10 Movies You Didn't Realise Inspired Songs
9. Juno
Artist & Song: Green Day - "East Jesus Nowhere"
When a musician finds inspiration from a movie, it can often be the result of the film's theme or a character in it, but more often than not, it's from a single line. In the movie Juno, Allison Janney played the stepmother, Bren, to Ellen Page's titular character, and she had some great lines.
In one scene, Juno returns home to Bren, who asks "where the hell have you been, Junebug?" She lets her know that she drove out to St. Cloud, Minnesota, to show her ultrasound image to the couple looking to adopt her baby, and Bren pushes to find out why she even bothered.
She then drops the line, "You could have sent it to them. Why would you drive an hour out to East Jesus, Nowhere?" It's a funny line, and it stuck with Billie Joe Armstong of Green Day. He liked the line so much, he wrote a song called "East Jesus Nowhere."
That track was dropped onto the band's eighth album, 21st Century Breakdown. Despite having part of the line in the title of the song, the words don't appear anywhere in the lyrics, making it hard to determine the inspiration for the song from a simple listen.