10 Songs That Emotionally DESTROYED Artists

10. Wake Me Up When September Ends - Green Day

Pop punk was never meant to be a genre for grown ups. If you listen to Blink 182 or Sum 41 more than once, most of the songs tend to be about the kind of emotions that you feel between the ages of 12 and 27, so you might as well be ancient when you start having real problems. Billie Joe Armstrong knew raw pain a little too young though, and he finally felt comfortable addressing it on American Idiot.

While the majority of the record is about a bunch of kids trying to make their way through Bush era America, Wake Me Up When Septembers is actually an autobiographical song Billie wrote about the death of his father, with the title coming from the last words Armstrong said to his mother after coming home from his old man’s funeral. Once it was dropped into the concept album, millions of people saw it as a reaction to dealing with loss, piggybacking off the name of the song to reference the tragedy of 9/11 just a few years before.

Although Billie has sung this song hundreds of times at this point, he still talks about feeling a bit uncomfortable playing it, including one performance at the Reading Festival when he got to the line about how long time had passed and turned away from the mic to stifle his emotions. Moving on is never going to be easy, but sometimes it takes music like this for those wounds to start healing.