong complaining about mass shootings, lousy Lotto odds, and sex robots equipped with batteries and programmed in English (only). It’s funny, and on target, but the music’s angry, which catapults the tongue-in-cheek lyrics from blithe satire into something meaner, with bared teeth. Armstrong sings with real gusto here, and the key change into the fiery, Ace Frehley-channeling guitar solo and the head-banging, pulse-racing chorus are rawly exciting, vintage Green Day, their amps way up, their sites set on post-Trump vulgarity, our new normal. Ain’t that a kick in the head?