10 Perfect Rock Songs That Were Written By Accident

3. Jesus of Suburbia - Green Day

When Green Day first started to craft the follow up to their disappointing album Warning, no one really saw American Idiot coming. As the band put the finishing touches of what was intended to be the follow up, the master tapes went missing and the guys decided to start from scratch again. There's no real guidebook to where to go from there, but Mike Dirnt found the way through the only way he knew how: humor.

Arriving to the studio one day by himself while the rest of the band were going through legal trouble, Mike wrote a 30 second snippet of a song that everyone was laughing about later that day. Being inspired by Mike's song, both Tre Cool and Billie Joe Armstrong wanted to write ones of their own, eventually sticking a bunch of them together and making a little medley of the tunes.

What originally started out as funny started to be taken much more seriously by Billie though, thinking that they could use this approach to construct a full rock opera based around this format. Though this eventually led to the song Homecoming at the tail end of the record, Jesus of Suburbia was the real masterpiece of their efforts, with Billie taking fragments of what could have been great songs on their own and meshing them together into a 9 minute epic piece. Whereas Blink 182 and New Found Glory were in the same camp as Green Day at the time, you weren't going to find any other pop punk band doing something like this any time soon.