Green Day’s interview in the latest episode of Q Magazine can be found over at GreenDayAuthority. Billie Joe’s comment about the trilogy is just about dead on:
Those records have absolutely no direction to them. It was about being prolific for the sake of it. So we were just going and going.
Green Day’s Billie Joe is, unsurprisingly, not a fan of Donald Trump. He speaks with Kerrang in their upcoming issue:
“The worst problem I see about Trump is who his followers are,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said. “I actually feel bad for them, because they’re poor, working-class people who can’t get a leg up. They’re pissed off and he’s preyed on their anger. He just said, ‘You have no options and I’m the only one, and I’m going to take care of it myself.’ I mean, that’s fucking Hitler, man!”
Green Day have released their new song, “Bang Bang,” on Spotify and their website. The song comes from the new album, Revolution Radio, due out October 7th. Pre-orders are now up. The band sat down with Rolling Stone to talk about the upcoming album:
It’s about the culture of mass shooting that happens in America mixed with narcissistic social media. There’s this sort of rage happening, but it’s also now being filmed and we all have ourselves under surveillance. To me, that is so twisted. To get into the brain of someone like that was freaky. It freaked me out. After I wrote it, all I wanted to do was get that out of my brain because it just freaked me out.
Sparrow Sleeps have released a new album of Green Day lullabies called Hypersomniac. You can stream their rendition of “Wake Me When September Ends” below.
Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong and Tré Cool played a set at the Tribeca Film Festival over the weekend. They teamed up with Joan Jett for a pretty awesome cover of “Bad Reputation.” They were celebrating the premiere of the new film, Geezer, which Billie Joe is starring in.Some videos from the performance can be found below.
A fan on the Green Day community forums said he ran into Billie Joe recently and the singer revealed that a new album was being worked on and would hopefully be out “in the fall.” He posted a photo of him with Billie for the non-believers.
It looks like Green Day are back in the studio.
I still remember the first time I heard American Idiot in full. It was my 14th birthday, and I’d been waiting for the better part of two months to finally give the album a spin. The record dropped on September 21, but as was the norm when I was young, broke, and trying to cut back on downloading, I often had to wait awhile to buy CDs or ask for them as gifts. Such was the case with Green Day’s first full-length album in four years, which I scrawled on my birthday list between other 2004 albums like Keane’s Hopes and Fears and Sister Hazel’s Lift.
The evolution of musical artists is an enigma in itself. While it can often polarize the fan of a beloved artist, it is absolutely fundamental for an artist to be able to grow, particularly as they become older and their longevity hinders on their next move. Surely it doesn’t always work, and many times, bands fail to ignite a fire with a large audience and are forced to step back creatively in order to earn their fans’ ears back. The approach is an anomaly since selfish listeners can’t budge and try out a drastic (or not so drastic) change, simply based on the band members’ decision to explore new depths of sound.
In 2004, Green Day did precisely what they had to do in order to maintain relevancy. There was no other choice after the mild success of 2000’s Warning, arguably their most inventive and shape-shifting album left the band in a questionable state. Following the lead of The Who down to almost a ‘T’, the band wrote a massive punk rock opera that followed the vaguely metaphorical tale of a youth living two different lives in a troubled modern era. The success paved the way for Green Day to distance themselves from their bratty punk rock past and move towards crafting ambitious efforts that rang of fierce, unsavory lashings at politics and religion, all while weaving a yarn that while still punk rock in all its context, allowed the band to develop a gratuitous sense of self while expanding their trademarked brand of punk rock.
Read More “Green Day – 21st Century Breakdown”
