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New Interview with Billie Joe Armstrong

Billie Joe Armstrong
Jason Tate

Kerrang sat down with Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong:

It’s getting more and more rare to get three or four people together to make a rock’n’roll band, you know? Especially because people are able to do home recordings, so I feel like there’s maybe more solo artists now. Getting a band together… God! I don’t know. It’s a tough question to answer because it’s all hypothetical, but I think that we would definitely have people that dug what we do. But do I think it would be on a level that it became back when Dookie and all that happened? I’m not sure. I think we always generate new – and young – fans, and people still seem to be discovering albums like Dookie.

Butch Walker Week

Butch Walker
Craig Manning

Once upon a time, I had a lot more time to write about music than I do now!

In 2013, about a year after I joined the staff at AbsolutePunk, I decided I’d take on a project called “Butch Walker Week.” The basic idea was that I’d go back and write about every Butch album, from the records with his former band Marvelous 3 up to his solo output, in the week leading up to his then-new EP Peachtree Battle. That project ended up running 11 reviews and about 16,000 words of text.

When Jason started reviving old AbsolutePunk content to post here on Chorus, I knew I wanted to resurrect this feature. Butch Walker has been one of the absolute constants in my musical evolution for the past 15 years. Getting to write about all his records back then was super fulfilling (and even earned some Twitter recognition from the man himself). Reading back through these reviews reminded me how much these albums meant to me (and how much they continue to mean to me now). So whether you’re familiar with Butch’s work or just thinking about listening to him for the first time, I hope you’ll give these old write-ups a look!

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Back to 2014 (Re-Ranking the Best of Lists)

Back to ...
Jason Tate

This week has us traveling back to 2014. Only one more week left after this, and we will be caught up with when Chorus launched in 2016. These last few weeks have an interesting feel to them, they’re far enough away where there’s a distance, but six years is still close enough where it doesn’t feel as much like the past as the previous dives.

Looking at AbsolutePunk’s 2014 list fills me with a wide range of emotions. The year itself, for music, is one that I’ll always hold dear. I loved that Noah Gundersen record. Taylor Swift released 1989 and was starting to cement herself as the artist of a generation. Bleachers released their debut. Copeland were back. Against Me! dropped an all-time classic. The Gaslight Anthem were polarizing. And a new group of bands were starting to make waves. From Joyce Manor, to PUP, to Modern Baseball, to The Hotelier cementing themselves as one of the ‘next great bands in our scene.’ And I’m also thinking back to 2014 and all the turmoil that was taking place not just in the scene but also in the AbsolutePunk offices. Drew Beringer had a fun little rant in the forums last week about being hired at the Spin office and the cluster fuck of mismanagement and organizational failures. This was, for lack of a more colorful phrase, the beginning of the end. I had an entire new version of the website designed, built, and coded, and I couldn’t get it launched. It was then that I gave up fighting the battles. I couldn’t even keep track of who was in charge anymore, or who was running what, so I went into “put the head down, do the work” mode. And the joy of something I had been doing since I was a teenager was sucked completely out of each day of work. I went through the motions and started daydreaming about what my next steps were going to be.

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Review: Alanis Morissette – Such Pretty Forks in the Road

Alanis Morissette - Such Pretty Forks in the Road
Mary Varvaris

Alanis Morissette needs no introduction, but she deserves one. At 21 years old, her breakthrough album, Jagged Little Pill sold 33 million copies worldwide, was nominated for nine Grammy Awards, winning five (including Album of the Year), and it’s one of the best-selling albums of all time. The singles are magnificent – each a warranted choice for best song on the album. Whether you were a year old in 1995, 13-years-old or pushing 30, “You Oughta Know” and “Ironic” were inescapable. Most astounding of all, Morissette channeled unflinching female rage in a fashion that was unheard of in mainstream music at the time. She also didn’t dream about growing older – she had one hand in her pocket, and the other one “giving a high five,” “flicking a cigarette,” and “hailing a taxi cab.” She effectively became the voice of a generation overnight – a voice for those who never expressed their desires, their fears, or their anger. 

In many ways, Morissette’s ninth album — her first album in eight years — Such Pretty Forks in the Road, feels like a love letter to her many past selves. Originally written for the 2018 Jagged Little Pill musical, opener “Smiling” calls back to the drama of “Uninvited,” as well as the Radiohead classic, “My Iron Lung,” echoing Jonny Greenwood’s descending guitar notes; only quieter. “Smiling” also paves the way for the rest of the album: she’s back, and she’s more confessional than ever. 

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