Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong on ‘American Idiot’ Impact: ‘It Changed Everything for Me’

Eric Renner Brown
·13 min read
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This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2004 Week continues here as we hear from an artist behind arguably the year’s biggest rock album: Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, whose punk-rock opera American Idiot sold millions and spawned four huge hit singles, led by its pointedly enduring titular protest anthem.

One of music’s biggest stories in 2004 was Green Day’s resurrection. After a ’90s run that included era-defining alt-rock and MTV hits like “Longview,” “Basket Case,” “When I Come Around” and “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” the band had taken a folkier turn on its 2000 album Warning – and experienced its softest sales and least enthusiastic reviews in years. With a new generation of pop-punk and emo bands emerging, Green Day could’ve easily seemed like a relic by 2004.

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But with that year’s album American Idiot, Green Day reasserted itself as a mainstream force – eclipsing even its monumental ’90s – with a dramatic reinvention. On the album, the band infused its tested brand of pop-punk with classic-rock grandiosity, grafting an anti-war storyline of disillusionment onto the 57-minute set; in interviews ahead of its release, Green Day’s members likened American Idiot to a “punk-rock opera,” drawing a direct line from idols like The Who to their own new project.

“The melodies are based on the tradition of Lennon and McCartney,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong tells Billboard today. “That’s where we were trying to push our stuff and take our melodies and the whole idea of Green Day – pushing it to a level that we thought could be our Tommy moment, or our Sgt. Pepper’s.”

The high-concept, high-octane album blew up like the heart-shaped hand grenade on its iconic cover. Recorded during the early days of the Iraq War and released three months before President George W. Bush’s eventual re-election, the title track and lead single took aim at news illiteracy, widespread propaganda and “a redneck agenda”; in its stark, Grammy-nominated video, the stripes wash off a giant American flag suspended behind the band. “American Idiot” topped the Alternative Airplay chart, snagged a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year and ignited a run of subsequent Idiot Hot 100 smashes — which included the caustic protest anthem “Holiday” (No. 19), as well as the power ballads “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” (Nos. 2 and 6, respectively).

All told, American Idiot snagged six Grammy nominations (winning Best Rock Album), was certified six-times platinum by the RIAA, and launched a 17-month world tour that spawned the live album Bullet in a Bible. In a couple short years, Green Day went from possibly-over-the-hump ’90s greats to being in the mix for the world’s biggest rock band.

Recently, Armstrong says, a fan approached him at London’s BRIT Awards. “They go, ‘American Idiot changed my life.’ And I said, ‘It changed my life too!'” he recalls with a laugh. “It changed everything for me. … It really made me feel like I can spread my wings. It proved to me that, if you have the guts to do it, then you can make it happen. When you have a hunch that it’s time to make a big statement, musically, and it gets acknowledged, it’s the best feeling ever.”

In the years since its release, American Idiot’s stature has only grown. Green Day has frequently harnessed the album’s urgent political energy since, including for this year’s Saviors, and American Idiot became the basis of the Tony-winning 2009 musical of the same name. Its songs remain staples of the band’s concerts, and Green Day has made headlines in recent years by revising the title track’s lyrics to address former President Donald Trump. This year, the band will perform American Idiot — as well as another of its seminal albums celebrating a milestone anniversary, 1994’s Dookie — in full on The Saviors Tour of North American stadiums.

On the eve of that tour, which kicks off overseas in late May, Armstrong admits, “I haven’t really acknowledged how proud I am of that record in a long time.” Below he talks more about American Idiot, being inspired by the New York bands of the early ’00s (and not so much by the period’s pop-punk), and why he still considers rock music to be “the underdog.”

Take me back to 2003, and Green Day’s headspace when you went into the studio to record American Idiot. After the ’90s and Warning, did you see American Idiot as the start of Green Day 2.0?

When we did Warning, we were definitely trying to do something different from [our] sound than we’d ever done before. It was a little bit more folky, a lot more acoustic guitar. That was foreshadowing for what would end up becoming American Idiot. We had a studio that we were going into every day in Oakland called [Studio] 880, and we just started to experiment in there. We were like the inmates running the asylum for months. Then we came upon doing a concept record that was right in the middle of the George Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

To what extent when you went in were you planning on this being a more political record? Or did that emerge organically during your sessions and your experimentation?

When I wrote the song “American Idiot” is when. It was just such a bold statement – bolder than I had ever said before politically. When we started [recording], we just talked about the song and we were all on the same page. It felt dangerous and risky and fun at the same time, if that’s even possible. We all agreed that this was the right way to go. And then with that came songs like “Holiday.”

It’s hard to imagine a single that’s more in your face than “American Idiot,” in both sound and subject matter. Was there any resistance from your team or your label about that being the lead single?

No, I didn’t feel like there was any resistance. We felt empowered when we did the demo and when we recorded it. I don’t think we really worried about anything – it gave us a bit more swagger, to be honest, because we knew that we were sitting on a song that we really believed in. The label, they were great. There was no blowback from them at all.

“American Idiot” has taken on this second life – you’ve called out President Trump a number of times when performing that song in recent years. Did you ever think when you were making it that it would end up being a living document, and that the ills it documented would persist long after the Bush era?

I don’t really know what I thought, like what kind of legs that that song was gonna have. I remember when Trump got into office, that song was getting played a lot. The first trip that he took to England, [a British social media campaign was] trying to get “American Idiot” to go No. 1. I think it got to number two. [Laughs.] When the song first came out, I think we were like, “This could blow up in our faces, but who cares? We’ve said something that we really felt strongly about.” Then, as the record kept getting bigger and bigger, I just said, “Man, we really made something that is special that’s gonna stand the test of time.”

A political record and tackling some of these themes would have been challenging enough, but then you had the rock opera concept and story on top of it. Why was that narrative structure the right way to present this subject matter?

It made the record personal. It was coming from the heart. And then, it was also not just finger pointing, but questioning my own ignorance, at the same time, and posing the questions to myself. The one thing about a lot of punk-rock bands that are political, it seems that they come across as politicians. For me, it was just — the one thing we all have in common is that we’re living the human experience. So I wanted the songs to come from the heart as much as they came from the head.

Green Day has always had a young fan base, and American Idiot was a huge touchstone for so many kids who were going through adolescence and waking up to the news and current events. This might have been the first political record they ever got. How did you feel about Green Day’s role in the political awakening of Millennials?

9/11 defined a generation in the same way that the Vietnam War defined a generation. It was just that sort of era of fear that every generation has to endure. When the Twin Towers fell down, it created a generation of paranoia. Looking back, three years after 9/11, a lot of people when they heard the music [on American Idiot], [there was] this push back [happening] and [we] created like a soundtrack for that push back.

“American Idiot” and “Holiday” were very political – and very successful – singles. But American Idiot spawned two even bigger, less politically oriented singles: “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” How do these pop crossover moments fit into the album as a whole?

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” became a part of the narrative of the record, because [it’s what the] Jesus of Suburbia character was going through. That song, it comes across as someone growing up that feels very self-righteous, until they come across into the real world and find [themselves] in a very lonely place. I wrote that song when I was spending time in New York. I was by myself, and not knowing really anything about New York, I just sort of dropped myself right into the Lower East Side. I honestly didn’t know where I was at. I have a horrible sense of direction. That that song is exactly that: It’s about my horrible sense of direction.

Green Day was a defining alt-rock band of the ’90s. Then, as you’re in the studio recording American Idiot, there’s a new wave of alt-rock popping up, whether it’s what’s happening on New York’s Lower East Side with The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or the next generation of pop-punk bands who were dominating Warped Tour. Was what was going on in alt-rock percolating through to you when you were in the studio or were you sealed off?

For us, power-pop or whatever, we just wanted to bring it to a new level. A lot of that music at that time, as far as the pop-punk stuff was, it just became, like, commercial on purpose. [Laughs.] The pop-punk stuff, it just seemed trivial. It seemed really generic, and I didn’t really like it at all. The subject matter was just really shallow. It felt paint by numbers. The New York stuff that was going on, where it was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes and Interpol, felt very real to me — because it felt like a scene, and it felt like people were very serious about making music. I found that to be really inspiring.

You’re playing American Idiot and Dookie all the way through this summer to celebrate their respective 20th and 30th anniversaries. As you’ve revisited American Idiot ahead of that tour, what has stood out to you?

American Idiot was sort of this unicorn that [during its album cycle] we were like, “OK, let’s get past this and move on.” We played it in its entirety at the Fillmore [in San Francisco] the other night. Revisiting it was cathartic, for lack of a better cliché. Playing songs like “Extraordinary Girl” and “Whatsername,” there were times on stage where I was getting choked up because it was bringing me back the feeling that I had at that time, that I was revisiting for the first time in 20 years. I had a great sense of pride and I was sort of humbled by the experience.

More and more artists are doing tours where they play classic albums in full. Why is that an effective way to connect with fans?

Playing it the other night at the Fillmore, just looking at people’s faces, there were people that were crying. I saw this one person that was in the crowd that was transgender, and I could see the tears coming out. I realized how far we’ve come. Green Day has been a space for people to feel a connection with people that are kindred spirits. It was really heavy to see people just sort of – we’re playing “Homecoming” and “Whatsername” and “Are We The Waiting” and people [are] just crying. I was kind of taken aback by it. I think it’s great that bands are revisiting their albums, because these are works of art. [Weezer’s] Blue Album is a work of art, just as much as Tommy is a work of art. This sounds really pretentious, but it’s like when an orchestra is playing Mozart. I think rock music is just as important.

One of the most adventurous parts of American Idiot is “Jesus of Suburbia,” the five-part, nine-minute epic. It’s still a fan favorite. Did you have any doubts when putting that song together – and has its longevity surprised you?

“Jesus of Suburbia,” that’s one of my proudest moments for Green Day. I remember the first time that we ever played it [in July 2004]. We were rehearsing at the Olympic Auditorium down in Los Angeles. We were really tight. We were playing every day and we thought, “Hey, let’s do a cheap ticket, people can come see us play.” That was the first time that we played it in front of people. They kind of couldn’t believe what we had done. It was this nine-minute epic, where people were used to our two-and-a-half, three-minute songs. The reaction was so positive in a way where people just couldn’t believe what they were hearing. I’m really proud of that song and how it was inspired by The Who and we just got to have that moment.

We don’t see rock smashes quite like American Idiot these days. What are your thoughts about the arc of rock as a mainstream genre – and how it fits into the pop landscape – since American Idiot came out?

There’s a lot of great rock music that’s out right now. And I think, in a way, it’s more popular than ever. You see these festivals that are popping up all over America. Something like Aftershock [in Sacramento] – they’re huge! Like, 50,000 people are coming out. To me, that feels like rock is bigger than it’s ever been, especially in the last 10 years. It just doesn’t get covered.

But in a way, rock music has always been underground and the underdog, as far as what goes on in the pop world. It’s always been that way. It’s been that way, really, since 1948.

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